The best project management software for small teams

Prices and features checked: 2026-11-09. Prices in the currency the vendor shows, checked on the date shown; we do not convert.

Verdict by team size

Every project-management comparison quotes the list price per seat. Almost none tells you what a real team pays once the vendor's minimum seats, seat bundles and flat tiers are applied. That is the gap this page fills: the monthly bill for teams of 5, 15 and 40 on nine tools, computed from the pricing pages as served on 2026-11-09.

Our criteria, stated up front: total cost at three team sizes including seat rules; what the free plan is good for; depth of views, dependencies and workload; whether the AI tier is worth paying for; integrations; and how hard the tool is to leave. We hold no position in any vendor. monday.com, ClickUp and Asana have partner programmes; Notion's is closed to new applicants; Trello, Jira, Basecamp, Linear and Wrike pay us nothing. The order below would be the same either way.

Team	Pick	Why	Monthly bill, annual billing (list, 2026-11-09)
2 to 5, any work	Trello Standard, or a free plan	Cheapest paid seat on the page; Free covers ten collaborators and ten boards	USD 25 for 5 [1]
5 to 15, process-heavy	ClickUp Core	Most task features per dollar; no seat minimum	USD 45 for 5, USD 135 for 15 [2]
5 to 15, needs reporting	Asana Starter	Clear hierarchy, managers can read it without training; watch the seat steps	USD 54.95 for 5, USD 164.85 for 15 [3]
5 to 15, visual boards and dashboards	monday.com Standard	Fastest-growing vendor; 3-seat floor	EUR 60 for 5, EUR 180 for 15 (served in EUR) [4]
10 to 40, flat budget	Basecamp Pro Unlimited	One price, unlimited users; weak on dependencies	USD 199 at any size [5]
Software teams	Linear Basic or Business	Issue tracking built for engineering; free up to 250 issues	USD 50 or 80 for 5; USD 400 or 640 for 40 [6]
40 and up with portfolios	Asana Advanced or Wrike Business	Portfolios, workload and approvals; Wrike's Team plan stops at 15 users	USD 999.60 or USD 1,000 for 40 [3][7]

Demand, for the record: "best project management software" draws 3,600 US searches a month at a USD 42.94 cost per click, down 18 percent year on year; the broader "project management software" close-variant cluster sits at 201,000 with a USD 40 cost per click and a difficulty score of 51, which is why this page targets the "best" query at difficulty 34; UK 480, Germany 110 for the local term ^[8].

Total cost at 5, 15 and 40 seats

Monthly bill on annual billing, list prices read on 2026-11-09, seat rules applied. USD unless the vendor served EUR; VAT is added at checkout in the EU.

Tool and plan	Seat rule applied	5 people	15 people	40 people
Trello Standard	Per user, every Workspace member and admin billed	USD 25	USD 75	USD 200
Trello Premium	Same	USD 50	USD 150	USD 400
ClickUp Core	Per member, no minimum stated	USD 45	USD 135	USD 360
ClickUp Business	Same	USD 85	USD 255	USD 680
Notion Plus	Per member, guests free	USD 50 (EUR 47.50)	USD 150 (EUR 142.50)	USD 400 (EUR 380)
Notion Business	Same	USD 100 (EUR 97.50)	USD 300 (EUR 292.50)	USD 800 (EUR 780)
monday.com Standard	3-seat floor; selector shows preset team sizes	EUR 60	EUR 180	EUR 480
monday.com Pro	Same; above 40 users monday asks for a quote	EUR 95	EUR 285	EUR 760
Asana Starter	Steps of 1 to 5 users, 5 to 30, 10 to 100	USD 54.95	USD 164.85	USD 439.60
Asana Advanced	Same	USD 124.95	USD 374.85	USD 999.60
Linear Basic	Per user, free members unlimited on Free	USD 50	USD 150	USD 400
Linear Business	Same	USD 80	USD 240	USD 640
Wrike Team	2 to 15 users; groups of 5 up to 30 seats	USD 50	USD 150	not sold at 40
Wrike Business	5 to 200 users; groups of 5, then 10 above 30, 25 above 100	USD 125	USD 375	USD 1,000
Basecamp	Flat tiers: Freelancer USD 29 (5 users, 3 active projects), Pro 79 (10 users, 8 projects), Pro Plus 99 (15 users, 12 projects), Pro Unlimited 199 yearly or 329 monthly	USD 29 or 79	USD 99 or 199	USD 199
Jira	Pricing page did not render for us on 2026-11-09	see pricing	see pricing	see pricing

Sources: Trello ^[1], ClickUp ^[2], Asana ^[3], monday.com ^[4], Basecamp ^[5], Linear ^[6], Wrike ^[7], Notion ^[9]. The monday.com and Notion pages served EUR from our location; Notion's USD list prices of 10 and 20 come from its own pricing page's currency selector and our catalogue, and monday.com's USD list prices of 9, 12 and 19 match the EUR figures one for one ^[4][9][10].

