PlanExe README
The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the PlanExe listing page.
Planning complex projects should not require a consulting-firm budget.
Turn a complex project brief into an editable planning baseline in about 15 minutes.
Create an account | See example plans | Getting started guide
Why PlanExe exists
Good ideas are not limited to people and organizations that can afford a large consulting engagement. Turning an ambitious idea into a coherent project, however, normally requires substantial time, specialist knowledge, stakeholder interviews, and repeated synthesis.
PlanExe is open-source software for people and AI agents that need to plan complex projects. Describe a project in plain language and PlanExe creates a structured first-pass plan: the assumptions to challenge, decisions to make, work to coordinate, risks to investigate, and questions that must be answered before execution.
The result is not a substitute for stakeholder participation or professional sign-off. It is a way to begin with a broad, inspectable planning baseline instead of a blank page.
What PlanExe does
PlanExe examines a project from several planning perspectives and combines the results into one self-contained interactive report. Depending on the project, the output commonly includes:
- Executive summary and project purpose
- Assumptions, constraints, and unanswered questions
- Strategic choices and alternative scenarios
- Work breakdown structure and dependency-aware Gantt chart
- Governance bodies, decision rights, and escalation paths
- Roles, stakeholders, and engagement approaches
- Risk register, SWOT analysis, and mitigation proposals
- Premortem, expert criticism, premise attack, and self-audit
- Documents to create, documents to find, and data to collect
- An editable bundle of Markdown, JSON, and CSV source artifacts
The planning pipeline can use cloud models or run with local models so sensitive project material can remain on systems you control.
Built for complex projects
PlanExe is intended for consulting-scale, multi-phase initiatives—not everyday task lists or small personal projects.
Examples of suitable work include:
- Planning a regional clean-water, energy, or transport infrastructure program
- Coordinating a regulated healthcare or financial-services transformation
- Designing a cross-border public-sector initiative
- Preparing a complex business, industrial, or technology program
- Structuring an ERP migration, corporate separation, or post-merger integration
- Helping an under-resourced organization develop an ambitious proposal before it has access to specialist advisers
The richer the brief—objective, location, constraints, stakeholders, resources, timeline, and success criteria—the more useful the resulting plan becomes.
A plan you can inspect and change
PlanExe does not hide the planning process inside a chat transcript. Each run produces a folder of readable source artifacts alongside the final report.
If you find an assumption or early decision you disagree with, you can edit that artifact and continue the plan from there. PlanExe rebuilds the later work that depends on your change while preserving earlier work you already accept. This makes it possible to refine the reasoning behind a plan, not merely rewrite its final prose.
What PlanExe does not replace
PlanExe creates a draft for investigation and refinement. Generated claims, budgets, dates, laws, engineering assumptions, and risk estimates may be wrong or incomplete. Important projects still require:
- Evidence and current local data
- Stakeholder interviews and negotiation
- Domain experts and professional judgment
- Legal, financial, medical, safety, or engineering review where applicable
- Named people who take responsibility for decisions and execution
Use the report to expose assumptions, focus conversations, and accelerate planning—not as proof that a project is safe, feasible, funded, or approved.
See a plan, then generate one
- Browse plans generated by PlanExe and open any report that interests you.
- Generate your own plan in the browser. No installation is required.
Why run PlanExe on your own infrastructure?
Some project data should not be sent to third-party services. Running PlanExe with local models can help you:
- Keep trade secrets, confidential strategies, and sensitive project material within systems you control
- Work offline or inside an air-gapped environment
- Continue planning when a model provider is unavailable in your country
- Reduce dependence on vendor censorship, changing usage policies, account restrictions, pricing changes, or service shutdowns
- Choose models that fit your language, values, hardware, and project
- Preserve access to your planning process and editable project files over time
Self-hosting does not remove your legal, ethical, security, or professional responsibilities. It gives you greater control over the models, infrastructure, and information involved.
For MCP, command-line, AI-agent, and Docker setup, see the PlanExe documentation.