Research

The PM tool paywall map

We read 8 vendors’ pricing pages and help docs and wrote down two things: where each free plan actually stops, and which tier you have to reach before each feature turns on. This is that record, published in full — the credits as well as the gates.

Jira, Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, Notion, Trello, Linear and Basecamp · Data checked July 2026; published August 2026.

How this was made

Every cell says how we know it.

Most feature-gating comparisons are a vibe. This one is a reading list: every cell below was either read on the vendor’s own page or found in the vendor’s own community, and the cell says which. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says that too, because a confident guess is how these tables go wrong.

We sell a project tool, so treat this the way you would any research published by an interested party: check the links. They all go to the vendors, not to us.

VERIFIED: Read on the vendor's own pricing page or help docs, and linked on the row.
REPORTED: Well-sourced community, forum or review evidence — usually the vendor's own feedback board — where the vendor publishes no number of its own.
NOT FOUND: We looked and the vendor doesn't publish it. We would rather leave a gap than guess at one.

Free-tier limits at a glance

What each vendor hands you for nothing, and the single limit that ends it. Seat caps and storage are the two that surprise people; the last column is the one that actually makes teams upgrade.

Free-plan seat caps, storage, automation allowances, history retention and the headline gap for eight project management tools, each row linking the vendor's own pricing page.
Tool	People on the free plan	Storage	Automations	History & audit	The gap that ends it
Jiraatlassian.com/software/jira/pricing	10 usersVERIFIED	2GB across the whole siteVERIFIED	100 runs a monthVERIFIED	No audit log at allVERIFIED	No guest access on the free planVERIFIED
Asanaasana.com/pricing	Personal — hard 2-user cap for accounts created on or after 12 Nov 2025VERIFIED	Unlimited in total, 100MB per fileReported: uploads well under that ceiling — in the 30–50MB range — are reported failingVERIFIED	No rules on the free planVERIFIED	No retention limit published for the free planNOT FOUND	No timeline, no dependencies, no custom fieldsVERIFIED
ClickUpclickup.com/pricing	Unlimited membersVERIFIED	60MB for the entire workspaceVERIFIED	100 actions a monthVERIFIED	A 1-day activity viewReported: read off search-indexed help-centre snippets; ClickUp's help site refuses direct fetchesREPORTED	About 100 lifetime uses of the Gantt view, then the free timeline is overVERIFIED
Monday.commonday.com/pricing	2 seats, 3 boardsVERIFIED	500MB in totalVERIFIED	None at allVERIFIED	Basic — an entry paid plan — keeps 7 days; the ladder runs to 5 years on EnterpriseVERIFIED	No guests and no viewers at allVERIFIED
Notionnotion.com/pricing	Unlimited for one person; a workspace with a second member meets a block ceiling of roughly 1,000REPORTED	5MB per file uploadVERIFIED	Slack notifications onlyREPORTED	7 days of page historyVERIFIED	Subtasks and dependencies are gated to PlusVERIFIED
Trellotrello.com/pricing	10 collaborators — and guests count toward the tenVERIFIED support.atlassian.com/trello	10MB per fileVERIFIED	250 Butler runs a monthVERIFIED	Unlimited activity log — the most generous free retention on this mapVERIFIED	10 boards per Workspace; past the cap, boards go view-onlyVERIFIED
Linearlinear.app/pricing	Unlimited membersVERIFIED	10MB per fileVERIFIED	Not metered like the spreadsheet tools; the Free limits are on tasks and teams insteadVERIFIED	Audit log is Enterprise-onlyVERIFIED	250 active issues, 2 teamsVERIFIED
Basecampbasecamp.com/pricing	20 usersVERIFIED	1GBVERIFIED	No rules engine to meter — Basecamp doesn't sell oneVERIFIED	No retention limit publishedNOT FOUND	1 projectVERIFIED

Every row links the vendor's own pricing page; a cell resting on a different page links that instead. Data checked July 2026; published August 2026. Spot something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.

Where the features unlock

The same eight tools, read the other way round: for each capability, the tier you have to reach before you are allowed to use it. Six capabilities, because these are the six teams tell us they assumed were included.

