Project management
Asana, Trello, monday.com or Microsoft Planner: project management software for a small team, priced
All four keep a team's tasks on shared lists and boards. They differ in where the free plan stops, in what they charge for, and in whether you already pay for one of them through Microsoft 365.
By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 5 minute read6 sources
The four, priced
As each pricing page showed them in October 2026. Asana, Trello and monday.com gave US dollars; monday.com says its prices do not include tax and that the price is determined by the billing country. Microsoft's Irish page gives euro, excluding VAT.
| Tool | Free | First paid plan | Billing, as shown |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asana | Personal, for one or two people | Starter: $10.99 per user a month | Billed annually; $13.49 billed monthly |
| Trello | Up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards per Workspace | Standard: $5 per user a month | Billed annually; $6 billed monthly |
| monday.com | Up to 2 seats and 3 boards | Basic: $9 per seat a month; plans start from 3 users | Billed annually; monthly billing costs more |
| Microsoft Planner | Included in Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard and Premium; Basic is €6.07 a user a month | Planner Plan 1: €8.70 per user a month | Paid yearly, excluding VAT |
What each one counts
Asana, Trello and Planner charge per user, and monday.com per seat. Trello also limits Workspace command runs, 250 a month on Free, 1,000 on Standard and unlimited on Premium, and sells Standard partly on "more automation". monday.com counts automations and integrations in actions a month.
Free plans, and where they stop
What each free plan includes, and what needs a paid one:
- 1Asana Personal: for one or two people, with unlimited tasks and projects, list, board and calendar views, unlimited storage with a 100MB limit per file, and 100+ integrations. Timeline and Gantt views, reporting dashboards, forms and unlimited automations start at Starter.
- 2Trello Free: up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards per Workspace, unlimited cards, unlimited Power-Ups per board, 10MB per file, and 250 Workspace command runs a month. Unlimited boards start at Standard, and the Timeline view at Premium.
- 3monday.com Free: up to 2 seats, 3 boards and 3 Docs, with 200+ templates and 8 column types. Automations and integrations start at Standard, the second paid plan.
- 4Planner in Microsoft 365: Grid, Board, Schedule and Chart views, and basic plan templates. Planner Plan 1 adds sub-tasks, backlogs and sprints, creating task dependencies, goals and milestones, and Calendar, Timeline (Gantt) and People views.
Asana or Trello
Trello is built on boards of cards. Its free plan takes a team of up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards per Workspace, its Standard plan removes the board limit at $5 per user a month billed annually, and a timeline view needs Premium, at $10 per user a month billed annually. Asana's free plan is for one or two people, and Starter, at $10.99 per user a month billed annually, is where its timelines, Gantt views, dashboards, forms and unlimited automations begin.
For a team of five on annual billing, at the prices those pages showed, that is $25 a month for Trello Standard, $50 for Trello Premium and $54.95 for Asana Starter.
monday.com, priced by the seat
monday.com's pricing page says plans start from 3 users. Basic is $9 a seat a month billed annually, Standard $12 and Pro $19, in the view the page opened with, and its answer on discounts is that a yearly plan is 18% cheaper. When read, the page also put a price on each plan's AI credits and took the same amount off as a special monthly discount.
Standard is the first plan with automations and integrations, each at 250 actions a month, and Pro raises both to 25,000. API calls are counted too: 1,000 a day on Standard and 10,000 on Pro.
Planner, if you already have Microsoft 365
Microsoft's Irish pages list Planner among the apps in Microsoft 365 Business Basic, at €6.07 a user a month, Business Standard with Copilot, at €20.36, and Business Premium with Copilot, at €27.73, each paid yearly and excluding VAT. A business already on one of those has Planner without a new subscription.
Planner Plan 1, at €8.70 a user a month paid yearly excluding VAT, adds the sprints, dependencies and Timeline view listed above. Planner and Project Plan 3, at €26.00, adds portfolios, baselines and critical path, and the Project desktop app.
Integrations, as each vendor documents them
How each one connects to the rest of your software:
- 1Asana: 100+ integrations on every plan, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Slack among them, with Salesforce, Tableau and Power BI integrations on Advanced.
- 2Trello: Power-Ups, unlimited on every plan, which Trello says connect it to more than 200 apps such as Slack, Google Drive and Salesforce. Some partners' Power-Ups carry a fee of their own.
- 3monday.com: integrations from Standard, counted in actions a month, as above.
- 4Microsoft Planner: Microsoft documents a Planner connector for Power Automate, with triggers for a new task, a task assigned to you and a completed task, and says the connector supports basic plans only.
Which fits which team
From the plans as each vendor publishes them:
- 1A business already on a Microsoft 365 business plan has Planner, and Plan 1 is the step up for timelines and sprints.
- 2A team of up to 10 that works in boards can stay on Trello's free plan while its Workspace has no more than 10 boards.
- 3monday.com's free plan is for 2 seats, and its paid plans start from 3 users, with automations from Standard.
- 4Asana's free plan is for one or two people; a larger team pays per user from Starter, which is also where its automations start.
Before you pick a tool
Pick the work first. What to automate first is about finding the job that repeats, and the automation savings calculator works out what that job costs you a year, with any tool's monthly charge counted against the saving. Where a project tool has no direct connection to another system you use, Zapier, Make, Power Automate and n8n can join them.
Sources
Free, and no account needed
What does a repeated task cost you a year?
Minutes each time and times a week in; the hours and money it costs a year, and the payback on automating it, with the tool's own monthly charge counted.
Run the free checkYour project tool, joined to the rest
Build connects your project tool to the systems around it, so new work, such as an enquiry, arrives as a task without being retyped, and every automation retries and alerts a person when it fails. €1,500 for one connection, €3,000 for up to five workflows.
See BuildWho wrote this
Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital
Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the legislation itself before it is published, and each article shows the date it was last checked.
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Written on 30 October 2026; it describes the law as FourWinds read it on that date. This is general information about how the rules work, not legal advice on your situation. Where you need a solicitor, we say so. How we check the law.