What the table shows that the list price hides. At five people the spread between the cheapest paid plan (Trello Standard, USD 25) and the dearest mainstream choice (Asana Advanced, USD 124.95) is a factor of five. At forty, Basecamp's flat USD 199 undercuts every per-seat plan by at least USD 1 per seat and most by USD 5 to 20, which is why it survives despite a thin feature set. And the vendor you pay most to is not the one with the most features: Wrike Business at USD 25 per seat is priced like Asana Advanced, and both are a tier above ClickUp Business's USD 17.

Minimum seats and billing traps

• monday.com sells Work Management plans from three seats; the pricing page's selector offers preset team sizes rather than a free-text count, and above 40 users monday asks you to request a quote. Prices are served in EUR and exclude tax ^[4][10]. A team of seven buys the next preset up.
• Asana designs plans around a minimum of two members and adds seats in steps: one at a time up to 5 users, five at a time up to 30, ten up to 100, twenty-five up to 500. A seven-person team pays for ten seats, USD 109.90 a month on Starter rather than USD 76.93. The steps come from an extracted summary of the pricing FAQ rather than verbatim text, so confirm them at checkout ^[3]. Our Asana vs monday comparison walks through the same maths.
• Wrike caps Team at 15 users and starts Business at 5; seats are sold in groups of five up to 30, ten up to 100 and twenty-five beyond. Business and above are annual only. Monthly rates are not shown ^[7].
• Basecamp has no per-user fee but caps users and active projects per tier: Freelancer 5 users and 3 active projects, Pro 10 and 8, Pro Plus 15 and 12. Archived projects do not count, which is how small teams live on the cheap tiers ^[5].
• Trello bills every Workspace member and team admin, including people who only watch a board ^[1].
• ClickUp bills per Workspace: "each Workspace requires an individual upgrade." Monthly prices were not rendered on the page we read; the "regular price" of USD 12 and 25 is what you budget if you cannot commit to a year ^[2].
• Notion counts paid seats at renewal and does not charge for guests, which makes it the easiest to under-buy and the most likely to surprise you at renewal ^[9].
• Linear gives unlimited members on Free but caps issues at 250; a growing team hits the issue cap long before the member cap ^[6].
• Jira is the trap we cannot describe: Atlassian's pricing page returned nothing but a title to us on 2026-11-09. Read it yourself before you budget, and look for the sliding per-user price by team size ^[11].

Views, dependencies, workload

Documented on the pricing pages read 2026-11-09:

• Asana has the cleanest hierarchy for managers: list, board, timeline and Gantt on Starter; portfolios, goals, resource management, approvals and time tracking on Advanced ^[3].
• ClickUp has the most views and settings per dollar; Business adds advanced dashboards, resource management, timesheets and webhooks ^[2]. Its revenue claim, USD 300 million in annual recurring revenue and 20 million users in September 2025, reached us only as a search snippet and is unconfirmed C^[12].
• monday.com is boards and dashboards first; the Free plan allows three boards and three docs ^[4]. It is also the vendor growing fastest: USD 316.9 million in the third quarter of 2025, up 26 percent year on year, with 3,993 customers over USD 50,000 in annual recurring revenue, up 37 percent A^[13]. Asana's comparable quarter grew 9 percent to USD 201.0 million A^[14]. The money is moving toward customisable boards.
• Trello Premium adds Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views on top of the kanban board that is the whole product on Standard ^[1].
• Linear is an issue tracker for software teams: cycles, projects, triage; Business adds Triage Intelligence and Linear Insights ^[6].
• Wrike Business carries the enterprise-style features (workload, approvals) at mid-market prices ^[7].
• Basecamp has to-dos, message boards, schedules and docs, and no dependency or workload view on its pricing page ^[5].
• Notion manages projects as database rows with board, calendar and timeline views; dependencies and portfolio reporting are not out of the box. Our Notion vs ClickUp vs Asana comparison covers that trade-off.

AI features worth paying for

Be sceptical of every AI claim here. The randomised evidence says generative AI speeds up routine writing substantially and helps less experienced people most, while slowing experts on tasks they already know and producing confident errors outside its competence A^[15]B^[16]. A status-update draft is in the first category; "plan my project" is in the second.

