While Gantter.com features beginner levels of charting that may not show enough information at once for some people's tastes, jxProject's Gantt charts may come off as overwhelming. The default page layout is a grid with alternating shaded rows, and columns corresponding to the days of the week and month. The resulting look brings to mind engineering graphing paper. It's a blessing that there is minimal use of colors and that you're not allowed to change the color of the black-and-white task bars -- it makes it possible to read the graph without the additional distraction that color would bring.

jxProject is free to use, but an ad banner appears at the upper-right of the program window. It's not directly obtrusive to the user experience, but the movement of the ads can be distracting. You can get rid of the ads by buying a user license for $20 (which is good for up to 5 users).

jxProject is probably not the ideal tool to create Gantt charts expressly for presentation to others, or to use with fellow project collaborators who are unfamiliar with project management applications. jxProject appears to be specially tailored for use and to be read by lead project managers who are in charge of keeping track of the minutia of every task and resource in a project.

OpenProj

Like GanttProject, OpenProj is an open-source project, and has the potential to be the most popular among the project management software on this list, mainly because of its compatibility with Microsoft Office Project files. (According to the Web site, OpenProj has been downloaded over 1,250,000 times.) It comes as a desktop program in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

OpenProj works well on its own for building project plans. Serena Software can offer this application free of charge because makes its money by selling back-end, server-side features to go with OpenProj for business clientele needing multi-projecting, reporting, time sheets, notifications and other enterprise-level apps.

The first thing you'll notice is its extensive charting features. OpenProj features Gantt and PERT charts, and also incorporates WBS, RBS, Earned Value costing, and a few other charting methods. Like GanttProject's PERT charting interface, the tasks and resources in the PERT, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) or Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS) charts of OpenProj are manipulated by simply dragging and dropping boxes; the pathways among them then reroute automatically.

The way which OpenProj shows you Gantt charts falls somewhere between Gantter.com's clean, simple look and jxProject's layered, visual complexity. OpenProj aims for a visual balance between these two. In its default settings, it labels its task bars with the name of the corresponding resource, and does so with an overall look that isn't as busy or overwhelming as jxProject's. You can also click on a bar and drag it side-to-side along the time line to place it earlier or later in the schedule, as well as adjust the sides of the bar to shrink or stretch the time duration of the task.