Almost every tool in this category can hold a list of tasks. What separates them is how they charge, what the free plan really allows, and which single view the team will live in.
Start with the seat model, not the feature list
Three different models are in use here, and they produce very different bills for the same team.
Per user. Asana, ClickUp, monday, Jira, Wrike, Teamwork.com, Linear, Notion and Todoist. Twenty people on ClickUp Unlimited is US$140 a month; on Asana Starter it is US$219.80.
Flat rate. Basecamp. Twenty people on Studio is US$59 a month regardless of how many of them there are, but only ten active projects.
Paid members plus free contributors. Smartsheet counts members at US$9 and US$19 and lets guests and contributors in free. Wrike's free plan also allows unlimited users at a reduced feature level.
Read the free plan's real limit
Free plans in this category fail in three different ways, and only one of them is about people.
- User-capped: Asana and monday stop at two seats; Teamwork.com at five; Basecamp at five users and one project.
- Content-capped: Trello allows ten boards per workspace; Linear 250 issues; ClickUp limits storage, spaces and lists rather than people.
- Generous: Jira is free for ten users with unlimited projects and tasks. Wrike allows unlimited users with essential task management. OpenProject and Redmine have no ceiling at all if you host them.
Pick the view the team will use
Every vendor lists views; the question is which one your team opens every morning.
Boards suit work that moves through stages: Trello, ClickUp, monday, Teamwork.com and OpenProject all state them. Timelines and Gantt charts suit work with dates and dependencies: Asana, ClickUp, monday, Jira, Wrike, Teamwork.com, Smartsheet, OpenProject and Redmine state them. Sheets suit work that is really a structured table, which is Smartsheet's whole argument.
Three questions that narrow it fast
- Do clients need in? Asana and Smartsheet state free guests; Teamwork.com states client users; Basecamp addresses it directly in its pricing page.
- Does anyone bill by the hour? Time tracking is stated by ClickUp, Basecamp, monday, Teamwork.com, OpenProject and Redmine. Only Teamwork.com states invoicing from logged time.
- Must it run on your servers? OpenProject's community edition and Redmine are the two answers here, both free of licence fees and both requiring someone to run them.
What we could not verify
Linear and Todoist publish limits rather than feature grids, so most of their capabilities are recorded as not verified rather than assumed. Where a vendor sells several products from one platform, as monday does, this catalogue covers the work management product and says so.
