"Free" is the most comparable word in software pricing and the least comparable thing in it. The four vendors below all publish a $0 plan, and the plan each one publishes stops at a different kind of limit: people, seats, storage, or a sentence with no number in it.
| Vendor | Free plan | What the page prints as the limit | Credit card |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asana Personal | $0 | "For one or two people managing personal projects" — 2 users | not required |
| ClickUp Free Forever | $0 | Unlimited members and guests; storage 60MB, 5 Spaces, 5 automation rules / 100 executions a month, 100 API calls a minute, 2 Teams, 30-day message history | not required |
| Wrike Free | $0 | "Active task limitations apply" — no number printed | not required |
| monday.com Free | $0 | 2 seats; paid tiers start from 3 users | not required |
Checked October 2026 on asana.com/pricing, clickup.com/pricing, wrike.com/price and monday.com/pricing. ClickUp's free-tier storage figure is the one its own feature table prints (60MB, attachments only — tasks do not count against it); third-party pages still show an older 100MB value, so the vendor's current page is the one we record. Wrike's page states the limitation without a quantity, and we do not substitute a number from an earlier version of the page or from a review site. monday.com's free plan is listed as up to two seats, and its own FAQ puts paid plans from three users.
The two plans that stop at two people are the ones with the clearest logic: Asana describes its free tier as being for one or two people managing personal projects, and monday.com caps its at two seats. Both then charge from the third person onward. ClickUp's free plan inverts the pattern — it lets the whole team in and constrains how much the team can store and automate — which makes it the only one of the four where adding a person changes nothing about the bill.
| Vendor | Cheapest paid tier | Smallest purchasable step | Cost of that step | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ClickUp | Unlimited $7 a seat | 1 seat | $7 a month | $84 |
| Wrike | Team $10 a user | 2 users | $20 a month | $240 |
| monday.com | Basic $9 a seat | 3 seats (floor) | $27 a month | $324 |
| Asana | Starter $10.99 a seat | 3 users (the third one) | $32.97 a month | $395.64 |
The spread here is the same 4.7x factor that shows up across the project tools generally, but the reason for it is not the seat rate — it is the floor. ClickUp sells one seat at $7. Wrike's team plan is published as being for two to fifteen users, so the smallest purchase is two seats at $10 each rather than one. monday.com routes paid plans through a three-seat minimum, which means a three-person team cannot pay for two seats and one; it buys three. Asana's paid tiers have no seat minimum, but its free tier already covers two people, so the third user is the first paid seat and the first floor.
Read that way, the four ceilings converge on a similar answer for a three-person team and diverge sharply below it. A two-person team is free everywhere. A three-person team pays $324 on monday.com or $395.64 on Asana, and nothing at all on ClickUp. That is the practical difference between a free tier that caps headcount and one that caps something else.
| Vendor & tier | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| ClickUp Unlimited $7 a seat | $35 | $420 |
| monday.com Basic $9 a seat (3-seat floor) | $45 | $540 |
| Wrike Team $10 a user (2–15 users) | $50 | $600 |
| Asana Starter $10.99 a seat | $54.95 | $659.40 |
| Asana Starter $13.49 a seat billed monthly | $67.45 | $809.40 |
| ClickUp Unlimited $10 a seat billed monthly | $50 | $600 |
Prices on annual billing keep the ordering the entry rates suggest, with one addition worth noting: Asana is the only vendor of the four printing two rates for its cheapest paid tier, $10.99 on annual billing against $13.49 monthly, and that 22.8% gap on five seats is $150 a year. ClickUp's own pair is $7 against $10, a 42.9% gap, or $180 a year at five seats. Wrike and monday.com each print a single rate for the tiers above their free plans.
The five-seat column also shows the difference between a floor and a rate. monday.com's three-seat minimum costs nothing at five seats — all five are paid for at the same rate — but it costs $18 a month to a two-person team that has to buy a seat nobody sits in. Floors are cheap at scale and expensive below them, which is the opposite of how they get described.
