An open source Gantt chart with nothing held back

GanttKit is MIT licensed: free for commercial use, no license key at runtime, no seat counting, and no feature reserved for a paid edition. The engine, all three renderers and every feature plugin ship under the same license, and the source is on GitHub.

What the MIT license gives you

That is the whole agreement. There is nothing to renew, nothing that expires in CI, and nothing that changes when your team grows.

Free as in no strings, not free as in stripped down

Commercial Gantt components are usually sold per developer seat or per application, often with a runtime license key and a support contract, and sometimes with the interesting features reserved for the top tier. Open source projects sometimes mirror that shape with an open core and a paid edition.

GanttKit does not have tiers. Concretely, all of the following are in the free package set:

• Three renderers. SVG, HTML and Canvas, driven by the same engine and the same plugins.
• Scheduling. Finish-to-start dependencies with auto-scheduling and drag-to-link.
• Hierarchy. Tree rows with expand and collapse, plus sidebar columns.
• Analysis. Baselines for planned versus actual, progress fill, date markers and bands.
• Interaction. Drag to move and resize, selection with rubber-band and context menu, tooltips, toolbar controls.
• Localization. Locale-aware timelines and translatable strings with runtime switching.

Auditable by design

Open source matters most when you can actually read the code. Two properties make that realistic here:

• Zero runtime dependencies in the core. There is no transitive tree to review, and no supply-chain surface that grows behind your back.
• Pure logic, unit tested. The engine runs in Node with no DOM, so its behavior is asserted directly rather than through screenshots.

Customize without forking

The usual reason to fork a chart library is that it does not do the one thing you need. GanttKit's extension points are the same ones its own features use, so custom behavior is a plugin, not a patch.

import { GanttEngine } from '@ganttkit/core'

const engine = new GanttEngine({ rows })

engine.use({
  name: 'weekend-shading',
  install(ctx) {
    // hooks.rows transforms data, hooks.scene adds or edits layers
    return ctx.hooks.scene.tap((scene) => withWeekendBands(scene))
  },
})

If you do need a fork, MIT allows it. Vendoring the packages into your own monorepo is a supported outcome, not a license violation.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests go through the GitHub repository. Bug reports that include the rows, the view mode and the expected geometry are the fastest to reproduce, because the engine can be exercised in a plain Node test without a browser.

Keep reading

Frequently asked questions