A TeamGantt alternative that runs on your desktop, not a monthly plan
TeamGantt is a clean, purpose-built online Gantt tool billed per manager, per month. shadow-planner is a TeamGantt alternative for people who'd rather own a desktop app outright — €4,99 once, resource utilisation and an AI assistant included.
TeamGantt earns its reputation: drag-and-drop scheduling, dependencies, and a genuinely pleasant Gantt view built for teams that plan together online. If real-time collaboration on a shared cloud timeline is what you need, it's a strong, focused choice. What you're paying for, though, is access — a subscription per project manager, every month, for as long as you use it, with team members typically needing their own seats to comment and update tasks.
shadow-planner takes the same core idea — a dependency-aware Gantt chart — and puts it in a desktop app you install once. The free tier covers a real project (1 scenario, 3 projects, 3 employees, every feature unlocked); €4,99 one-time removes those limits for good. No recurring seat cost, ever.
Side by side
| shadow-planner | TeamGantt | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Planning and controlling: timelines, capacity, scenarios | Online Gantt chart built for team collaboration |
| Pricing | Free tier; €4,99 one-time, no per-seat fee | Free plan for a single small project; paid plans billed per manager per month |
| Where data lives | Locally on your machine (SQLite) | TeamGantt's cloud |
| Collaboration | Single-user desktop app; share via export (XLSX / CSV / JSON) | Real-time multi-user boards, comments, discussion threads |
| Gantt / timeline | Core feature, with finish-to-start dependencies and cascade preview | Core feature, drag-and-drop, dependencies |
| Resource utilisation | Weekly capacity vs. allocation, cost roll-ups from daily rates | Workload/availability view on paid plans |
| What-if scenarios | Isolated scenarios, snapshots, templates | Not a concept; duplicate a project manually |
| AI | Chat assistant over your data + planning agent; bring your own model (local Ollama or cloud key) | Not part of the product |
| Offline | Fully | Requires connectivity |
Who should switch
- People paying monthly for a solo or small-team Gantt. If TeamGantt's per-manager billing is the whole reason you're looking around, €4,99 once is the entire pitch.
- Anyone who wants a capacity view, not just a timeline. shadow-planner's resource utilisation — weekly allocation vs. capacity, cost roll-ups — goes further than TeamGantt's workload view, and it's included, not gated.
- What-if planners. Scenarios and snapshots let you branch a plan and compare it, something TeamGantt has no built-in concept for.
- Privacy-conscious users. Your schedule stays in a local file instead of a vendor's cloud, and the AI assistant can run fully offline via a local model.
Who should stay
- Your team edits the same timeline together in real time — assigning, commenting, reordering — and needs everyone looking at one live board. shadow-planner is single-user by design; sharing happens via export.
- You want a polished, purpose-built online Gantt with zero setup and don't mind the recurring cost for the convenience of not installing anything.
- You rely on TeamGantt's built-in team communication (comments, discussions) as part of how work gets tracked day to day.
A common pattern: plan and steer in shadow-planner — build the timeline, check who's overloaded, model a what-if — then export to Excel for whatever the wider team already uses. See the AI Gantt chart walkthrough or the resource utilisation view for more on what's included.
Install shadow-planner for free — the Gantt, utilisation and AI assistant are all in the free tier.