Two published details change the arithmetic that a free-tier comparison usually hides.
ClickUp's trial allowances accumulate. Several features on ClickUp's free tier are listed as trial access, and the vendor's own FAQ states that those allowances do not reset each month: once the allowance is used, the feature can no longer be used to create or edit items, though existing data stays in place. That is different from a monthly quota that refills, and it is the reason the free tier's storage figure is worth reading next to its feature table rather than on its own.
Wrike's ceiling is deliberately unquantified. Its pricing page says active task limitations apply to the free plan and prints no figure for it. Every other number on that page is a number; this one is a sentence. For a buyer trying to decide whether the free tier will hold a five-person backlog, that is the single least answerable line on the page, and it is worth treating as a reason to test rather than to assume.
Do not pay for a third seat on Asana or monday.com if the second person is occasional. Both free tiers stop at two, and the first paid step is $324 to $395.64 a year. If the third person is a contractor who needs to see one board, that money buys a seat that the free tier's guest or viewer mechanics may already cover — check what the free plan allows before assuming the ceiling is hard.
Do not move off ClickUp's free plan for headcount reasons. It allows unlimited members, so adding people does not force an upgrade. The upgrade trigger there is storage, automations or feature access — and the smallest step to clear it is $7 a seat, or $84 for one member for a year, which makes it the cheapest paid entry of the four.
Do not treat "free" as a like-for-like comparison across vendors. Two of the four free plans are capped by people, one is capped by storage and one declines to say. A comparison table that lists four $0 rows and stops there is measuring the one thing the plans agree on.
Do not buy a three-seat minimum for a two-person team on price alone. monday.com's floor is $27 a month against ClickUp's $14 for two members on Unlimited, and the floor does not buy extra capability — it buys a seat that goes unused until a third person joins.
This is the project-management half of a comparison we ran on CRM first: the free CRM plans guide applies the same method to six vendors, including the two that publish no $0 tier at all. For the paid ladders behind these free plans, ClickUp's pricing breakdown and Wrike's take each vendor tier by tier, and the Asana alternatives guide prices the swap candidates at the same seat counts. Every rate here follows the method documented in our pricing methodology.
All four we priced publish a $0 tier: Asana Personal, ClickUp Free Forever, Wrike Free and monday.com Free. They are not the same size of plan: Asana and monday.com stop at two people, ClickUp allows unlimited members and limits storage instead, and Wrike states that active task limitations apply without printing a number.
It depends which ceiling breaks first. Asana's third user starts Starter at $10.99 a seat on annual billing, or $395.64 a year for three people. monday.com's paid tiers start at three seats, so its floor is $27 a month on Basic, or $324 a year. Wrike's team plan starts at two users at $10 each, a $240-a-year floor for two seats. ClickUp's cheapest paid tier is Unlimited at $7 a seat, or $84 a year for one member.
Members are not the limit: the free tier allows unlimited members and guests, though guests cannot change permissions. Storage is 60MB in attachments, Spaces are capped at five, automation runs at 5 rules and 100 executions a month, API calls at 100 a minute, teams at two and message history at 30 days. Several advanced features carry trial access, and the vendor's FAQ states those allowances accumulate rather than reset.
Yes. monday.com publishes a free plan capped at two seats, and its paid tiers start at three users, so a two-person team stays at $0 but a three-person team buys three seats rather than two. At the published Basic rate of $9 a seat on annual billing the floor is $27 a month, or $324 a year, and requests above 40 users are routed to a quote.
Not automatically, because the free tiers differ in what they stop at. A three-person team is free on ClickUp and pays $324 to $395.64 a year on monday.com or Asana. A two-person team is free on all four. If storage rather than headcount is the constraint, ClickUp's 60MB attachment limit is the ceiling to check first, while Asana's Personal plan carries unlimited storage with a 100MB per-file limit.