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We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

plane.so

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Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#131

Post by devanshuarora »

miki123211 wrote: post #45

TBH, if I were working in such a highly regulated industry, I'd be very hesitant about buying software from a company with a .so domain and basically beholden to the whims of the government of Somalia. If they said "implement a backdoor for us or all your non-airgapped customers lose access tomorrow", are you sure the company would be able and willing to say no?

Totally fair to ask.

.so is widely used by software companies as a domain availability solution - think Notion. For regulated environments, the domain doesn’t matter, the architecture does.

With air-gapped deployments, Plane doesn’t rely on any external DNS or domains — .so or otherwise. No license pings, no telemetry, no outbound calls. Everything runs in complete isolation, and customers have full control over the environment.

Also worth noting: Plane’s open-source core (AGPLv3) allows for full transparency and auditability. So any notion of a backdoor is counter to how we operate — and how our users deploy us.

Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#132

Post by juliangmp »

> Even with our robust self-hosted option, we kept hearing the same feedback from legal and compliance teams: "Private cloud" solutions that still require Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnels don't meet their stringent requirements.

If it has a VPN tunnel to some outside server, you shouldn't really call it "self-hosted*

Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#133

Post by devanshuarora »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #115

the air gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries is a big white board

We ran our company on a whiteboard, until we couldn't, so I get it.

And honestly it does beat a lot of bloated tools out there. But when you need permissioning, history, workflows, audit logs—and your infra lives in a bunker—we try to be the next best thing.

Air-gapped, fast, and without the Jira bloat.

Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#134

Post by devanshuarora »

rendall wrote: post #49

> This post explores the journey of building this specialized deployment option for regulated industries where data sovereignty isn't just preferred—it's mandatory. This is an AI writing tell: "It's not just x—it's y." https://youtu.be/9Ch4a6ffPZY

To be fair, “not just X—it’s Y” showed up in product marketing way before AI started parroting it. Just saying. :)

Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#135

Post by hmhhashem »

Aeolun wrote: post #124

I think it’s hilarious that this is something they specifically had to do, and was apparently hard? All my software works fine in completely air-gapped environments.

When you add features such as telemetry, curl calls in install scripts, and in general build on public cloud infra, everything assumes you have internet connectivity. That assumption is so crucial that it is embedded in everything and touches most software components. When you already have an established product, I imagine changing it to remove the assumption without a full rewrite can be tricky.

Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#136

Post by devanshuarora »

0xWTF wrote: post #58

As a DoD employee, it would be amazing if more companies took this seriously (I'm looking at you health tech bros).

Really appreciate that — and totally agree. We’ve been surprised by how many teams in defense, healthcare, and critical infrastructure are still stuck choosing between bloated legacy tools or cloud-only products that don’t check the right boxes.

We built the air-gapped edition of Plane exactly for this.

Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#137

Post by devanshuarora »

rubidium wrote: post #95

They make it seem like a big deal. It’s pretty much how all software used to ship :)

Yes, absolutely, in a way, we’re just bringing back the old-school model — full package, zero dependencies, runs on your own infra — but with modern tooling and UX.

Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#138

Post by devanshuarora »

Aeolun wrote: post #124

I think it’s hilarious that this is something they specifically had to do, and was apparently hard? All my software works fine in completely air-gapped environments.

Yes, agreed, if you build with air-gapped in mind from day one, it should just work. In our case, we had to unwind a bunch of assumptions baked into modern SaaS: license checks, analytics, image pulls, update pings… even small things like font hosting or third-party embeds needed rethinking.

Not hard in principle, just a lot of invisible cleanup to make it truly self-contained. Learned a ton doing it.

Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#139

Post by devanshuarora »

treve wrote: post #121

I just learned air-gapped includes private networks. I was under the impression this strictly meant isolated non-networked computers. Was this always the case or has the term diluted over time?

Strictly speaking, air-gapped originally meant physically isolated, no network connections at all. But in practice, the definition has broadened a bit, especially in enterprise and defense settings.

Today, it may include closed private networks with no internet access, still isolated, but with internal connectivity for practical reasons (like backups, logging, or internal auth).

Re: We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

#140

Post by chrisandchris »

isatty wrote: post #82
viharkurama wrote: post #2

After a U.S. federal contractor told us they loved Plane but couldn't use it due to ITAR requirements, we spent 6 months building a truly air-gapped version. No external connections, no license pings, no telemetry, everything runs in complete isolation. The interesting part: our air-gapped deployment actually runs faster than our SaaS version. Turns out when you eliminate all network latency, things get snappy. This…

> The interesting part: our air-gapped deployment actually runs faster than our SaaS version. This is the least surprising thing I’ve read all day.

If they also realize that having less dependencies makes deployment easier we have gone full circle.
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