Best project management software in 2026

Three of these will not sell you the seats you have

The per-seat price on a pricing page is not the price. What you pay is the per-seat price multiplied by the number of seats the vendor will sell, and those are different numbers on a third of this page:

Tool	Smallest paid purchase	A five-person team buys	A six-person team buys
monday.com	3 seats, $27 a month	5 seats	6 seats
Wrike	5 seats, $50 a month	5 seats	10 seats
Asana	2 seats, $21.98 a month	5 seats	10 seats
Trello, ClickUp, Plane, Teamwork.com, Basecamp, Smartsheet Pro	1 seat	5 seats	6 seats

Wrike publishes the rule: “For accounts of up to 30 seats, subscriptions are sold in groups of five.” Asana’s is in its FAQ - increments of one between two and five users, then five up to 30. Neither is hidden, and neither is on the price card.

One ambiguity worth naming: Wrike’s plan card says Team covers “2 to 15 users” while its FAQ says subscriptions up to 30 seats are sold in groups of five. We have taken the FAQ as binding, because it describes the purchase rather than the plan, which is why the table above says five seats rather than two.

The practical effect is that a six-person team on Wrike Team pays $1,200 a year for ten seats while a five-person team pays $600 a year for five. Hiring one person doubles the bill.

Twenty seats is where the ranking changes

At five seats, the cheapest paid options are Trello at $300 a year and Plane at $360. Hold the comparison to twenty seats and two products fall apart, because their entry tier has a member cap:

Tool	5 seats a year	20 seats a year	What changed
Trello	$300	$1,200	Nothing
Plane	$360	$1,440	Nothing
ClickUp	$420	$1,680	Nothing
monday.com	$540	$2,160	Nothing
Teamwork.com	$599.40	$2,397.60	Nothing
Asana	$659.40	$2,637.60	Nothing
Basecamp	$900	$3,588	Flat fee takes over at 20
Smartsheet	$540	$4,560	Pro caps at 10 members, so Business at $19
Wrike	$600	$6,000	Team caps at 15 users, so Business at $25

Smartsheet and Wrike both triple or quintuple between the two columns, and neither does so because you asked for more features. You asked for more people.

Basecamp moves the other way. Pro is $15 a user a month; Pro Unlimited is $299 a month flat for an unlimited number of users, so its bill stops at $3,588 a year however many people you hire.

That is worth less than it sounds, and the arithmetic says exactly how much less. Pro Unlimited only becomes the cheaper option once a rival’s per-seat bill passes $3,588 a year:

Instead of	Per user a year	Basecamp Pro Unlimited wins from
Wrike Business at $25 a user a month	$300	12 people
Smartsheet Business at $19	$228	16 people
Basecamp Pro at $15	$180	20 people
Asana Starter at $10.99	$131.88	28 people
Teamwork.com Basics at $9.99	$119.88	30 people
monday.com Basic at $9	$108	34 people
ClickUp Unlimited at $7	$84	43 people
Plane Pro at $6	$72	50 people
Trello Standard at $5	$60	60 people

A thirty-person company is cheaper on Trello, Plane or ClickUp than on Basecamp. A thirty-person company leaving Wrike Business saves $5,412 a year by moving to it. The flat fee is not a discount; it is a bet on how expensive your current per-seat rate is.

What AI costs on top

Every product here except Basecamp names AI on its pricing page. What differs is who pays for it:

Tool	AI at the entry paid tier	Extra cost
Trello	Included from Standard	None
Smartsheet	Smart Assist and AI dashboard builder included on Pro	None
Wrike	AI Essentials included on Team	AI Elite needs Business at $25
monday.com	1,000 credits a month on Basic	Top-ups
Asana	AI Studio Basic, 50,000 credits a month	AI Studio Plus and Pro are paid
Plane	1,000 credits a seat a month on Pro	Top-ups
Teamwork.com	Included on 20 August 2026, for a stated introductory period	Usage-based credits announced for September 2026, price unpublished
ClickUp	Not included	$9 a user a month, or $28 for Everything AI
Basecamp	No AI features advertised	Not applicable

ClickUp is the outlier by a distance. Its plan is $7 a user a month and its AI is $9 more, so the AI-equipped price is $16 a user a month - above Asana Starter, where a credit allowance is included. That is the single largest gap between a headline price and a working price on this page, and it is why ClickUp scores 2 on that dimension while scoring 10 on its free tier.

Free tiers, as counts

Tool	Free seats	Free projects or boards	Other hard cap
ClickUp	Unlimited members	Unlimited tasks	60 MB storage
Plane	12 users	Unlimited	500 AI credits a seat
Basecamp	20 users	1 project	1 GB storage
Trello	10 collaborators	10 boards per Workspace	250 command runs a month
Wrike	No published cap	Unlimited	Active task limit, number not published
Teamwork.com	5 users	5 projects	100 automations
Asana	2 users	Unlimited	100 MB per file
monday.com	2 seats	3 boards, 3 docs	8 column types
Smartsheet	No free plan	-	-

Two entries in that table changed since we last checked. Asana’s free tier is two users, not ten - this site published the ten-user figure, and it was wrong. ClickUp’s free storage is 60 MB, not 100 MB.

