Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Paymo

Invoice Ninja is a source-available invoicing and billing application for small businesses and freelancers. It helps you create invoices and quotes, accept online payments, manage clients, and track work with projects and time entries.

Key Features

• Create and send invoices, quotes, and credit notes with customizable templates and branding
• Client portal for viewing invoices, making payments, and accessing documents
• Online payment integrations and payment reminders for due and overdue invoices
• Expense tracking plus basic business workflow around clients and items/products
• Projects and time tracking to bill hours and manage ongoing client work
• REST API for integrating invoicing and client data into other systems

Use Cases

• Freelancers generating professional invoices and accepting online payments
• Small businesses managing quotes, recurring invoices, and client communications
• Agencies tracking time and projects and converting work logs into invoices

Limitations and Considerations

• Source-available under the Elastic License rather than a permissive OSI license
• Some features (for example, white-labeling) may require a paid license

Invoice Ninja provides a comprehensive invoicing workflow with a client-facing portal and integrations, making it suitable for running billing and client management in-house. It’s a strong fit when you need both invoicing and time/project billing in a single system.

Kimai is a professional, web-based time-tracking application for freelancers, agencies, and organizations. It helps teams record working time across customers, projects, and activities, and turns that data into reports and invoices.

Key Features

• Multi-user time tracking with roles, teams, and permission controls
• Customer, project, and activity management with budgets and hourly rates
• Time-clock mode (punch-in/punch-out) and multi-timer support
• Advanced reporting, filtering, and dashboards for time and cost analysis
• Invoicing with configurable templates and multiple export formats
• Data export options (for example CSV, PDF, and spreadsheet formats)
• Extensive JSON API for integrations and automation
• Authentication options including database login, LDAP, and SAML, plus optional TOTP-based 2FA
• Plugin system to extend features

Use Cases

• Tracking billable work and generating invoices for clients
• Company-wide timesheets and internal reporting by team, project, and period
• Integrating time tracking into existing tooling via the JSON API

Kimai is a solid fit when you need a full-featured time tracking system with strong reporting and invoicing capabilities, while supporting both small and large multi-user deployments.

InvoicePlane is a self-hosted, open source web application for managing your billing workflow, from quotes to invoices and payments. It also includes CRM-like client management and configurable templates for email and PDF output.

Key Features

• Create, send, and manage quotes and invoices
• Track payments and invoice statuses, with reminders
• Client management with contact details, notes, and custom fields
• Customizable themes and configurable email/PDF templates
• Reporting to review billing and financial activity
• Multi-language interface with community translations
• Optional integrations for online payments (for example PayPal and Stripe)
• Support for generating eInvoices (version-dependent)

Use Cases

• Freelancers and small businesses issuing recurring or one-off invoices
• Teams needing a lightweight billing tool with basic customer records
• Organizations that want an on-premise invoicing system with customizable templates

Limitations and Considerations

• Primarily aimed at small to medium billing workflows; advanced accounting features are limited
• Payment provider options depend on available gateways and configuration

InvoicePlane provides a practical invoicing and client-management workflow with a straightforward web UI and flexible customization. It’s a good fit for users who want control over billing data and a simple, extensible PHP-based application.

Worklenz is an open-source project management platform that combines task management, time tracking, resource planning and basic client/finance features in a single product. It provides a web application suitable for teams that need project planning, collaboration and time-based reporting.

Key Features

• Task management with subtasks, dependencies, attachments and activity logs
• Kanban board and phase-based project views for visual workflow tracking
• Built-in time tracking and timesheets with time reports and per-user/project summaries
• Resource and workload views to monitor team allocation and utilization
• Project templates and reusable task templates for standardizing projects
• Client portal and basic project finance tracking for billing visibility
• Dashboard analytics and project health/estimated vs actual reporting
• Files and comments attached to tasks for team collaboration
• Deployable via Docker with recommended stack components (PostgreSQL, Redis, MinIO, nginx)

Use Cases

• Agencies and consultancies managing client projects, deliverables and billing
• Software and IT teams organizing work with kanban, time tracking and roadmap views
• Small-to-medium organizations needing resource planning, workload balancing and project analytics

Limitations and Considerations

• The free tier limits active projects (site notes a three-active-project limit for the free plan)
• Several features (CRM, HR) are listed as "coming soon" on the product site and roadmap
• Import/migration tools from other PM platforms appear limited or pending enhancements

Worklenz targets teams that want an integrated, open-source PM tool they can run themselves or use as a hosted service. It emphasizes a combined feature set (tasks, time, resources, analytics) and provides Docker-based deployment and documented setup for self-hosting.