At Homeville, when the technology team expanded from 4 to 65+ members, licensing costs for JIRA and Confluence became unsustainable. JIRA charged approximately $400 USD monthly beyond the first 10 users, while Confluence’s expenses were rivalling our AWS bills.
Shifting from Atlassian
We transitioned to OpenProject, an open-source self-hosted alternative. This move provided security benefits by keeping proprietary data within our own AWS infrastructure, and improved regulatory compliance through local hosting. A Python scripting effort migrated projects, tickets, and sprint information from JIRA to OpenProject.
WordPress as Internal Wiki
Rather than continuing with Confluence, we opted for self-hosted WordPress with extensive customisations. Here’s what we built.
Custom Taxonomies. We implemented PODs to quickly add custom post types and taxonomies, enabling separate organisation of credit platforms, systems, and documentation areas.
Authorisation and Access. Integration with Microsoft 365 allowed Active Directory authentication, eliminating manual user provisioning. A membership plugin restricted content access by team. We disabled the REST API to prevent unauthorised data exposure and used AWS NACL rules to prevent off-premises access entirely.
Integration with OpenProject. Custom plugin development created shortcodes that pulled OpenProject sprint data, enabling teams to generate release notes with sprint backlog links directly within WordPress posts.
Document Templates. We replicated Confluence templates using WordPress’s block editor, making it straightforward for teams to create consistent documentation and preserving temporal records of product decisions.
The Result
The total licensing cost reduction was significant. More importantly, everything — documentation, sprint planning, release notes — lived inside our own infrastructure. For a fintech company handling sensitive data, that matters as much as the cost saving.