The plan tier at which guests, Gantt and timeline views, dashboards, automation quotas, SAML SSO and sprints first unlock, across eight project management tools.
Tool	Guests & clients	Gantt / timeline	Dashboards & reporting	Automation quota	SAML SSO	Sprints & velocity
Jiraatlassian.com/software/jira/pricing	No free guest role — anyone who needs access takes a licenseVERIFIED	A basic timeline is free; cross-project planning is PremiumVERIFIED	Free, capped at 20 gadgets; Analytics is EnterpriseVERIFIED	100 runs/mo on Free; paid limits scale with seat count. Rovo AI is credit-capped on topVERIFIED	Atlassian Guard at about +$4/user/mo, or Cloud EnterpriseVERIFIED	Free — sprints and velocity are in every planVERIFIED
Asanaasana.com/pricing	Guests outside your email domain are free on paid plans; the free plan caps the whole workspace at 2Reported: billing traps are reported where an organisation and a workspace disagree about who is a guestVERIFIED	Timeline starts at StarterVERIFIED	Reporting sits on Advanced — free Dashboards were moved into paid Portfolios in 2018VERIFIED	Rules are tier-gated, and AI credits meter separately at 50K/75K/200K by planReported: their pricing page now advertises unlimited rules from Starter up; the earlier 250-a-month company-wide cap drew sustained forum backlashVERIFIED	SSO on Advanced; full SAML is an Enterprise quote with no published priceVERIFIED	No sprint product — templates plus custom fields, so Starter in practice; time tracking is AdvancedVERIFIED
ClickUpclickup.com/pricing	Guest limits vary by plan, and guests granted edit rights have converted to billable seatsReported: one team's bill moved from $144 to roughly $1,250 a year after guests with edit rights converted, per ClickUp's own feedback boardVERIFIED	Gantt is on Free but metered; the Timeline view is BusinessVERIFIED	BusinessVERIFIED	5,000 actions/mo on Business, 250,000 on Enterprise — plus a separate AI credit meterVERIFIED	SAML is Enterprise-only with no published price; Business gets Google sign-inVERIFIED	Sprint points are metered to about 100 uses until BusinessVERIFIED
Monday.commonday.com/pricing	3 free viewers on Standard, then four per paid seat; unlimited from Pro; none below StandardREPORTED	Gantt on paid plans; the critical path needs ProVERIFIED	1 dashboard board on Standard → 5 on Pro → 50 on EnterpriseVERIFIED	250 automation + 250 integration actions/mo on Standard; 25,000 on ProVERIFIED	Enterprise-only, no published price — a sales callVERIFIED	A separate paid product — monday dev, from about $9 a seatVERIFIED
Notionnotion.com/pricing	10 guests on Free; limits climb with the tierVERIFIED	Timeline view is free; dependencies are PlusVERIFIED	Thin analytics only — there is no dashboard product to gateREPORTED	Automations are tier-gated, and Custom Agents bill usage-style at about $10 per 1,000 creditsVERIFIED	SAML starts at BusinessVERIFIED	Templates onlyREPORTED
Trellotrello.com/pricing	Single-board guests; on Free they count toward the 10-person capVERIFIED support.atlassian.com/trello	Timeline starts at Premium — and there are no dependencies at any tierVERIFIED	The Dashboard view starts at PremiumVERIFIED	250 runs/mo Free, 1,000 on Standard; Premium is sold as unlimited, with an undocumented ceiling teams have hitReported: the ceiling teams describe hitting is around 10,000 operations a month, with no usage meter anywhere in the product to watch it approachVERIFIED	Atlassian Guard, about +$4/user/mo — or Enterprise, 50-seat minimumVERIFIED	Power-Ups onlyVERIFIED
Linearlinear.app/pricing	Bill as full seats — no read-only role, and guests themselves start at BusinessVERIFIED	No Gantt at all — cycles instead, and they're freeVERIFIED	Insights on Business; Dashboards on EnterpriseVERIFIED	No run quota — the capability is gated instead of meteredVERIFIED	Enterprise-only, no add-on path, no published priceVERIFIED	Free — cycles ship in every planVERIFIED
Basecampbasecamp.com/pricing	Free on every tier, genuinely — the fairest guest policy on this listVERIFIED	Never — an on-record product refusal, not a gateVERIFIED	Every plan, including the free oneVERIFIED	No automation builder to meter; Basecamp doesn't sell oneVERIFIED	Not sold at any price — their docs suggest Google sign-in with 2FAVERIFIED	Never — Shape Up instead of sprintsVERIFIED

The patterns

Four things the map makes obvious

1. The SSO tax is nearly universal

Logging in securely is a paid upgrade almost everywhere on this map. 4 of the 8 tools won't publish a price for SAML at all — you book a call and negotiate an Enterprise contract to use your own identity provider. Of the 3 that do publish one, none includes it in the plan you would otherwise buy:

Jira — Atlassian Guard at about +$4/user/mo, or Cloud Enterprise
Standard → Standard + Atlassian Guard Standard: +51% per seat over their own entry plan.
Notion — SAML starts at Business
Plus → Business: +100% per seat over their own entry plan.
Trello — Atlassian Guard, about +$4/user/mo — or Enterprise, 50-seat minimum
Standard → Standard + Atlassian Guard Standard: +80% per seat over their own entry plan.
Basecamp — Not sold at any price — their docs suggest Google sign-in with 2FA
No uplift to quote, because there is nothing to buy. For a security review that asks for SAML, that is a hard stop rather than a price.

