“Free plan” means five different things across these five tools, and in two cases it now means something much smaller than it did two years ago. The headline: Asana’s free plan is now capped at two users. Its pricing page says it plainly — “Up to 2 users can collaborate for free.” If you are a team of three, Asana is off this list before you start.
What each free tier actually allows
| Tool | Free tier reality | First paid tier |
|---|---|---|
| Trello | 10 collaborators, 10 boards, unlimited cards, 10MB per file | Standard $5 annual / $6 monthly |
| Asana | 2 users. Unlimited tasks and projects, 100MB per file | Starter $10.99 annual / $13.49 monthly |
| ClickUp | Unlimited members, unlimited tasks, 60MB total storage | Unlimited $7 annual / $10 monthly |
| Notion | Unlimited blocks solo, block-capped with 2+ members, 5MB uploads, 10 guests | Plus $10 per member/month |
| Linear | Unlimited members but 2 teams, 250 issues, no guests | Basic $10/user/mo billed yearly |
All prices are per user or per member per month.
The three traps
ClickUp’s cap is storage, not seats. Unlimited free members sounds unbeatable until you read the next line: 60MB of storage for the entire workspace. That is roughly a dozen screenshots. Unlimited people with nowhere to attach anything is a demo, not a plan — and it is the least-advertised limit in this comparison.
Notion’s block limit only bites when you invite someone. Solo, blocks are unlimited. Add a second member and the workspace becomes block-capped. So Notion is genuinely unlimited for one person and quietly finite for a team — which is the opposite of how most people assume it works.
Linear gates guests behind Business, not Basic. Neither the free plan nor the $10 Basic plan lets you give a contractor or client restricted access. If external collaborators are part of your workflow, Linear costs $16 a seat, not $10.
So which are usable free for three to five people?
Trello, genuinely. Ten collaborators and unlimited cards is a real allowance; the ten-board ceiling is the only wall you will hit, and for a small team ten boards is a lot. The 10MB file limit is the thing to watch.
ClickUp, if you attach nothing. Perfectly workable as a pure task tracker where files live in Drive or Dropbox. Useless as a document hub.
Asana is out at two users. Linear is out at 250 issues — an active team burns through that in a couple of months, and there is no archiving your way around a hard cap. Notion is out for a team of that size once the block limit engages, unless your workspace stays genuinely small.
If you are going to pay anyway
The paid ladder is wider than the free one. Trello Standard at $5 a user annually is half of everything else here. ClickUp Unlimited is $7. Then there is a jump to $10–$11 for Asana Starter, Notion Plus and Linear Basic.
For a five-person team that is $300 a year on Trello against $660 on Asana. Whether Asana is worth twice Trello depends entirely on whether you need its reporting and workflow rules — for a small team running simple projects, usually not.
What we would pick
- Three to five people, no budget: Trello free. It is the only one with no disqualifying catch.
- Task tracking only, files elsewhere: ClickUp free, unlimited members.
- Solo: Notion free is genuinely unlimited — the block cap never engages.
- Software team that will pay: Linear, but budget $16 for Business if you work with contractors.
- Cheapest paid plan worth having: Trello Standard, $5 a user annually.
Once projects are organised, the next question is where the hours went. We compared Toggl, Clockify and Harvest.
All limits and prices read from each vendor’s own pricing page in September 2026. Notion and Linear display annual rates by default; monthly equivalents were not shown for Linear.
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