Tip Tuesday: the most popular Redmine themes

People too often judge by appearances. It also applies to the products and tools we use. Unfortunately, the weakest side of Redmine is the default interface. .

Redmine, the same as in a Cinderella, is a hidden beauty. The tool has multiple benefits and can be transformed into a good looking and modern one with a theme, or skin. It’s hard to find and point out the “best theme for Redmine”. It’s a matter of each team needs and sense of style. Tech-people and developers tend to focus on the functionality, and clarity of interface. They are used to a practical design, known from the systems and main resources that they use every day. Business users are more used to colorful, stylish interfaces, more intuitive and simple, known from other apps and tools.

Unfortunately, Redmine theme’s marketplace is just an informative list of elements, sorted by most-recently updated items. It would be much more useful, if it included an indicator of community' interests, such as views/downloads/ratings and so on.

That’s why we prepared a list of most popular themes. It is based on available objective metrics: downloads, ratings, mentions in blog or Redmine forum.

Free Redmine Themes

Most (99%) of Redmine themes are free. Benefits are clear. You can get a pretty looking skin for no costs. There are plenty of themes. The only problem with them can be weak a support and dropped updates for most recent version(s) of Redmine. Two meaningful paid themes offer a valuable redesign for the system, and they’re described below.

Nevertheless, we checked that the free themes listed below are still actively developed and supported. They are also compatible with our Redmine plugins.

Flatly

Its clear interface and moderate colors stand out from the rest of themes. Another benefit is a slide-out side panel. You can toggle the menu in the left-top corner to open-hide it. The only minus is that if you activate too many modules for your project, top menu does not autofit for your screen.

MineLab

Comes with a hideable menu. By default uses blue-ish default Redmine colors, but can be adjusted in CSS stylesheet. In the backend written in Sass. It uses Bourbon for cross-browser compatibility, Neat for responsive grids, cool Font Awesome icons, and mimics Gitlab's page loading animations.

PurpleMine2

Is another theme build with Bootstrap and SCSS. It's not fully responsive, but still uses adaptive design, to adjust to the device screen size.

Our themes

We have released 5 Free Redmine themes. Three of them gained a lot of love from the Redmine community, and are compatible with Redmine 3.4 (current newest version of system). All of them are fully responsive, which means they adapt to your smartphone's screen. You can work on your mobile, even when away from the computer. See the screens.

Circle

A1

Coffee

Paid themes

For most teams, free themes are enough. In Redmine community, there're currently two people who invested their time and resources, to prepare a good looking and professional Redmine theme. As both are intuitive, contemporary and designed to work on mobiles, we list them as well. They would be a great solution for a demanding team, as they change Redmine into the entirely different system.

We are not associated with premium theme developers. We don't use affiliate links.

Abacus

This is a first premium Redmine theme. It's clear and really user-friendly. From technical features, it has retina-friendly menu icons, buttons for "new issue" and "edit issue" and few more. It's compatible with all our plugins.

Costs: 19€ (one time) / 39€ (yearly subscription for updates). Use coupon code "10off" to get a 10% discount on the 6– and 12–months plans.

BoostMine

Is by far the most customizable and fresh theme, build with JavaScripts. It changes Redmine into a new instrument, more human-friendly. Users can customize multiple elements, such as icons, logos, login page, colors, make menus sticky or hideable and so on. It's compatible with all our plugins.

Costs: 75€ (one time, includes yearly updates).

If you got caught up in the research style, and wish to continue the hunt, you should definitely go to GitHub and simply search for "Redmine theme". Then check Redminethemes.org where you have a list of themes with screenshots. Some companies also shared their free themes, such as Codevog. If you and your team like the dark-ish look of your apps, check out also this list at UserStyles.org.

If your team cannot select one design, there's a solution. Within Redmine plugin marketplace you can find a pretty useful Redmine theme changer that allows each user to display theme individually, independently from a system-wide selected one.

I believe our article will help you to find a design for your Redmine, to dress it for success. I would love to hear your voice in the comments and see which theme you use and recommend. Share your comments!