CISA has said SSO belongs in base offerings rather than in a premium tier. Not one of the 8 tools on this map puts SAML in the plan a normal team buys. Basecamp is the only one that never charges for it, and only because it never sells it.

2. Your own past is sold back to you a tier at a time

Retention is the quietest gate in the category, because you only discover it after the window you needed has closed. Jira’s free plan has no audit log at all. ClickUp’s shows one day of activity. Notion keeps seven days of page history. Linear’s audit log is Enterprise-only. And Monday sells retention as a ladder you climb one plan at a time:

Basic7 days — on a paid plan
Standard6 months
Pro1 year
Enterprise5 years

Seven days on a plan you are already paying for is the number worth sitting with. Trello is the counter-example and deserves the credit: an unlimited activity log, on the free plan, for nothing.

3. “Unlimited” usually means unlimited with a meter

ClickUp’s free Gantt view runs for about a hundred lifetime uses and then stops — not a hundred a month, a hundred ever. Sprint points are metered the same way until Business. Trello Premium is sold as unlimited automation and teams report a ceiling around ten thousand operations a month, with no meter anywhere in the product to watch it approach. Monday’s Standard plan allows 250 automation actions a month and Pro allows 25,000: a hundredfold jump for roughly 58% more per seat.

A meter you can’t see is worse than a cap you can. The cap tells you where you stand; the invisible meter only tells you when the work stops.

4. Storage is the free plan’s real ceiling

Seat caps get the attention; storage ends more free plans. ClickUp gives a free workspace unlimited members and 60MB to share between all of them — one screen recording. Notion caps uploads at 5MB a file, Trello and Linear at 10MB. The whole field, smallest first:

ClickUp60MB for the whole workspace
Notion5MB per file
Trello10MB per file
Linear10MB per file
Monday.com500MB in total
Basecamp1GB
Jira2GB

Asana is the outlier in the other direction — unlimited total storage with a nominal 100MB per file — though uploads well under that ceiling are reported failing.

And the generous marks

A map that only finds fault is a map nobody should trust. These are the places where a vendor on this list is doing better than the field, and each one is in the tables above too:

Trello — an unlimited activity log on the free plan, when most of the others ration history by tier.
Basecamp — dashboards on every plan and genuinely free clients on every plan — the fairest guest policy in the set.
Asana — free guests from outside your domain on every paid plan.
Linear — cycles free in every plan, and no run meter on anything.
Jira — sprints and velocity free, including on the free plan.

Disclosure

Where Sahnga sits on this map

We built the tool that this research says we should: every feature in every plan, and no tier above the one you're on. The first person who creates or edits work is free, every one after that is $5 a month — flat, with no upsells. Viewers, commenters, guests and clients are unlimited and never counted. Nothing meters, nothing counts down, and full history is on every plan including Free.

When SAML and SSO land, they're on every plan — Free included — at no extra cost. We will never charge you for logging in securely.

Methodology & corrections

How to check this yourself

Every free-plan and feature-gate claim above was read against the 8 vendors' own pricing pages and help documentation, then cross-checked against the audited price dataset behind our comparison pages. Data checked July 2026; published August 2026. Where the two passes disagreed — and they did, on Jira's guest allowance and on an unpublishable SSO uplift for Asana — the later audit won and the earlier figure was dropped rather than published with a hedge.

The evidence labels are the honest part of this page, so they are worth restating plainly:

VERIFIED: Read on the vendor's own pricing page or help docs, and linked on the row.
REPORTED: Well-sourced community, forum or review evidence — usually the vendor's own feedback board — where the vendor publishes no number of its own.
NOT FOUND: We looked and the vendor doesn't publish it. We would rather leave a gap than guess at one.

Two limits on what you are reading. Review aggregators blocked our fetches, so the community evidence rests on vendor-owned forums and feedback boards, app-store reviews and independent write-ups — arguably stronger sources, but narrower ones. And pricing is perishable: these are the terms as published in July 2026, and vendors move them without notice.

Spot something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it. We would rather correct a row than defend it — tell us what we got wrong. Prices and gates are re-audited on a schedule, and the two dates at the top of this page move when they are.

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