Best Free Project Management Software for Startups
If the goal is to put the whole company in one tool for $0, Freedcamp is the answer this table gives: its free plan has no cap on users, projects or tasks, and storage is unlimited under a fair use policy. ClickUp also lets unlimited users track unlimited tasks, but the entire workspace shares 60 MB, so attachments end the free ride before hiring does.
For a team that ships code, Jira and Shortcut are the stronger free starts, each holding up to 10 users with 2 GB and 5 GB of storage. Beyond that, the thirteen tools differ less on features than on which wall arrives first. Some stop at two people, some stop at a count of boards, issues or records, and a few stop at a few megabytes of files.
Our picks
- Everyone in, no seats to count: Freedcamp. Unlimited users, projects and tasks, with storage under a fair use policy; the catch is a 10MB ceiling on any single file.
- An engineering team of up to ten: Jira. Ten users, unlimited projects and work items, 2 GB of storage, and backlog, timeline and calendar views without paying.
- A small team that expects to pay soon: Zoho Projects. Five users, three projects and 5 GB free, and the Premium tier after that is US$4 per user/month billed annually.
- Running it on your own servers: Plane. Open source and self-hostable with no per-seat cost, and the hosted free plan covers up to 12 users.
At a glance
| Option | Free plan team size | Free plan limit | Free plan storage | Cheapest paid plan | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 10 userssource | Up to 10 boards per Workspacesource | Unlimited storage, 10MB max per filesource | $5 per user/month billed annually ($6 monthly), Standard plansource | Any teamsource | |
| Up to 2 userssource | Unlimited tasks and projectssource | Unlimited storage, 100MB max per filesource | $10.99 per user/month billed annually ($13.49 monthly), Starter plansource | Any teamsource | |
| Unlimited userssource | Unlimited taskssource | 60 MBsource | $7 per user/month billed yearly ($10 monthly), Unlimited plansource | Any teamsource | |
| Unlimited pages and blocks for one person, limited for teams of 2+source | 5 MB max per file uploadsource | $10 per member/month, Plus plansource | Docs and databasessource | ||
| Up to 10 userssource | Unlimited goals, projects, tasks and formssource | 2 GB file storagesource | $7.91 per user/month, Standard plan (estimated)source | ||
| Unlimited userssource | 250 issuessource | $10 per user/month billed yearly, Basic plansource | Software teamssource | ||
| Up to 2 userssource | Up to 3 boardssource | $9 per seat/month billed annually, Basic plansource | Any teamsource | ||
| Up to 5 userssource | 3 projectssource | 5 GBsource | US$4 per user/month billed annually, Premium plansource | Any teamsource | |
| Up to 5 userssource | Up to 5 projectssource | 100 MBsource | $9.99 per user/month billed yearly, Basics plansource | Client worksource | |
| Up to 5 userssource | 1,000 records per basesource | 1 GB of attachments per basesource | $20 per user/month billed annually, Team plansource | Docs and databasessource | |
| Up to 10 userssource | 5 GBsource | $8.50 per user/month billed yearly, Team plansource | Software teamssource | ||
| Unlimited userssource | Unlimited projects and taskssource | Unlimited storage under a fair use policysource | $1.49 per user/month billed annually ($2.49 monthly), Pro plansource | Any teamsource | |
| Up to 12 userssource | $6 per seat per month, Pro plansource | Any teamsource |
Free plans that stop at two people
Asana and monday.com are two of the most-searched names for this kind of tool, and both cap their free plans at 2 users. Asana is otherwise unrestricted inside that pair, with unlimited tasks and projects, so it suits two founders before the first hire. monday.com adds a limit of 3 boards on top of the two seats. A third teammate costs $10.99 per user/month billed annually on Asana's Starter plan, or $9 per seat/month on monday.com's Basic plan.
The middle band is five people (Zoho Projects, Teamwork.com, Airtable) or ten (Trello, Jira, Shortcut), with Plane at twelve. Airtable's five are editors; read-only viewers are unlimited. Notion sets no seat number at all. Once a second member joins, it limits the blocks the workspace can hold instead.
Limits that arrive before headcount does
Linear lets the whole team in but caps the workspace at 250 issues and two teams, so a startup shipping steadily runs out by volume. Airtable's binding limit is 1,000 records per base, which is quick to reach for hiring pipelines or inventory. Trello allows 10 boards per Workspace, and Zoho Projects allows 3 projects.
Storage is the quieter trap. ClickUp's 60 MB and Teamwork.com's 100 MB are shared across the whole account, while Trello and Freedcamp keep total storage open but refuse any file over 10MB, and Notion stops single uploads at 5 MB. A team trading design files will feel those numbers long before it feels a user cap.
What outgrowing free will cost per person
The first paid tier runs from $1.49 per user/month billed annually on Freedcamp to $20 per user/month on Airtable's Team plan. Most of the rest cluster between $5 and $11: Trello at $5 billed annually, Plane at $6 per seat, ClickUp at $7 billed yearly, Shortcut at $8.50, Teamwork.com at $9.99, Notion and Linear at $10. Jira's $7.91 is an estimate from Atlassian's own calculator and moves with team size, so treat it as a ballpark rather than a list price.
The options in detail
Trello
Trello is the simplest thing on this list: drag cards across columns and you have a project. The free plan carries a real team (ten collaborators per Workspace, unlimited cards) and the ten-board ceiling is generous for a startup running a handful of workflows. The catch is views: calendar, timeline, table and dashboard all sit behind Premium, so a free Trello board stays a board. Teams usually outgrow it when they need dependencies or reporting rather than when they hit a limit.
