7 best free project management software for small businesses on a budget

Navigating project management software can feel like a daunting task for any small business owner – but fear not, as we’ve sifted through the options and unearthed the cream of the crop.

Our top pick? ClickUp.

From rebuilding their interface this past November, to the introduction of their new AI features this February, the company is now the best free choice for small businesses looking to scale their businesses without breaking the bank.

But could another software potentially suit your business needs better? And is it worth upgrading for the additional features to save time or other precious resources? Let’s find out by exploring our other top picks, all tailored to better 🔍align with your budget.

The best free project management software

ClickUp Free

ClickUp promises a ‘free forever’ payment option and it is certainly possible for businesses to get by with the feature-rich ClickUp Free for a long time.

Its collaboration features are especially outstanding. By consolidating various communication tools, like task comments and user tags, ClickUp Free becomes an effective team working tool that means you won’t have to spend hundreds on third-party messaging apps.

As well as this, the ClickUp Free tier has a huge array of both essential and advanced features including:

• Custom views
• Portfolios
• Goals
• Mind maps
• Dashboards
• Spreadsheets

As an added bonus, Clickup Free didn’t present a steep learning curve for users. It provides a lot of easy preset functions, such as employee management templates and productivity workflows, so our testers were able to hit the ground running after a relatively quick onboarding.

However, during testing, we were frustrated by the speed of the platform. The app became unresponsive frequently, particularly when importing data. One tester had to manually add in dates and milestones to a project, which proved time-consuming. As a result, we gave ClickUp Free an okay ease of use score of 3.9 out of 5.

We also would have liked to see more integrations available with ClickUp Free; specifically for marketing. While rival brands like Trello, Asana, and Teamwork connect with third-party apps like HubSpot for free, ClickUp lags behind in this area.

ClickUp Pricing

When reviewing ClickUp pricing, we found that startups could feasibly use the free tier for their full first year in business without needing to upgrade, as its average price across all pricing plans are very competitive.

Pricing begins at just $7 per user when billed annually ($10 per user when billed monthly) for Clickup Unlimited, which unlocks unlimited storage and larger monthly allowances. Here’s the full pricing by tier:

• ClickUp Free – $0
• ClickUp Unlimited – $7 per user, per month (billed annually)
• ClickUp Business – $12 per user, per month (billed annually)
• ClickUp Enterprise – on request

ClickUp Unlimited costs around £10 per user, per month when billed annually, and this unlocks an unlimited number of uses of important features like dashboards. Our experts say it’s the ideal investment for scaling companies taking on more projects or commissions.

While this article predominantly focuses on the free features provided by each provider, it’s important to also highlight ClickUp’s recent advancements in the realm of artificial intelligence.

Last year, ClickUp unveiled ClickUp Brain, a groundbreaking leap in AI technology. ClickUp Brain harnesses knowledge from an entire organisation’s workspace, streamlining processes and eliminating redundant tasks.

ClickUp Brain comprises three integral components: AI Knowledge Manager™, AI Project Manager™, and AI Writer for Work™, collectively enhancing efficiency by automating mundane tasks and empowering you to allocate your valuable time towards innovation and leadership.

While it can be seamlessly integrated into any plan for an additional $5 per member per month, you also have the option to explore its potential through a 💸 complimentary trial period.

Is the ClickUp Free plan worth it?

Yes; for startups that are in the very early stages of growth, ClickUp Free is excellent value for money. It allows you to create an unlimited number of tasks, and has lots of premium features (eg. Kanban boards) that are only available with the more advanced plans of rival software like monday.com or Wrike.

That said, users can only create up to five spaces per month with ClickUp Free, which means teams with more than three employees will likely quickly outgrow the free tier. We recommend startups ugrade to ClickUp Unlimited as soon as their budget can afford to ensure the tool doesn’t end up limiting hiring plans.

monday.com Free

Those who are just starting out, perhaps by going freelance, will like monday.com for its simplicity. It is an incredibly easy-to-use platform that encourages creative thinking and problem-solving with its online whiteboard feature.

During our ease of use testing, we discovered that the more complex features (ie. budget tracking) require workarounds, which can take a while to grasp. Sometimes, the monday.com free plan explained the workarounds via its knowledge base but other times it didn’t, leaving us in the dark at points of the test process.

Sole traders won’t need to worry about this problem as they are more likely to be using the platform for day-to-day tasks than long-term project management. Comparatively, group work is not really catered for in the free tier of monday.com.

