The short answer
Asana is the best project management software for most teams, because its cheapest paid plan is the only one here that does not meter something you use weekly. ClickUp costs $478.80 a year less for ten people. Trello has the free plan a small team can actually live on. Basecamp charges one price however many people you hire.
Every price on this page is twelve months for a team of ten, on the cheapest plan that can actually run a project, read from the vendor on .
Three conditions, all on the same plan: a timeline or Gantt view, an automation allowance above zero, and outside collaborators who do not eat a paid seat. That sounds like a low bar. At two of these seven, the rate the whole internet quotes does not clear it, and at a third it clears it with a meter attached.
What the best project management software costs for a team of ten
ClickUp is $7 a user a month, so $840 a year. Trello Premium, Notion Plus and Wrike Team all land on $1,200. Asana is $10.99 a user, so $1,318.80. monday.com is $12 a seat, so $1,440. Basecamp is $59 a month flat for any number of people, so $708, and it is the one figure here that does not clear the bar.
Three of the seven land at exactly $1,200 and buy three quite different things.
The plan every review quotes is the one below the one you need
This is the finding, and it is not subtle.
monday.com Basic is $9 a seat and has no Timeline, no Gantt and no automation actions at all. Every page in the search results quotes that rate. The first monday.com plan that can draw a timeline is Standard at $12, which over a year for ten people is $360 more.
ClickUp is quoted at $7, and that plan does carry Gantt without a limit. Its Timeline view is a different matter: on Unlimited it is a hundred uses. ClickUp is straight about what that means.
"When you reach a use limit, you won't lose any data, but you won't be able to edit or create new items with that feature."
Trello is quoted at $5, which is Standard, which has no Timeline view. Premium at $10 does.
Those are the three cheapest advertised rates in the category. Two of them are not plans, and the third comes with a counter on it.
Automations: the same money buys a hundredfold difference
At the qualifying plan, per month.
Asana and Trello publish no limit at all. Notion documents that database automations exist on paid plans without publishing a cap. ClickUp gives 1,000 actions a month across the workspace, with 500 active automations. Wrike gives 50 per paid seat, so 500 for a team of ten. monday.com gives 250, for the entire account.
That last number is the one to sit with. It is the dearest qualifying plan on this page and the tightest published allowance, by a factor of four against ClickUp at $600 less. A team running a handful of rules across a handful of boards will spend 250 actions inside a week.
Wrike's behaviour at the cap is the harshest anyone here documents: all rules are disabled automatically, with warning emails to admins at 50 percent and 10 percent of the threshold.
Basecamp has no automation rules at any price, and does not pretend otherwise.
Three of these will not sell you eleven seats
Asana adds seats in increments of one between two and five users, then five up to thirty, ten up to a hundred and twenty five up to five hundred. monday.com starts at three seats and then moves in multiples of five. Wrike sells in groups of five up to thirty seats.
Ten is buyable at all three, which is lucky for this page. Eleven is not, and costs you fifteen.
Wrike adds a second limit on top: the Team plan runs from two to fifteen users. Basecamp Freelancer has a cap too, at twenty, but Basecamp sells a bigger flat plan for $34 more a month. Wrike's step out is $25 a seat, two and a half times the rate.
What the uptime promises actually say
Three of the seven publish a contractual SLA. Three more publish a percentage in marketing copy and nowhere else. Read them.
Trello is not on the product list for Atlassian's contractual cloud SLA. That list names Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Bitbucket, Compass, Loom and Jira Product Discovery. Trello's own enterprise page promises 99.99 percent uptime, and its trust page still cites a 2018 uptime figure in 2026.
Notion measures its 99.9 percent "excluding holidays and weekends and scheduled maintenance", and the 5 percent credit is forfeited unless you claim it in writing within 72 hours. A Saturday outage is contractually not downtime.
monday.com publishes the most detailed SLA of the seven, with a credit schedule from 5 to 30 percent, on Enterprise only. It also excludes up to 45 consecutive minutes in read-only mode from the definition of downtime.
Asana publishes 99.9 percent per fiscal quarter, Enterprise and Enterprise+ only, with up to 360 minutes of quarterly maintenance excluded.
ClickUp and Wrike publish no contractual figure. Wrike's site footer claims uptime over 99.9 percent and its terms provide the service as is, with all faults. ClickUp publishes no percentage anywhere and caps its total liability at one hundred dollars.
Basecamp advertises 99.99 percent historical uptime and states in its terms that it does not offer service level agreements, in those words. Of the seven that is the least reassuring position and the most honest one.
What it costs to leave
Nobody in this category prices the exit, and it is where the money is.
Basecamp is the cheapest to leave: an HTML export of the whole account on every plan including the free one, and a published timetable, permanent deletion 30 days after cancellation and removal from backups within 60.
Wrike is the dearest. Account backup is a Business, Pinnacle and Apex feature, so the Team plan we price cannot export itself, and where the backup does exist Wrike states that backed up data cannot be imported back into Wrike.
In between: Trello's CSV export does not include comments and its JSON carries only the 1,000 most recent actions. ClickUp puts List and Table export on Business and exports attachments as hyperlinks rather than files. monday.com's whole-account export excludes archived boards, workdocs and dashboards, and the download link expires after 24 hours. Notion's HTML export is the best of the seven: it carries comments, resolved and unresolved, along with the assets.
The other place the money hides is SAML
If your organisation needs single sign-on, the ladder above is the wrong ladder.
Notion is the cheapest with SAML included in the plan price, at $20 a member a month. Asana, monday.com, ClickUp and Wrike all put it behind a plan whose price they do not publish. Trello is cheaper in total, but only by bolting on a second subscription: SAML comes from Atlassian Guard from $4 a user a month, so Premium plus Guard is $14 a user, and Atlassian has said the Guard list price changes on 13 October 2026. Basecamp does not offer SAML at any price and says so.
Pick order is not score order
monday.com scores 7.6, above two of our four picks, and sits outside them. The board model is the best in this comparison and the dashboards are genuinely good. It is out on the pricing ladder: the plan that can draw a timeline is the dearest qualifying plan here, and it carries the tightest automation allowance published by anyone. Those two facts sit on the same plan.
Basecamp is the lowest-priced tool on the page at $708 and fails our anchor at any price. It has no Gantt chart and no automation rules, and no amount of money changes that. It holds a pick anyway, on a role the anchor cannot decide: it is the only tool here whose bill does not move when you hire, and the only vendor that publishes what it does not have. If your work has dependencies and a critical path, this is the wrong tool and the price is irrelevant.
What we did instead of testing
This is the only category we have covered where the pages above us in the results say they tested the products, describe how, and disclose their affiliate relationships while doing it. We have no reason to doubt any of that and no way to match it.
So we read paperwork instead: seven pricing pages, seven help centres, the terms of service, the service level documents, the export articles and the seat rules, and put one comparable number beside each. That work is what produced the Basic plan that cannot draw a timeline, the 250 automations a month, the plan that cannot back itself up and the SLA that does not cover the product. Some of it would surface after long enough in the tool, on the day the rules switch off. None of it surfaces on the day you choose.
Our usability score is the one number here that is not a document reading. Treat it as a judgement on documented scope and interface design, because that is what it is.
Which is the better tool is a question somebody else has answered. Which plan you actually have to buy is the one we found nobody asking.