Tool	AI included	Add-on price	Unit
monday.com	1,000 credits a month on Basic, 2,000 Standard, 3,000 Pro	EUR 10 per 1,000 credits	credits [4]
ClickUp	Brain on every paid plan: 1,000 credits per user on Core, 1,500 Business, 3,000 Enterprise, 10,000 MAX; 500 trial credits on Free	USD 10 per 10,000 credits	credits, pooled [2]
Asana	5 AI requests per user per month, capped at 50 per account on Starter and Advanced; AI Studio 50K or 75K credits per billing account	Pay-as-you-go per request, figures from an extracted summary only	requests and credits [3]
Notion	Agent, AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search on Business; trial on Free and Plus	Custom Agents USD 10 per 1,000 credits after a free trial	credits [9]
Trello	AI on Standard and above; no separate price shown	—	— [1]
Linear	Linear Agent and agent platform on Free; cloud coding agent requires AI credits	not stated	credits [6]
Wrike	"AI Essentials" on Team; a starter set of "AI Elite actions" on Business, 3x on Pinnacle, 10x on Apex	AI Elite action packs, custom price	actions [7]
Basecamp	No bundled AI; "bring your own AI agents" via CLI, plus ChatGPT and Claude connectors	—	— [5]

Three units (credits, requests, actions) with three vendors' exchange rates make "AI per dollar" uncomparable without knowing your usage. The honest summary: ClickUp gives the most AI usage per seat at the entry tier; Asana's allowance is the smallest and is clearly built to sell Enterprise; Basecamp's position, that your AI should be the one you already pay for, is the only one that does not add a second meter.

Integrations

All nine have native connectors to Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and GitHub, and public APIs; we did not count catalogue sizes because the numbers are marketing. The documented differences that matter: ClickUp's automation builder is included from Core with 1,000 actions a month, 10,000 on Business, against 100 on Free ^[2]; monday.com meters automations hard below Pro, as our Asana vs monday comparison details; Trello Free allows 250 Workspace command runs a month ^[1]; Linear's export and import are on every plan including Free ^[6]; Basecamp exposes a CLI for agents ^[5]. For anything cross-tool you will end up in Zapier, Make or n8n regardless.

If the tool is mainly a personal task list with a team attached, our task-management apps comparison is the better page; the cost at eight seats there is a quarter of what the project tools charge.

Lock-in and export

Read from the pricing pages' feature tables on 2026-11-09:

Tool	Export documented	Where it sits
Asana	CSV and PDF export of project data and reports; PowerPoint export of portfolios and dashboards; full organisation JSON export only as a Compliance add-on	All paid plans; JSON on Enterprise+ [3]
ClickUp	List-view export on Business (trial on Core); table and form exports, Gantt PDFs on Business and above	Business and up [2]
Notion	Export entire workspace as HTML, Markdown, CSV and PDF	Tier not shown on the served page [9]
Trello	"Simple data export"	Premium and Enterprise [1]
Linear	Import and export	All plans including Free [6]
monday.com, Wrike, Basecamp	Not found in the served text	— [4][7][5]

Lock-in, ranked from easiest to hardest to leave: Linear and Asana (plain data models, export on the plans most teams use), then Trello, then ClickUp (export is a Business feature and automations never export), then Notion (nested pages and relations do not round-trip), with monday.com, Wrike and Basecamp unranked because we could not read their export terms. Whatever you choose, export a real project from the trial before you pay. The file you get back is the honest measure of how locked in you will be.

Who should not buy project-management software

• Teams of two or three without dependencies. A shared task list (Todoist Business at USD 8 a seat) does the job for a third of the price.
• Teams without an agreed process. The tool will not supply one; ClickUp in particular will give you a hundred settings and no answer.
• Anyone buying for the AI. The allowances are small, the units are incomparable, and the evidence for AI planning a project is weaker than the evidence for AI drafting the update A^[15].
• Teams whose work lives in code. Linear or the issue tracker next to your repository, not a general tool.
• Anyone who has not exported a project from the trial.

What to do next

Count your people and your projects, then read the seat rules above before the feature lists; a seven-person team on Asana is a ten-seat team, and a sixteen-person team on Wrike is a Business customer. Shortlist two. Put the same real project into both free tiers for a week, then export it. If you want the shortlist built for you from team size, platforms and budget against this catalogue's dated prices, the Tool Finder does that. ClickUp, Asana and monday.com all start without a card; Trello, Linear and Basecamp do too, and we earn nothing if you choose them.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best project management software for a small team?

For 2 to 5 people, Trello Standard at USD 5 per user or a free plan. For 5 to 15, ClickUp Core (USD 9) if process is your thing, Asana Starter (USD 10.99) if managers need reporting, monday.com Standard (EUR 12) if you think in boards. For 10 to 40 on a flat budget, Basecamp Pro Unlimited at USD 199 a month for unlimited users. Prices per seat per month on annual billing, checked 2026-11-09.

How much does project management software cost for 15 people?