Projects with multiple collaborators or stakeholders will struggle with the lack of dashboards, or a team instant messenger, to monitor colleagues’ progress. Both of these are, by comparison, available on ClickUp Free for no charge. Of course, if you spend on monday.com, then you unlock a huge number of features that make it far better suited to team work.

monday.com Pricing

While monday.com calls its freemium tier Free Forever, there is a time limit for how long businesses can use it. While the ClickUp Free plan could realistically be used by a business forever, monday.com users should upgrade to the Basic plan once they have more than two team members.

Luckily, monday.com pricing is very fair. monday.com Basic provides teams of 3+ employees with an attractive and colour-coded view of a larger project timeline through monday’s famously customisable templates – and all for a low monthly cost of just £8 per user, billed annually:

• Basic – £8 per seat, per month (annual billing, minimum 3 users)
• Standard – £11 per seat, per month (annual billing)
• Pro – £17 per seat, per month (annual billing)
• Enterprise – bespoke pricing

Is the monday.com free plan worth it?

Small businesses can use the monday.com free plan to demo the platform. Naturally, monday.com’s free plan is not a sustainable solution for businesses due to its two-person cap, however. Teams of three or more should upgrade to the lowest-tiered plan, monday.com Basic, to gain access to monday’s wealth of customisable templates and project management tools.

Use the time to train staff members on basic tasks, and migrate any project data. That way, when it’s time to upgrade to monday.com Basic, you can start using the software from the minute your contract begins.

Teamwork Free Forever

Time tracking is a very valuable tool for small businesses which is why a lot of PM systems (including Asana and monday.com) only host this feature on their paid-for plans.

Teamwork Free Forever is the anomaly, offering this plus lots of other managerial-specific functions that can help SME users to meet deadlines by optimising their resources. For example, Teamwork’s ‘milestones’ feature alerted us when a specific target has been hit (or missed) by another team member.

One thing we were surprised to see missed off the list of free Teamwork features was a team instant messenger. For a brand that prioritises team-working, Teamwork Free Forever users can only send emojis or files to other team members. Plus, they’ll have to pay a special additional charge for the privilege.

Teamwork Pricing

Users who upgrade to Teamwork Deliver for £9.99 per user, per month (billed annually) will find it an expensive leap compared to scalable rivals like ClickUp and monday.com.

However, the upgrade does get you access to billing and invoicing – two crucial resource management areas that will save a lot of time and money for SMEs.

Here’s how the other Teamwork plans stack up:

• Teamwork Free Forever – £0
• Teamwork Starter – £5.99 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Teamwork Deliver – £9.99 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Teamwork Grow – £19.99 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Teamwork Scale – bespoke

Is the Teamwork Free plan worth it?

Like monday.com, Teamwork Free should not be thought of as a long-term PM solution. It is definitely not the most full-featured free plan for SMEs. Particularly when compared to rivals like ClickUp, it is hugely lacking in project creation areas like preset templates and custom project templates – plus, there’s a pesky three user limit.

Teams with more than three employees will need to upgrade to the next plan up, Teamwork Standard, to ensure your software is not only available for a certain percentage of team members. To support a larger team base, Teamwork Standard will also give you access to a team messenger tool.

Wrike Free

Wrike Free hosts all the essential features for a freemium plan. It also has a generous allowance for spreadsheet usage, making it useful for scheduling and monitoring work allocation, which neither Jira, Teamwork, Trello, or Teamwork offer.

We really liked how in-depth the platform when it came to task management. We were able to create sub-tasks of sub-tasks, making complex project management with a lot of collaborators run much more smoothly than if we had been using a more stubborn format like Excel or Google Sheets.

Wrike Free’s more sophisticated tools do sacrifice some fundamental PM functions. We gave it a score of just 3.7 out of 5 for features due to its poor collaboration features (no instant messenger is available in the free version) and complete lack of dashboard tools.

We were also disappointed to find out that Gantt charts (the staple feature on Wrike’s paid-for plans) are not available for free. This also means users lose access to Task Dependencies (the ability to make a task’s success dependent on another’s); a useful prioritisation tool.

Wrike Pricing

Customers can get by with the Wrike Free platform if they are planning a short-term project. However, if your company deals with regular commissions and tasks, the lack of features will start to limit staff.

Here’s how Wrike’s pricing plans look (charged in $):

• Wrike Free – $0
• Wrike Team – $9.80 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Wrike Business – $24.80 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Wrike Enterprise – bespoke

Upgrading to Wrike Team for $9.80 per user, per month (pricing is only available in US dollars) brings a significant uplift in functionality with users then able to access features like Gantt charts and dashboards. Our complete guide to Wrike pricing has more information on how much you should expect to spend.

Is the Wrike Free plan worth it?