Asana
Asana is a polished, widely used work tracker, but its free tier is now the tightest of the mainstream options: two people. Within that it is unrestricted, with unlimited tasks and projects and list, board and calendar views, so it works well for a founding pair before the first hires. A third teammate means paying, and Asana's entry price is among the higher ones here. Worth choosing on the assumption that you will pay for it, not as a free tool.
ClickUp
ClickUp has the most generous headline free plan here: unlimited members and unlimited tasks, which no other hosted option matches at this price. The real limit is storage, at 60MB for the whole workspace, so attachments push you to pay long before headcount does. It is also the densest interface of the group, with docs, chat, whiteboards and sprints layered into one app, which suits teams that want to consolidate tools and frustrates teams that just want a task list.
Notion
Notion is a documents-and-databases workspace that many startups run projects inside rather than a project tracker as such. Free is effectively unlimited for one person, but the moment a second member joins the workspace, block usage is capped, which is the limit teams actually hit. File uploads are also capped at 5MB each, so it is a poor home for design assets. Best when your bottleneck is scattered knowledge (specs, meeting notes, a roadmap page) rather than task tracking.
Jira
Jira's free plan is the most substantial one aimed at engineering teams: ten users, unlimited projects and work items, 2GB of storage, and backlog, board, timeline and calendar views without paying. It expects more setup than the others here, and its vocabulary (work items, workflows, sprints) is built around software delivery, which is either exactly right or entirely wrong for your team. Startups that already use it for issue tracking tend to stay; teams that are not shipping code usually find it heavy. The eleventh hire is what forces the upgrade.
Linear
Linear is an opinionated issue tracker for product and engineering teams, known for being fast and for keeping its feature set narrow on purpose. Its free plan is shaped unusually: everyone on the team can join, but the workspace is capped at 250 issues and two teams, so it runs out by volume rather than by headcount. That makes it a fine place to start and a poor place to stay once you are shipping steadily. Teams that like it tend to like it a lot and pay early.
monday.com
monday.com is a colourful, highly configurable work platform, but its free tier is the thinnest here: two seats and three boards, which is closer to an extended trial than a plan you can run a company on. Everything that makes the product interesting (automations, dashboards, timeline views, guests) begins on paid tiers. Consider it if you expect to buy quickly and want the free plan only to check the fit.
Zoho Projects
Zoho Projects gives away more of a conventional project tool than anyone else at this size: five users, three projects and 5GB of storage, with subtasks, timesheets-adjacent basics and mobile apps included. Its upgrade is also by far the cheapest real one on this list, so growing out of the free plan is not a budget event. The trade-off is the wider Zoho ecosystem: the interface feels of a piece with Zoho's other apps, and integrations lean towards its own suite rather than the tools startups usually already run.
Teamwork.com
Teamwork.com is built around billable client work rather than internal projects, so it carries time tracking, client users and per-client organisation as first-class ideas. For an agency-shaped startup that matters more than any feature count. The free plan is a genuine five-person, five-project workspace with Gantt and table views, but 100MB of storage across the account is small, and anything to do with budgets, invoicing or capacity planning starts on paid tiers.
Airtable
Airtable is a relational database with project-shaped views bolted on, which is the right tool when what you are tracking is structured records (candidates, inventory, content, customers) rather than tasks. The free plan allows five editing collaborators and unlimited read-only viewers, and its binding limit is 1,000 records per base, which arrives quickly for anything operational. Its upgrade is the most expensive on this list. Choose it for flexibility, not for project management conventions.
Shortcut
Shortcut is issue tracking for software teams that find Jira heavy, with kanban boards, iterations, a roadmap and GitHub, Slack and Figma integrations available on the free tier. Ten users is a real engineering team, and unlike Linear's free plan there is no cap on how much work you track. Reporting depth, work-in-progress limits and automations are the things reserved for paid plans. A strong default for a technical startup that has outgrown a board but is not ready to configure Jira.
Freedcamp
Freedcamp is the only tool here whose free plan is unlimited on every axis that usually forces an upgrade: users, projects, tasks and total storage, subject to a fair use policy. For a startup that wants everyone in one workspace without counting seats, nothing else on this list competes. The trade-offs are a dated interface and a 10MB cap on any single file, and its paid tiers exist mostly to add integrations, templates and larger uploads rather than core features.
Plane
Plane is an open-source project tracker that can be self-hosted, which is the reason to look at it: a startup with an engineer to spare can run it on its own infrastructure with no per-seat cost at all. The hosted free plan covers twelve users with cycles, modules, multiple layouts and project pages, and its paid tier is cheaper per seat than any incumbent here. It is younger than the rest, so expect a smaller integration ecosystem and rougher edges around the corners of the product.
How we researched this
A tool needed a free plan its own pricing page describes, and famous names stayed even when that plan is thin, because the useful thing for a founder to learn is that Asana and monday.com are not the free choice. Wrike was dropped because its pricing page gives no free-tier user count, storage or project limit. Bitrix24's page showed no plan detail, Taskade no longer describes its free tier in project-management terms, GitHub Projects states its limits in repositories rather than projects, OpenProject's page does not state its Community edition's limits, and Basecamp no longer offers a free plan. Notion and Airtable are included as adjacent tools that startups run projects in anyway.
Empty cells are limits the vendor does not publish: no storage figure for Linear, monday.com or Plane's free plans, no work cap for Shortcut or Plane, no seat number for Notion, and no audience for Jira, which Atlassian now pitches as general work management. Free tiers shift often. As of September 2026 Asana's free plan was 2 users, where many older roundups still say 10 or 15, and ClickUp's storage was 60 MB rather than the 100MB often quoted, so reread the free-plan limits before you move a team's work into one of these.