The one plan here that does not meter anything
Four of the six rivals in our comparison sell an entry paid tier with something switched off in it. monday.com withholds the timeline. ClickUp counts your uses of it. Trello does not have one until the second tier. Wrike rations your automations by the seat and turns them all off at the cap. Only Notion Plus meters nothing either, and Basecamp has nothing to meter.
Asana Starter has Timeline, Gantt, unlimited automations and unlimited free guests, and it is the first plan you can buy. That is the entire argument for the pick, and Asana charges for it.
It scores 8.3 under how we rate, the highest of the seven, and it is our Best Overall pick.
What it costs, and the blocks nobody mentions
Starter is $10.99 a user a month billed annually, or $13.49 billed monthly. Both cycles are printed, which three vendors in this set manage. For ten people over twelve months that is $1,318.80, the dearest of our four picks, though monday.com is dearer still at $1,440.
Now the part the pricing page puts in an FAQ. Seats come in blocks:
"Between 2 and 5 total users: add seats in increments of 1. Up to 30 total users: add seats in increments of 5. Up to 100 total users: add seats in increments of 10. Up to 500 total users: add seats in increments of 25. More than 500 users: add seats in increments of 50."
Asana lays that out as a bulleted list. The wording is verbatim; the full stops are ours.
A team of eleven buys fifteen seats. A thirty first person costs ten. Nobody in the category writes this down, and monday.com and Wrike do the same thing, so it is a category habit rather than an Asana quirk. It is still $527.52 a year for four seats you did not want.
The free Personal plan is two seats. It used to be fifteen, and people still recommend it as a team plan. At two, it is a trial.
Guests are genuinely free, and that is unusual
Asana's wording is unqualified: unlimited free guests, and inviting external collaborators does not affect your user count.
Compare it across the set. Trello makes single-board guests free and bills anyone who joins a second board. ClickUp gives you five guest seats plus two per additional paid user. monday.com and Wrike give unlimited free viewers who can only read. Notion matches Asana and does not count guests as seats.
For an agency running client projects, that difference is worth more than the price gap between any two plans on the page.
Where the money stops
Two things sit behind a price Asana does not publish.
SAML SSO and SCIM are Enterprise and Enterprise+ only. Google SSO arrives on Starter, which covers a lot of small teams, but if your security review asks for SAML you are in a sales conversation with no list price to anchor it.
The uptime SLA is Enterprise-only too. It promises 99.9 percent per fiscal quarter and excludes up to 360 minutes of maintenance a quarter. That is a real commitment and better than ClickUp or Wrike, who publish none at all, but you cannot buy it at $10.99.
The compliance set behind it is the strongest here: SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, and five ISO certifications, on a company listed on the NYSE with published accounts.
What is missing
No deletion timetable. Asana documents a 30 day restore window for deleted projects and tasks, and an inactivity policy admins can set from six months to ten years, and says nothing about what happens to a closed account. Basecamp publishes 30 days to deletion and 60 from backups. That is the standard, and Asana does not meet it.
The export is JSON and CSV per project, and the help article does not say whether attachments or comments come with it. On a page about lock-in that is a gap, and Notion's HTML export is the better answer.
Who should buy it
Buy Starter if you would rather pay $478.80 a year more than ClickUp than meter anything at all. That is the trade, stated plainly, and for most teams it is the right one.
Buy it especially if you run client or contractor work, because unlimited free guests with no seat consequence is the most generous position here, matched only by Notion.
Do not buy it if the bill is the deciding factor, where ClickUp does the same job for $840. Do not buy it if your team is eleven or twenty six people, where the seat blocks cost you four or four again. And do not plan on SAML at this price.
Prices, seat increments, guest terms and the service level addendum on this page were read from the vendor pricing page, trust centre, service levels page and help centre on . We did not test the products in this comparison.
