Every tool in this category advertises a free plan. Almost none of them tell you where it stops.
We checked the actual limits on nine free tiers. Two are genuinely usable for a working team, three are usable with a specific workaround, and two exist purely to demonstrate the product.
Quick verdict
Where every free plan actually stops
| Tool | Users | The wall you hit | Usable free? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trello | 10 per Workspace | 10 boards, 250 automation runs/mo | Yes |
| ClickUp | Unlimited | 60MB total storage, 5 Spaces | Yes, with caveats |
| Jira | 10 | Built for software teams, steep for others | Yes, if agile |
| Wrike | Unlimited | No Gantt, no advanced dashboards, storage limits | Partly |
| Todoist | 5 per project | 5 personal projects, 3 filter views | Solo only |
| Airtable | 5 | Record and automation limits | Partly |
| Notion | Limited above 1 | Block limit applies once a second person joins | Solo only |
| Asana | 2 | No timeline, no dashboards, no rules | No |
| monday.com | 2 | 3 boards | No |
Three patterns are worth pulling out of that table.
Headcount caps are the harshest limit. Asana and monday.com both stop at two users, which rules them out for any team. No feature generosity elsewhere compensates for that.
Storage caps are the quietest limit. ClickUp gives you unlimited users and unlimited tasks, then caps total storage at 60MB. Teams discover this weeks in, when someone attaches a deck.
Project caps hit individuals hardest. Todoist’s five-project free tier and Notion’s block limit both target solo users, who are the least likely to have a budget.
Trello: the free plan that is actually a product
Trello
A Kanban board tool built around cards and lists, designed to be usable within minutes rather than configured.
- Best for
- Small teams that want to start today without a card on file
- Pricing
- Free plan (10 boards per Workspace); paid plans from $5/user/mo billed annually ($6 monthly)
Trello free gives you ten collaborators per Workspace, ten boards, unlimited cards, unlimited Power-Ups per board, and 250 automation command runs a month.
The Power-Ups allowance is the unusual part. Most vendors gate integrations behind a paid tier; Trello does not. A free Trello board can connect to Slack, Google Drive, and a calendar without paying anything.
Where it stops: calendar, timeline, table, and dashboard views are Premium features at $10 per user. On the free plan you get boards, and that is the whole vocabulary. For a team coordinating work that moves through stages, that is often sufficient for years.
Pros
- Ten collaborators and ten boards is a genuine team allowance, not a trial
- Unlimited Power-Ups per board even on free
- 250 automation runs a month at no cost
- Nothing to configure before the team can start
Cons
- Boards only — no calendar, timeline, or dashboard views
- 10MB per file attachment
- No task dependencies at any tier
ClickUp: unlimited people, 60MB of files
ClickUp
An all-in-one workspace combining tasks, docs, dashboards, goals, and automation, aimed at teams that want to consolidate tools.
- Best for
- Larger groups with light participants, whose files live in Google Drive
- Pricing
- Free plan; paid plans from $7/user/mo billed annually ($10 monthly)
ClickUp free has no user cap and no task cap. For a team of fifteen where five people do the work and ten need visibility, that is a materially better deal than Trello’s ten-collaborator ceiling.
The catch is 60MB of total storage across the workspace, plus a five-Space limit. Both are workable if you treat ClickUp as a structure layer and keep documents in Drive, Dropbox, or SharePoint. Neither is workable if you attach files to tasks.
Be honest about the setup cost too. ClickUp free is not less complicated than ClickUp paid — the same configuration burden applies, and new teams routinely report weeks before people are productive. A free plan that nobody adopts is not a saving.
Pros
- No cap on users or tasks
- Full task structure, custom fields, and multiple views included
- Genuinely useful for teams with many read-only participants
Cons
- 60MB total storage across the whole workspace
- Limited to 5 Spaces
- Setup burden is identical to the paid product
Jira free: excellent, if your team is technical
Jira’s free plan supports ten users with unlimited projects and issues, plus native Scrum and Kanban boards, sprint planning, backlog management, and release tracking. For a software team, this is the most capable free tier on the list by a wide margin.
For anyone else it is the wrong tool. Jira is designed for developers and product managers, and non-technical teams face a real learning curve for concepts they do not need. Choose it because your team already thinks in sprints, not because the free allowance is generous.
Wrike free: unlimited users, deliberately hollow
Wrike’s free plan is unusual in allowing unlimited users and projects. What it removes is everything that makes Wrike distinctive — no Gantt charts, no advanced dashboards, no AI, with storage limits on top.
It is a reasonable way to trial the product with a whole team, and a poor way to run one. Note also that Wrike restructured its pricing in January 2026, retiring the old Professional and Enterprise plans in favour of a Team plan at $10 per user per month, so older comparisons of its paid tiers are out of date.
The solo-only free tiers
Todoist allows five personal projects and five collaborators per project, and includes automatic reminders for tasks with a date and time; custom reminders need Pro. It is excellent free software for one person managing their own work, and it will push you to Pro — $5 a month billed annually — within months.
