The Best Free Project Management Software

Comparing free plans on features is close to useless, because they nearly all include the same core: tasks, assignees, due dates, a board, comments. What separates them is which limit you hit first.

So this is organised around that. Find the constraint that binds for you, and the answer falls out.

What runs out first

All limits checked on the vendors' own pricing pages on 27 August 2026.

Trello free — the best free plan for an actual team

Trello's free tier is free for up to 10 collaborators per Workspace, with unlimited cards, unlimited storage at 10MB per file, up to 10 boards per Workspace, and 250 Workspace command runs a month for automation.

Ten people is five times what Asana or monday.com allow, and it is the number that makes this a plan rather than a trial. A six-person team can run its real work here indefinitely without paying, which is not true of most of this list.

The limit that binds is boards, not people. Ten per Workspace sounds ample until you discover the natural instinct is one board per client or per project, at which point you reach ten faster than you expect. The workaround — fewer boards with more lists — is usually better practice anyway, but it is a real constraint on how you organise.

The 250 automation runs a month also go quickly if you automate anything routine. That is the most common reason teams move to Standard at $5 a user a month.

Best if: you have up to ten people and can live inside ten boards.

ClickUp free — unlimited people, almost no storage

ClickUp's Free Forever plan is the only one here advertising unlimited free plan members alongside unlimited tasks. It includes collaborative docs, kanban boards, sprint management, calendar view, a basic custom field manager and one form.

The constraint is 60MB of storage, plus structural caps of 5 Spaces, 40 Lists per Space and 100 Folders per Space, and chat history limited to 30 days.

60MB is small. A handful of screenshots and a couple of PDFs and it is gone. This is a coherent trade rather than a trick — ClickUp is charging for files instead of people, which is the right way round for a team that talks more than it uploads and the wrong way round for anyone handing over design files.

It is also the most product on this page, which is a mixed blessing on a free plan. There is a great deal to configure and nobody in a small team is usually assigned to configure it.

Best if: you have more than ten people and your attachments live somewhere else.

Asana and monday.com free — two seats, so read them as trials

Asana's Personal plan is up to 2 users with unlimited storage at 100MB per file, no portfolios, goals or advanced reporting. monday.com's free plan is up to 2 seats, 3 boards and 3 docs.

Both are legitimately useful for one person or a pair. Neither is a team plan, and it is worth being clear-eyed that this is a deliberate acquisition design: get the work in, then charge when the third person needs to see it.

That is not a criticism of the products — Asana Starter at $10.99 and monday.com Basic at $9 a seat are reasonable — but if you are shopping for free, these two are not really on the list. Use them to evaluate, and budget from your third hire. The choice between them is covered in Asana vs monday.com.

Notion free — excellent alone, awkward together

Notion's free plan is unlimited for individuals, with 10 guests, 5MB file uploads and 7 days of page history. Block limits apply once you have two or more members.

For one person it is one of the most capable free tools in existence, and it does project tracking well enough that many solo operators never need anything else. The moment it becomes a team workspace, the free plan starts pushing back, and Plus is listed at $10 a seat.

The wider caveat is that Notion is a documents product that can model projects, not a project product. That is a strength when your work is thinking, writing and reference material with tasks attached, and a weakness when you need something to chase you.

Best if: you are one person, or a small team whose real artefact is documents.

Teamwork.com and Wrike free — narrower, but worth knowing

Teamwork.com free is 5 users, up to 5 projects and 100 automations. That is a tight fit but a coherent one for a very small client-services team, and it is one of the few free plans built around client work rather than internal tasks.

Wrike free covers what Wrike calls essential task management — project and task management with board and table views across web, desktop and mobile. It is the narrowest offering here in feature terms, and Wrike's paid plans are also the ones to check carefully: seats are sold in groups of five, so a six-person team buys ten.

Basecamp free — one project, and honest about it

Basecamp's free tier is one project for personal use, 1GB of storage, up to 5 users. It is not pretending to be a business plan, and Basecamp's paid tiers are flat monthly fees with no per-user charge — $25 for Freelancer, $59 for Studio — which makes it the cheapest option here at scale even though it is the least generous free one.

If free is a budget constraint rather than a permanent requirement, Basecamp is worth modelling anyway. At fifteen people, $59 flat beats every per-seat plan on this page by a wide margin.

Choosing

• Team of 3–10, normal work: Trello free. Nothing else here is close on seats-per-dollar.
• Team over 10, files elsewhere: ClickUp Free Forever.
• One person: Notion free, or Trello if you prefer boards to documents.
• Small client-services team: Teamwork.com free while you are under five projects.
• Evaluating before you buy: Asana or monday.com free, understanding that both are two-seat evaluation accounts.

One habit worth adopting whichever you pick: check the export before you have a year of history inside. Free plans are where the largest amount of undocumented work accumulates, and the cost of leaving is paid in the history that does not travel.

When a cap does start costing you something, the paid comparison is in the best project management software for small teams, and the numbers people forget to budget for are in what this software actually costs.