On annual billing and list prices read 2026-11-09: Trello Standard USD 75, ClickUp Core USD 135, Notion Plus USD 150, Linear Basic USD 150, Wrike Team USD 150, Asana Starter USD 164.85, monday.com Standard EUR 180, Basecamp Pro Plus USD 99 or Pro Unlimited USD 199. Asana Advanced is USD 374.85 and monday.com Pro EUR 285.

Which project management tools have minimum seats?

monday.com starts at three seats and sells preset team sizes. Asana designs plans for two members and adds seats in steps of one up to five users, then five up to 30 and ten up to 100, so seven people pay for ten. Wrike Team covers 2 to 15 users and Business 5 to 200, in groups of five. Basecamp has no per-user fee but caps users per tier. ClickUp, Trello, Notion and Linear bill per user with no stated minimum.

Is monday.com or Asana better?

monday.com if your team works in boards and dashboards and is between 3 and 40 people; it is cheaper per seat (EUR 12 Standard vs USD 10.99 Asana Starter is close, but EUR 19 Pro vs USD 24.99 Advanced is not) and is growing 26 percent a year against Asana's 9. Asana if managers want a hierarchy of projects, portfolios and goals they can read without training, and if you will export data often. Our Asana vs monday comparison goes deeper.

Is the AI in project management tools worth paying for?

Rarely as a reason to choose. ClickUp bundles the most AI credits per seat; monday.com meters 1,000 to 3,000 credits a month; Asana allows five requests per user per month; Basecamp bundles none and lets you connect ChatGPT or Claude. The randomised evidence supports AI for drafting routine text, not for planning projects, and the three vendors' units (credits, requests, actions) cannot be compared without knowing your usage.

Which project management software is easiest to leave?

Linear exports on every plan including Free, and Asana exports CSV and PDF on all paid plans, so both are easy to leave. Trello exports on Premium, ClickUp on Business. Notion exports the whole workspace but nested pages and relations do not round-trip. monday.com, Wrike and Basecamp did not show export terms on the pricing pages we read on 2026-11-09; test an export from the trial before you pay.

Sources and evidence

1. Trello pricing — Atlassian (2026), vendor page A trello.com/pricing (retrieved 2026-11-09)
2. ClickUp pricing — ClickUp (2026), vendor page A clickup.com/pricing (retrieved 2026-11-09)
3. Asana pricing (plan cards, comparison table and FAQ; seat steps from an extracted summary of the FAQ) — Asana (2026), vendor page A asana.com/pricing (retrieved 2026-11-09)
4. monday.com pricing (work management plans, served in EUR) — monday.com Ltd. (2026), vendor page A monday.com/pricing (retrieved 2026-11-09)
5. Basecamp pricing — 37signals (2026), vendor page A basecamp.com/pricing (retrieved 2026-11-09)
6. Linear pricing — Linear (2026), vendor page A linear.app/pricing (retrieved 2026-11-09)
7. Wrike pricing (seat ranges and groups partly from an extracted summary of the FAQ) — Wrike (2026), vendor page A www.wrike.com/price/ (retrieved 2026-11-09)
8. Productivity Signal keyword database, US/en rows "best project management software", "project management software" cluster, "project management software tool", "trello project management software"; UK and DE rows (DataForSEO Labs keyword_overview, keyword_suggestions and historical_search_volume) — Productivity Signal research, via DataForSEO (2026), dataset A dataforseo.com/ (retrieved 2026-11-09)
9. Notion pricing (served in EUR; USD available via currency selector) — Notion Labs (2026), vendor page A www.notion.com/pricing (retrieved 2026-11-09)
10. Productivity Signal affiliate catalogue, price tiers for monday.com and Notion (USD list prices), checked 2026-11-09 — Productivity Signal research (2026), dataset A monday.com/pricing (retrieved 2026-11-09)
11. Jira pricing (page served only its title on 2026-11-09; no figures quoted) — Atlassian (2026), vendor page C www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing (retrieved 2026-11-09)
12. ClickUp surpasses $300 million ARR (press release; read as search snippet only) — ClickUp / Business Wire (2025), report C www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250909757692/en (retrieved 2026-11-09)
13. monday.com announces third quarter 2025 results — monday.com Ltd. (2025), report A ir.monday.com/news-and-events/news-releases/news-details/2025/monday-c (retrieved 2026-11-09)
14. Asana Q3 fiscal 2026 results (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1) — Asana, Inc. (2025), report A www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477720/000147772025000235/asana8-kex9 (retrieved 2026-11-09)
15. Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligence — Noy S, Zhang W (2023), RCT A doi.org/10.1126/science.adh2586 (retrieved 2026-11-09)
16. Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality — Dell'Acqua F, McFowland E, Mollick ER et al. (2023), RCT B doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4573321 (retrieved 2026-11-09)