The best project management software

Our pick, and one fact decides it: Linear is the only tool in this group that publishes actual uptime numbers rather than a promise. Its status page reports US app availability at 99.93% and API at 100%, with EU app at 99.54%, for July to October 2026. Everyone else either commits to 99.9% exclusively on an enterprise contract or publishes a status page with no figures at all. For software you run your entire engineering process through, a vendor willing to publish the number it actually hit is making a different kind of statement from one willing to promise a number in a contract you cannot see. The free tier is structured unusually too: it caps issues rather than seats, so an unlimited number of people can be in it, which is the right shape for a team deciding whether to adopt. The trade-offs are real — no Linux desktop app, and SAML, SCIM and audit logs are enterprise-only on annual billing — and it is deliberately built for engineering rather than general work management.

The most generous free tier in the category by a distance: unlimited members and unlimited tasks, with 24/7 support included at no cost, which no other vendor here offers. It is also the cheapest paid entry tier. The constraint that bites is storage — 60 MB in total on free, which any team sharing files will exhaust almost immediately, and which is the real reason the free plan converts. Offline works in the web client, unusually, but only for viewing; you cannot edit. And the gap between monthly and annual billing is the widest here, with Business costing 58% more month to month.

The only tool here with genuine offline editing — read and write — on every plan including the free one, across desktop and mobile. For anyone who works on trains or planes that single property outweighs most feature comparisons. Its object model, where documents and databases are the same underlying thing, is also the most flexible in this group and the reason people build whole internal systems in it. Two limits to know: offline does not work in a browser at all, only the desktop and mobile apps, and databases truncate to the first 50 rows in some contexts, which surprises people who have built something large.

The most mature of these for cross-functional work that is not software engineering, and AI Studio — building AI automations — is available from the entry paid tier rather than being reserved for enterprise, which is unusual and genuinely useful. The free plan is the problem: exactly two users, which is not a team, and timeline and Gantt views, dashboards, forms and custom fields are all gated above it. That makes evaluating Asana properly a paid exercise, where several competitors let you try the real thing with your actual team first.

Highly configurable, and the four separately priced products mean you can buy only the part you need. What makes it hard to budget is that the things you will actually lean on are metered rather than included: automations and integrations are capped by actions per month, with the Standard tier allowing 250, and AI is sold as a monthly credit allowance that varies by tier. That is a usage model more than a seat model, and the cost of a workflow you rely on can move without you changing plan. The free tier is two seats and three boards.