Given Wrike’s low cost, we would recommend small businesses upgrade to Wrike Team to take advantage of the many core and advanced project management features that it provides.

Chief amongst them being a Gantt chart, which can be very helpful for large teams needing to prioritise resource management and calendar planning (monday.com only offers this on its Pro plan). You’ll also get preset widgets, the ability to create dashboards, and task dependencies.

It’s worth noting that all of these features are available for free (although with a limited number of uses) with ClickUp. SMEs that want to take advantage of these tools might consider trialling them first with ClickUp Free.

Jira Work Management Free

Compared to all other brands on this list including our number one choice, ClickUp Free, Jira Free is the undeniable champion for data reporting. It had every feature we analysed including a custom chart builder for users to measure any project metric.

Workarounds are necessary for just one area: tracking budget. Jira Free lacks a dedicated budgeting feature so we had to use custom fields to display budget info. Thankfully, with this approach, updating budgets on Jira is as simple as filling in a field on the task screen.

Less tech-savvy users will likely encounter a steep learning curve with Jira Free. Whilst it has a clean interface, during testing we found we had to carry out a lot of menu-diving to complete basic project tasks, such as setting up a simple missed deadline notification. Ultimately, we gave it a fairly average ease of use score of 3.2 out of 5.

Jira Work Management Pricing

Away from the free plan, Jira’s prices remain cheap for business users. Jira Standard is priced at $5 (around £4.04) per user, per month when billed monthly (costs are only available in US dollars) which is just cheaper than monday.com.

This payment uplift gives you some additional features beyond the free plan, including more customer support options (live chat and email). You’ll increase your user limit beyond 10, which will be essential for growing businesses, plus benefit from more data storage.

Here’s how Jira’s pricing plans look (charged in $):

• Jira Free – $0
• Jira Standard – $8.15 per user, per month
• Jira Premium – $16 per user, per month
• Enterprise – bespoke

For smaller businesses with under 10 users, we’d recommend sticking with Jira Free given how minimal the benefits are for upgrading.

Is the Jira Work Management free plan worth it?

Small businesses with fewer than 10 employees should absolutely stick with Jira Free. The platform is an excellent way to save money before you’re ready to start growing your team.

Our analysts could only spot three areas where Jira Free differs from Jira Standard: user limit, data storage limit, and automation limit. None of these will stop you from managing a project, so we think the freemium tier is good value for SMEs – although you might need to spend money on another file storage system like Google Drive to plug the gaps.

Asana Basic

Amongst Asana Basic’s excellent real-time communication tools is a project message board to instantly share comments and ideas (unavailable with Trello or Jira Work Management) which makes it brilliant for a team working in today’s age of hybrid offices. We’ve shown what it looks like above.

Alina Cincan is the Managing Director of Inbox Translation, a translation agency. Cincan told Startups: “The comment function allows us to share ideas, add files, and keep track of everything pertaining to that task or project in one place. If someone works on a task I’m involved in then I get notified, which helps me to be on top of the projects I’m interested in.”

During testing, we found that Asana Basic doesn’t offer much scope for workarounds if you’re trying to complete a task which the app doesn’t currently boast a set feature for.

That said, it has made some improvements since 2023: standout being project budgeting. Previously, Asana Basic wasn’t able to track a budget effectively. Plus, its existing spreadsheet functionality lacked formula capability. Now, users can add a budget to tasks, and use formulas to calculate total costs spent.

Asana Pricing

Asana’s free plan certainly holds its own against rivals like monday.com, but it doesn’t have the complex features that ClickUp boasts, such as subtasks for divvying up responsibilities, which teams of 5+ employees will find frustrating.

Here’s what you’ll need to spend for Asana’s paid plans:

• Asana Basic – free
• Asana Premium – £9.49 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Asana Business – £20.99 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Asana Enterprise – bespoke

Asana Premium is the best way forward for larger companies with a lot of collaborators. The cost is £9.49 per month, per user when billed annually (£11.59 billed monthly).

Is the Asana free plan worth it?

Yes; it’s certainly possible for microbusinesses and sole traders to use Asana completely free forever. It has an unlimited number of tasks, projects, and team messages, meaning for basic, day-to-day task management it’s unlikely to hamper growth.

Asana’s free Basic version allows up to 15 users to collaborate, and we would recommend it for larger, remote teams. Being able to add CRM, marketing, accounting, and reporting integrations makes it a brilliant solution for those needing a virtual workspace they can use to manage their daily tasks, together.