Wrike’s row is the reason the rubric treats an unquantified limit as worth half marks. “Active task limitations apply” is a real constraint that you cannot plan a team around, because the page does not say what the number is.

Configuration burden decides rollouts, and we have not measured it

The previous version of this page put 25% of its ranking weight on “works without configuration”, and said that dimension predicted adoption. We removed it, and the ranking changed.

Not because the judgement is wrong. It is probably right: the tools that arrive with opinions applied - Trello, Basecamp, monday.com - do seem to survive contact with a team more often than the ones that expect you to supply the opinions. But nobody here has run nine trackers with a real team for a quarter, which is what measuring that would take, and a rubric is a place for things you counted. So the question sits here in prose, where a reader can weigh it themselves, rather than silently moving a product up three places.

If someone on your team wants to configure a tool, ClickUp gives you the most for your money and can genuinely replace several subscriptions. If nobody does, ClickUp will be abandoned within a month, and Trello or Basecamp is the honest answer.

One of these you can own

Every product on this page is a subscription except one. Plane publishes the same price ladder for its cloud and for self-hosting, and its community edition is open source under AGPL-3.0 with no seat minimum and no licence key. Native importers ship on every edition, including that one.

That is a different kind of answer to “what happens if the price goes up”. Task rows export from anything as a CSV; what does not normally travel is the configuration, the automation and the history. When the software is open source, the question stops being whether you can leave and becomes where you want it running.

The caveats are about maturity rather than licensing. Plane Software was founded in 2022, publishes no customer count, and paid self-hosted licences start at ten seats. We have not used it, and we have no evidence about whether teams keep it current over years - which is the question that decides any tracker.

Nothing here is an issue tracker, with one exception

If the work being tracked is software delivery, Jira or Linear fit properly and are covered in their own profiles rather than ranked here. Plane is the exception on this page: cycles, modules and estimates are shaped for engineering work as well as general projects.

Teams that ignore this end up with developers filling in a marketing tool on Friday afternoon from memory, which is how a burndown chart becomes a work of fiction.

A rollout that survives month two

Most project tools are abandoned, and they are almost never abandoned because of a missing feature. They are abandoned because the tool became a second place to record work that was already being discussed somewhere else. The rollout that works looks like this:

1. Start with one team and one real project. Not a pilot project invented for the trial - a piece of work with a deadline someone cares about. Invented pilots always succeed and predict nothing.
2. Define “done” for a task before you define anything else. Teams argue about views and statuses for weeks while the actual ambiguity is what a finished task looks like.
3. Cap yourself at three statuses and no custom fields for the first month. Every field you add is a field somebody has to fill in, and the ones added on day one are almost always the wrong ones. Add a field when a report you actually run requires it.
4. Pick one place work is discussed and make it the tool. If status still gets asked and answered in chat, the tool is a duplicate record and will be treated like one. This is the step that decides adoption, and it is a management decision rather than a configuration one.
5. Run one project end to end before rolling out further. Whatever broke will break identically at five times the scale.

The signal to watch in week three is whether people update tasks before the status meeting or during it. Updating during the meeting means the tool is reporting theatre, not a system of record, and adding more structure will make it worse rather than better.

What to migrate, and what to deliberately leave

The instinct when switching tools is to bring everything. Resist it - a migration is the only free chance you get to delete years of accumulated noise.

• Bring: open work, anything with a future due date, the reference documents people actually open, and the two or three recurring processes you want to template.
• Leave: completed tasks, abandoned projects, and archived boards. Export them to a file if retention matters. Importing 8,000 closed tasks makes search useless from day one, and search being useless is a leading cause of quiet abandonment.
• Rebuild rather than import: automations and templates. They rarely transfer cleanly, and roughly half of them turn out to be automating something nobody needs any more.
• Check before you commit: whether your export includes attachments and comments, or only task rows. Comments hold the decisions. Task rows hold the titles.

One sequencing note that saves real pain: keep the old tool readable for a full quarter after cutover. Not editable - readable. The cost is one month of overlap on two subscriptions, and it removes the pressure to import everything “just in case”, which is the decision that makes the new workspace as cluttered as the old one.

What this comparison is based on

Nine pricing pages, read on 19 August 2026 through a United States egress because this machine geolocates to the EU and several of these vendors price by region. monday.com’s seat selector was driven through all eleven of its options to establish that three seats is the smallest purchase. Teamwork.com’s plan cards animate their digits, so its prices came from the static comparison table on the same page. Plane’s billing switch was inspected in the page, because “$6 per seat per month” beside a “Save 25%” badge does not say which period it is.

Nobody here has run these tools with a team. There is no adoption measurement on this page, no setup-time measurement, and no claim that one of them will be used more than another. What is measured is what they cost, how few seats they will sell, what their free tiers actually allow, and what AI adds on top.