Notion is fully usable free for one person. The moment a second person joins, block limits apply, which means the free tier does not survive becoming a team tool. Plan on Plus at $10 per member if you intend to collaborate.
Airtable allows five users on free with record and automation limits, and paid plans start at $24 per user per month — the steepest jump on this list. Trial it free, but budget properly before committing a workflow to it.
The two you should not bother trialling for free
monday.com
A visual work platform built on colour-coded boards, with strong dashboards and automation for teams that manage work by status at a glance.
- Best for
- Teams evaluating seriously — but use the paid trial, not the free tier
- Pricing
- Free for up to 2 seats; paid plans from $9/seat/mo billed annually with a 3-seat minimum
monday.com free gives two seats and three boards. Reviewers describe it as almost too limited to evaluate the product properly, and that is a fair reading. If you want to assess monday.com, use the paid trial instead — and note that its paid plans carry a three-seat minimum, so the real entry price is $27 a month.
Asana free stops at two users with no timeline, no dashboards, and no rules. Everything that distinguishes Asana sits behind Starter at $10.99 per user. As a demonstration it is fine. As a free tier it does not exist in any meaningful sense.
Free and self-hosted
If “free” means “no licence cost” rather than “no work,” the open-source options remove the ceilings entirely.
Plane is the closest free equivalent to ClickUp. It deploys via Docker or Kubernetes and imports directly from ClickUp, Jira, Asana, and monday.com — issues, attachments, comments, and automations included. If you are leaving a paid tool and want to keep your structure, this is the shortest path.
OpenProject is GPL v3 with a fully functional Community edition and no time limit. Heavier than the hosted tools, and built for organisations that need audit trails and portfolio reporting.
Focalboard and Leantime are lighter options — boards you control, and a deliberately calmer interface for small teams and solo founders respectively.
The trade is real: you are exchanging a subscription for operational work. Someone runs the server, applies updates, and owns backups. If nobody wants that job, Trello free costs nothing and asks nothing.
When free stops being free
Free plans rarely end with a bill. They end with a workaround that costs more than the subscription would have.
Storage caps cost you a second tool. ClickUp’s 60MB means files live in Google Drive, which is fine until someone cannot find the brief attached to a task. You have not saved money; you have moved the cost into everyone’s time.
Power-Ups and add-ons re-monetise a free tier. Trello free allows unlimited Power-Ups, but the useful ones — time tracking, reporting, dependency management — are third-party products with their own subscriptions. Three at $5 a month costs as much as Trello Standard and Premium combined. If Trello free is what you are outgrowing, our Trello pricing guide explains exactly what each paid tier adds.
User caps cost you visibility. Asana and monday.com at two users mean clients and contractors are excluded, so status gets relayed by email. That is the specific problem a project tool exists to remove.
Self-hosting costs you a person. Plane and OpenProject have no licence fee and a real operational cost: server, updates, backups, and someone accountable when it breaks. At a loaded cost of even a few hours a month, you have exceeded ClickUp Unlimited for a ten-person team.
The honest framing is that free plans are excellent when your requirement genuinely fits inside them, and expensive when you are working around them. Before committing, name the limit you expect to hit first — that is the tool’s real price.
How to pick a free plan you will not have to leave
Three questions settle it faster than any feature comparison.
How many people need to see the work, not just do it? This is the question that eliminates Asana and monday.com immediately. If clients, contractors, or stakeholders need visibility, ClickUp free is the only option here with no headcount ceiling.
Do files live in the tool or beside it? If your team already works in Google Drive or SharePoint, ClickUp’s 60MB is irrelevant. If people attach decks to tasks, it is disqualifying and Trello’s 10MB-per-file allowance is the better shape.
Will anything ever depend on anything else? No free tier here handles dependencies well, and Trello handles them at no tier. If your work has a critical path, plan to pay — or self-host OpenProject, which is the only free route to genuine dependency and Gantt support.
Which free plan should you pick
A team of two to ten, mixed technical ability. Trello. It is the only free tier on this list designed to be lived in rather than sampled.
A team of ten to twenty where most people only need visibility. ClickUp, with files kept in Drive.
A software team. Jira free. Ten users, unlimited projects, and sprint tooling that nothing else here matches for free.
One person. Todoist for tasks, Notion if your work is mostly writing. Both will push you to $5 to $10 a month eventually, and both are worth it at that price.
You need timeline views for free. Nobody offers this. Trello, ClickUp, Asana, and monday.com all place timeline or Gantt behind a paid tier. Self-hosting OpenProject is the only genuinely free route to Gantt charts.
When the free tier stops working, best project management software for small teams covers what each paid entry tier actually costs once seat minimums and billing increments are counted. If ClickUp specifically is what you outgrew, see the best ClickUp alternatives.
Start with Trello FreeFree plan limits verified in August 2026 against the official pricing pages for Trello, ClickUp, Asana, monday.com, Notion, and Todoist. Free tiers change frequently; confirm before committing a workflow.