Trello Free

Trello is intended to have a gentle learning curve for new users. Because of this, it doesn’t have a lot of the more advanced features that apps like ClickUp Free provide. For those looking to find their feet with an easy bit of software, however, we think Trello Free is the best option. Users can get:

• Kanban boards
• Assignee and due dates
• iOS and Android mobile apps
• Two-factor authentication
  
• Marketing and CRM intergrations

Adding a task is done using a simple pop-up form (pictured above) which can be tailored using custom fields. Because there’s no particular field which asks for specific project information (eg. deadlines), we did find it frustrating to edit all of this information again when duplicating tasks.

Trello Pricing

Trello has had a major shift in its pricing in the past 12 months, becoming dramatically cheaper than what it was in the recent past. Trello Standard, the platform’s second-tier, now costs £4.15 per user, per month when billed monthly (£4.99 per user, per month, billed annually).

Here’s the full Trello cost breakdown, by plan:

• Trello Basic – free
• Trello Standard – $5 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Trello Premium – $10 per user, per month (billed annually)
• Trello Enterprise – $17.50 per user, per month (billed annually)

However, Trello Standard offers little more than an uplift in user allowances from 5 to unlimited. Trello Premium ($10 per user, per month) has more features for your money but these are all available for zero cost from other platforms, like ClickUp Free or Wrike Free. Switching providers is better value for money when looking to upgrade.

Is the Trello free plan worth it?

Yes. We recommend Trello business users stick with the free plan, rather than upgrading to a paid-for tier. Trello is so great with features that you won’t be missing out – making it a great, bargain choice for single users that want to manage their project tasks on a Kanban board. If you’re looking to implement any add-ons (or as Trello calls them, “Power-ups”) however, some come at a small additional cost.

The one reason you’d need to upgrade to Trello Standard would be for the ‘guest access’ feature, as this is the only tool that isn’t available with the free tier. You can read this one of two ways: Trello’s free plan is incredibly generous, or its paid-for plans are noticeably lacking.

How does free project management work?

Like paid-for plans, free project management systems have lots of useful features for managing workload. However, a free software tool is more limited as, for obvious reasons, companies want you to upgrade to a paid-for plan to access more sophisticated features.

For example, ClickUp’s freemium plan only gives users 10 automations per month. Meanwhile, its lowest-tiered plan, ClickUp Unlimited, has no cap.

However, free plans will definitely give you access to project dashboards. These are essentially a virtual workspace when you can see every task that needs to be completed, as well as who is responsible for its delivery. Some free platforms allow other team members to be added to dashboards so you can collaborate.

What types of businesses should use free project management software?

Free software plans are not meant for long-term use. They can help you to scale-up your business by delivering on a successful project, but once a company takes on multiple clients or employees, users should upgrade to unlock more sophisticated tools aimed at delegation and collaboration.

That said, freemium tools are good choices for:

• Sole traders and those who might be running their company alongside a full-time job. monday.com Free is our preferred plan for this type of user.
• Startups that can’t commit to a long-term, expensive contract but need a tool that can enable them to take on new contracts.
• Small businesses based offline that need to manage projects irregularly, such as a restaurant wanting to organise a seasonal calendar of events during Christmas.

Of course, it’s not only about size or budget. Purchasing any new business technology requires you to assess the goals of your business to get the most of your investment.

If you are looking to collaborate better with your team, or to find a smarter way to monitor the resources spent on a project each month, then you will need to factor these considerations into your research.

What makes a good free project management software?

Free software often has limitations on the number of users, which can prove irritating for SMEs with larger teams. For this reason, we picked out the best free options for project management software based on how they go against these expectations.

These are:

1. Number of available features – freemium options tend to be close-fisted when it comes to PM features
2. Security – cyber-attacks can be particularly costly for SMEs, but security is not often the focus for work management tools
3. Gentle learning curve – important for small firms that are new to using PM software and want to get to grips with a freemium version
4. Number of users – user limits are common for freemium software and can be tricky for small businesses with fluctuating team sizes
5. Integrations – communication or marketing add-ons are often only included in paid-for plans as they bring so much benefit to business users

Final verdict

Our top-rated free project management software is ClickUp Free, an extraordinarily generous software freemium that compromises on very little in terms of features. Larger teams will need to watch out for the cap on its more advanced tools, but overall we think ClickUp is a strong, accessible choice for any startup with ambitious growth goals.

Project management software is a particularly confusing market to navigate, with a lot of new brands emerging very suddenly and all claiming to bring the most benefit to users.

To speed up the process, we have crunched our research into an easy-to-use 🔍cost comparison tool that will give you direct quotes from the most suitable providers in just one minute. Just tell us a couple of details about your company’s needs, and we’ll do the rest.