The mid-size UK marketing agency we worked with had been on Monday.com for four years, paying £15/user/month for 22 seats. That's £3,960/year. They used Monday for a single thing: tracking which client campaigns were live, which were in production, and which were waiting on client sign-off. Three columns on a board. The other 90% of Monday's features had never been touched. The team could have done the same job on Trello Free, or on a single shared Google Sheet, with no functional difference.
This is the typical state of project management software adoption. Teams pick a tool because it was recommended, set up workflows that match the tool's defaults, then quietly use 10-20% of the feature set forever after. The premium tiers exist mostly to capture the teams that don't realise their actual usage doesn't justify them.
For most UK teams the right answer in 2026 isn't a different premium PM tool; it's downgrading to the cheapest tier that actually does what you use. For most small teams, free tiers genuinely work. For mid-sized teams, the differences between Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Notion are smaller than the marketing suggests, and the right pick depends more on what tools you already use than on the PM tool's specific feature set.
What you're actually trying to do
Before picking a tool, the genuine first question: what's the actual work that the PM tool needs to support? The category covers four genuinely different needs:
Visual status tracking across multiple projects. Looking at a board and seeing which projects are in flight, which are waiting on sign-off, which are blocked. Trello, Monday, Asana boards, and Linear all do this; Trello does it most simply.
Task management with dependencies and timelines. Knowing that task B can't start until task A is done, that the project needs to ship by a specific date, that resources are over-allocated in week 3. Asana, Monday, ClickUp all do this; Microsoft Project did it 25 years ago in more depth than most teams need.
Document-based project management. Each project has a document with goals, decisions, status updates, and embedded task lists. Notion is built around this; Confluence (Atlassian) does it differently; Google Docs plus a status spreadsheet does it without specialist software.
Issue tracking for software engineering. Bugs, features, incidents, PRs, all linked together with version control and automation. Linear and Jira are the dominant choices; GitHub Projects covers smaller teams.
The mistake teams make is picking a tool optimised for one of these and then using it for another. A team using Notion for visual status tracking finds it awkward; a team using Linear for general project management finds it constraining. Match the tool to the work.
The right tool by team size
For most UK teams, team size is the largest single factor in what makes sense.
Solo or 2-3 people. Free tier of Notion, Trello, ClickUp, Asana, or Linear. All of them have free tiers that cover small teams indefinitely. The choice between them is mostly aesthetic and habit-driven; pick the one whose interface you actually enjoy using. Don't pay anything yet.
Small team (4-10 people). Free tiers still mostly work. Asana Free supports up to 10 users. ClickUp Free's limits are generous. Notion Free for personal-plus-shared use covers small collaborative teams. The £6-£10/user/month upgrade buys advanced features (Gantt views, custom fields, deeper integrations) that small teams sometimes don't need.
Mid-size team (10-30 people). Paid tiers start to earn their keep. Asana Premium at £10/user/month, Monday Standard at £10/user/month, ClickUp Unlimited at £5-£8/user/month, or Notion Plus at £8/user/month. The difference between these is mostly the visual approach and the integration ecosystem.
Larger team (30+). Enterprise tiers with proper admin controls, SSO, audit logs, advanced permissions. Asana Business or Monday Pro at £15-£24/user/month. The pricing gets significant; the savings from picking carefully matter.
The pattern: don't pay for the team-of-50 tier when you have a team of 6. The features you'd be paying for don't apply.
The major tools, briefly differentiated
Asana. The default choice for general project management at most UK organisations. Mature product, strong integrations, sensible defaults for project work. Free tier is good for up to 10 users; Premium at £10/user/month adds Gantt views, custom fields, advanced reporting. Best for teams whose work fits the "project with tasks and a deadline" model.
Monday.com. Visually-led project management with broad customisation. Strong with creative agencies and operations teams that want to model work in non-standard ways. Free tier is limited; Standard at £10/user/month is the typical entry. Best for teams that benefit from highly visual status tracking and don't mind the interface being more colourful than corporate norms.
ClickUp. The "do everything" PM tool with the most generous free tier in the category. Free Forever covers a lot; Unlimited at £5-£8/user/month covers most small businesses comprehensively. Sometimes overwhelming because it has so many features; sometimes the right answer because it bundles task management, document collaboration, time tracking, and reporting into one tool.
Notion. The document-and-database hybrid that's particularly good for teams whose work is research, content, knowledge management, or anything where documents and tasks are tightly linked. Free for personal-and-shared use; Plus at £8/user/month for small teams. The right answer for teams whose work is more "writing and thinking" than "tasks and deadlines".
Trello. The original Kanban tool, owned by Atlassian. Free tier covers most simple uses comprehensively; Standard at £5/user/month adds advanced features. Best for teams that genuinely just want a visual Kanban board without the complexity of larger PM platforms.
Linear. The cult-favourite among software engineering teams. Fast, clean, opinionated about how engineering work flows. £8-£15/user/month. Best for software teams; awkward for non-engineering work.
Microsoft Planner / Microsoft Loop. Bundled into Microsoft 365 subscriptions, which most UK organisations already have. Decent for basic project tracking, particularly for organisations standardised on Microsoft. Best when "good enough" beats "perfect" because the cost is already paid.
