The best project management software for small teams in 2026

Short answer

Linear is the best project management tool for a small team in 2026 at EUR 9.20 per user per month, because its free plan is the only one here with no member cap and its paid entry tier is cheaper than Asana, Notion and ClickUp's monthly rate. If you want to pay nothing for a year, Jira is the answer: free forever for 10 users. If you refuse per-seat billing, Basecamp Pro covers up to 10 people for a flat USD 79, which is EUR 7.27 per head. Asana has the weakest free plan in this comparison, capped at 2 users, and Height's website did not respond at all when we checked.

What small teams actually pay

Entry paid tier, per user per month, annual billing, converted at 1 USD = 0.92 EUR where the vendor prices in dollars.

Two things fall out of that table. Basecamp is the cheapest way to cover five people, because it does not charge per seat. And the spread between the cheapest and the most expensive per-seat tool is only EUR 2.31 per person per month, so for a team of five the entire price difference across this market is about EUR 11 a month. Price is not the deciding factor. The free tier and the shape of the tool are.

What the free tiers really allow

This is where the differences are brutal, and where vendors are least forthcoming.

Jira's free tier is in a different league: ten people, forever, with a real issue tracker. Linear's is the cleverest, because unlimited members means you can put the whole company in and only the 250-issue ceiling pushes you to pay. ClickUp's 60 MB is the trap in this table, because the marketing emphasises unlimited tasks and unlimited members while the storage number means you cannot attach a handful of design files.

Asana's 2-user Personal plan deserves a sentence of its own. A free plan for two people is not a free plan for a team, it is a single-user trial with a colleague attached, and any article that calls it "generous" has not read the pricing page.

The ranking

1. Linear, EUR 9.20 per user per month

Free for unlimited members with 2 teams and 250 issues, Basic at EUR 9.20 for 5 teams and unlimited issues, Business at EUR 14.72 for unlimited teams, private teams, guests and Insights. Enterprise is annual only.

Linear wins because it is fast enough that people actually use it, and because the free plan lets you onboard everyone before you decide. The cost is rigidity: Linear has opinions about cycles, projects and initiatives, and a marketing team trying to run a content calendar in it will fight the tool. Triage, issue sync, diffs and MCP access are included on every plan, which is unusually generous at the bottom of the range.

2. Jira, EUR 7.80 per user per month

Free forever for 10 users with 2 GB of storage. Standard is EUR 7.80 per user per month and Premium EUR 14.32, both converted from the unit prices Atlassian publishes on its own pricing page.

For a software team of up to ten people, Jira at zero euros is objectively the strongest offer in this market, and nothing else comes close. What you pay instead is configuration time, and that bill is real: Jira will let you build workflows, screens and permission schemes that nobody on a five-person team has the hours to maintain. Automation on the free tier is only 150 steps a month for the whole site, which is the first wall most teams hit.

3. Notion, EUR 9.50 per member per month

Plus at EUR 9.50 and Business at EUR 19.50, priced in euros by Notion itself, with up to 20 percent off on annual billing.

Notion is the right answer when the tracker and the documentation have to be the same product. A five-person team that writes specs, keeps meeting notes and shares client-facing pages replaces two subscriptions with one. The free plan is where it gets thin for teams: a block limit, 5 MB file uploads, 10 guests and 7 days of page history. Notion AI credits are billed separately, at USD 10 per 1,000 credits for custom agents.

4. Basecamp, flat EUR 26.68 per month and up

Personal is free for 1 project and 3 users. Freelancer is USD 29 for 3 projects and up to 5 users, Pro is USD 79 for 8 projects and up to 10 users, Pro Plus is USD 99 for 12 projects and 15 users, and Pro Unlimited is USD 199 a month billed annually for unlimited projects and unlimited users. There is a 30-day trial.

The flat fee is the feature. Hiring does not change your bill, and Pro at USD 79 for ten people is EUR 7.27 per head, cheaper per person than any per-seat tool here. The constraint is project count, not people: three projects on Freelancer and eight on Pro. There are no sprints, no cycles and no dependency management, so an engineering team will outgrow it, and time tracking only appears at Pro Plus.

5. monday.com, EUR 9 per seat per month

Free for 2 seats with 3 boards and 3 docs. Basic EUR 9, Standard EUR 12, Pro EUR 19, all per seat per month billed annually, priced in euros, with 1,000, 2,000 and 3,000 AI credits included respectively.

monday is the easiest tool here to hand to a sales or operations team, and including AI credits in the seat price rather than metering them separately is the right call. Two caveats: the free plan at 2 seats is a demo, and paid plans are sold in seat blocks starting at three, so a two-person company pays for three.

6. ClickUp, EUR 8.28 per user per month

Free Forever with unlimited tasks and unlimited members but 60 MB of storage. Core EUR 8.28 per user per month billed yearly, Business USD 17, MAX USD 100, Enterprise custom. Annual billing saves 33 percent against monthly, the biggest annual discount in this comparison.

Core is remarkable value on paper: unlimited storage, custom fields and forms at EUR 8.28. The reasons it sits at six are the 60 MB free-tier storage, which makes the free plan a trial in disguise, and interface density, which is a genuine onboarding cost when half your team is not technical. Brain credits are pooled per user and metered beyond the allowance at USD 10 per 10,000.

7. Asana, EUR 10.11 per user per month

Starter at EUR 10.11 per user per month billed annually, USD 13.49 monthly, Advanced at EUR 22.99 annually. Personal is free for 2 users.

The product is good, particularly for cross-functional coordination across marketing, operations and delivery, and unlimited free guests on Starter is genuinely useful for client work. It ranks seventh on buying terms, not quality: it is the most expensive entry tier here, monthly billing costs 23 percent more than annual, and the free plan is capped at 2 users so you cannot trial it as a team without paying.

8. Height, price on request

On 11 November 2026, height.app did not respond to requests from two independent clients, although the domain still resolves in DNS. We cannot quote a price, confirm the feature set, or verify that the product is still sold. Height 2.0's autonomous project-tool concept was the most original idea in this category, which makes this worse rather than better. Do not migrate a team onto a product whose vendor site is unreachable.

Which project management tool should a five-person team choose?

Three honest paths.

If you build software, start on Jira's free plan, because ten seats for nothing is unbeatable, and move to Linear when the configuration tax annoys you more than the migration will. If your work is documents as much as tasks, buy Notion Plus at EUR 9.50 and delete the second subscription you were about to buy. If you hate per-seat billing on principle, buy Basecamp Pro at USD 79 and stop thinking about it.

Avoid two patterns. Do not pick a tool because the free plan says "unlimited tasks", check the storage and the automation limits first. And do not buy annual on month one: every vendor here except Linear Enterprise and Basecamp Pro Unlimited offers monthly billing, and the 20 to 33 percent annual discount is worth less than finding out in week three that the tool does not fit.

If your team is also choosing how the code gets written, we ranked that market in the best AI coding tools, and the full Linear profile with every tier is at Linear.

Vendors: these prices were read from your own pricing pages on 11 November 2026. If a plan has changed, or if you run Height, send the primary source through get listed and we will date the correction.