Google Sheets / Google Tables. Surprisingly capable for simple project tracking. Free for any organisation already using Google Workspace. Best for teams who want to model their own workflow in a spreadsheet rather than fitting a tool's opinionated structure.
The integration question
The PM tool that makes sense often depends on what other tools the team already uses, because the integration ecosystem matters more than the PM tool's standalone feature set.
Microsoft 365 organisations. Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Loop are bundled in. Microsoft Project is available for substantial project work. Notion, Asana, Monday, ClickUp all integrate but the path-of-least-resistance is the bundled tools.
Google Workspace organisations. Asana and ClickUp have particularly clean Google integrations. Google's own Sheets-and-Tasks combination works for simpler use cases.
Slack-heavy organisations. Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Linear all have decent Slack integrations. Notion's is somewhat lighter.
GitHub-centric engineering organisations. Linear or Jira plus GitHub integration. Sometimes GitHub Projects directly, which is free and integrates natively.
Salesforce or HubSpot CRM organisations. Asana and Monday have the strongest CRM integrations.
Pick a PM tool whose integration ecosystem matches the rest of the stack. The tool that's marginally better in isolation but doesn't integrate cleanly with everything else loses on net.
Free tier reality check
The free tiers of the major PM tools, briefly:
Asana Free. Up to 10 users, list and board views, basic features. Genuinely useful for small teams; the limit hits at growth.
ClickUp Free Forever. Unlimited users with feature limits (storage caps, fewer integrations). Generous; many small teams could stay here permanently.
Notion Free. Unlimited pages for personal use with limited shared blocks. Best for small teams or solo use; the team features need a paid plan above 5-10 users.
Trello Free. Unlimited boards and members, limited Power-Ups. Ample for visual Kanban work.
Linear Free. Up to 250 issues for small teams. Engineering-focused.
Microsoft Planner. Free with any Microsoft 365 subscription, which most UK organisations have.
For most UK teams of fewer than 10 people: one of these free tiers is genuinely sufficient. Pay only when you've hit a free-tier limit that actually matters or need a feature the free tier doesn't include.
The "AI features" question
Most major PM tools have added AI features in 2024-2026: Notion AI, Asana Intelligence, ClickUp Brain, Monday AI. The pattern is similar across them — summarising long discussions, generating draft content, suggesting task assignments, automating routine workflows.
The honest assessment: for most teams these features add modest convenience but rarely justify the premium tier on their own. They're worth using if you're already on the relevant tier; they're not worth upgrading specifically to access.
The one exception: Notion AI, for teams that genuinely use Notion as a knowledge base, can produce material time savings on document drafting and Q&A retrieval. £6-£10/user/month for Notion AI is sometimes worth it for content-heavy teams.
For most other teams: ignore the AI marketing and pick the tool based on the underlying PM features.
When to switch tools
The cost of switching PM tools is substantially higher than people anticipate. Migration of historical data is awkward, team retraining takes weeks, the new tool's quirks have to be learned. Switching costs roughly 10-30 hours of team-wide effort, plus ongoing inefficiency for 1-3 months.
The cases where switching is worth it:
The current tool fundamentally doesn't fit the work. A team using Linear for marketing campaigns is forcing the wrong tool; switching to Asana or Monday is worth the migration cost.
The team is paying significantly more than necessary. A team of 12 paying £24/user/month for Asana Business when Asana Premium at £10 would cover their actual usage is leaving £2,000/year on the table; the switch (downgrade) pays back in months.
The team has outgrown the free tier and the free-to-paid jump for the current tool is worse than switching to a competitor's pricing. ClickUp's Unlimited at £5-£8 is meaningfully cheaper than Asana Premium at £10; for some teams that switch makes sense.
The cases where switching isn't worth it:
The current tool is mildly annoying but functional. The marginal benefit of a slightly better tool rarely beats the migration cost.
A new tool has launched with a feature you'd like. Wait six months; either the existing tool will add the feature or the new tool will have shaken out its early bugs.
The team is in the middle of an active project. Don't introduce migration overhead during a delivery push.
What I'd actually do
For most UK teams under 10 people: stay on free tiers indefinitely. Asana Free, ClickUp Free, Trello Free, or Notion Free, picked by team preference and existing tooling. Total cost: £0/month.
For UK teams 10-30 people: ClickUp Unlimited at £5-£8/user/month or Asana Premium at £10/user/month, picked by interface preference. £60-£300/month total for the team.
For UK teams 30+ people with serious project complexity: Asana Business at £24/user/month or Monday Pro at £15-£20/user/month, with the assumption that proper admin features and reporting earn the premium.
For software engineering teams: Linear at £8/user/month, accepting that it's optimised for engineering and will be awkward for adjacent non-engineering work.
For teams whose work is genuinely document- and knowledge-driven: Notion at £8-£14/user/month.
For teams already on Microsoft 365 with simple needs: Microsoft Planner, free with the existing subscription. Don't add a third-party tool unless the bundled Microsoft option genuinely fails to do the job.
The single biggest waste in the PM software category is paying for premium tiers on usage that doesn't need them. Audit what your team actually uses for one month; downgrade to the cheapest tier that covers the actual usage; revisit annually. The savings, across a 5-year period, often run into thousands of pounds for mid-sized teams.
Affiliate disclosure: Morningfold has affiliate partnerships with Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp, Notion, and Linear. See editorial standards.