Project management for 10 to 30 people: count the seat minimum, the administrator, and the exit.
At twenty people, the per-seat price is rarely what decides this. A seat minimum, a plan-gated export, and an unnamed administrator each cost more than the difference between two pricing tiers.
You leave with A twenty-seat price check, the seat minimum that breaks the comparison, export findings per product, and a conditional decision path
Who this is for, and who it is not for
This is for a team of roughly ten to thirty people choosing or replacing a shared project tracker: an agency, an operations group, a product team, a nonprofit programme office. It assumes one person will end up owning the configuration whether or not that is in their job description.
It is not for solo users or pairs, where every product here has a free tier and the decision is taste. It is not for enterprise portfolio management with resource forecasting and financial integration. And it is not a ranking — the sections below give conditions, not a winner.
The scenario, so the numbers mean something
- Twenty people who all need to create and be assigned work, so twenty paid seats. No viewer-only tier assumed.
- One part-time administrator drawn from those twenty, not an extra hire.
- Around sixty active projects a year and roughly four thousand work items in year one.
- Two external collaborators who need guest access to one project each.
- Annual billing at list price, taxes and add-ons excluded, over a three-year horizon.
Annual figures below are our own multiplication of each vendor’s displayed rate against this scenario. They are arithmetic, not quotes.
Current first-party pricing at twenty seats
Every rate comes from the vendor’s own pricing page, checked 4 September 2026.
| Product | Displayed pricing | Twenty-seat scenario |
|---|---|---|
| Asana ↗ | Personal at $0. Starter at $10.99 per user/month billed annually ($13.49 billed monthly). Advanced at $24.99 annually ($30.49 monthly). Enterprise is quote-only. | Twenty seats on Starter, annual rate: $2,637.60 a year. On Advanced: $5,997.60. |
| monday.com Work Management ↗ | Free for up to 2 seats. Basic at $9 per seat/month billed annually, Standard at $12, Pro at $19. Enterprise is quote-only. | Twenty seats on Standard, annual rate: $2,880 a year. On Pro: $4,560. |
| Jira Cloud ↗ | Atlassian states the Cloud Free plan is available for up to 10 users for Jira and Confluence, with 2 GB of storage and community support. Paid per-user rates are not printed; the page directs you to a pricing calculator. | Twenty people do not fit the Free plan. We do not publish a Jira annual figure, because we could not read one from a first-party page. |
| OpenProject Enterprise cloud ↗ | Basic at 5.95 EUR per user/month, Professional at 10.95 EUR, both with a 25-user minimum. Premium at 15.95 EUR with a 100-user minimum. Monthly billing adds 1.00 EUR per user. | A twenty-person team pays for twenty-five. Basic: 1,785 EUR a year. Professional: 3,285 EUR. |
| Plane ↗ | Free at $0 per seat/month, limited to 12 users. Pro at $6 per seat/month. Business at $13. Enterprise Grid is quote-only. | Twenty seats exceed the Free limit. Twenty on Pro at the monthly rate: $1,440 a year before the advertised annual discount. |
| Vikunja Cloud ↗ | Organization at 5 EUR per user/month, or 50 EUR per user when billed yearly. Self-hosting is free; Vikunja states it is and always will be open source and freely available. | Twenty users on the yearly Organization rate: 1,000 EUR a year. |
Asana, monday.com, and Plane display USD; OpenProject and Vikunja display EUR. Figures exclude tax, add-ons, migration, integrations, training, and internal labour.
The seat minimum that breaks the comparison
OpenProject’s pricing page sets a 25-user minimum on both its Basic and Professional plans, and a 100-user minimum on Premium (checked 4 September 2026). A twenty-person team therefore buys twenty-five seats: 1,785 EUR a year on Basic rather than the 1,428 EUR that a straight per-user multiplication would suggest. That is a 25 percent premium invisible in any table that lists only the per-user rate.
The same shape appears in reverse at the free tiers. Jira Cloud is free up to 10 users, Plane up to 12, monday.com up to 2 — so a team at 11 or 13 people is on a different price curve than a team one person smaller. Price your actual headcount, plus the two hires you already know about.
The open-source path, with the licence spelled out
Three of the options here publish an OSI-approved licence in their repository. Read the file, not a comparison chart, checked 4 September 2026:
- OpenProject ↗ — GNU General Public License, Version 3. The Community edition is free; Enterprise features are gated behind the subscription priced above.
- Plane ↗ — GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3.
- Vikunja ↗ — GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3.
Running any of them yourself is a real commitment. OpenProject’s own system requirements ask for a quad-core CPU at 2 GHz or better, 4096 MB of RAM, and 20 GB of free disk for a single server serving up to 200 users, on PostgreSQL 16 or above since OpenProject 16.0.0, with a Docker-based installation recommended. That is a modest server and a non-modest set of ongoing responsibilities.
The administrator cost most comparisons omit
A project tool is a shared vocabulary with a database attached. Somebody maintains the vocabulary. Put their hours in the total before you compare seat prices.
- Project templates, custom fields, and statuses — and the quarterly cleanup when three teams have invented three versions of “blocked”.
- Permissions and guest access, including the client who should see one project and currently sees four.
- Automations and integrations: the Slack notification, the calendar sync, the form intake, each with an owner and a failure mode.
- Reporting definitions. Somebody decides what “on track” counts as, or every dashboard means something different.
- Onboarding and offboarding: reassigning the work items of the person who left, before the sprint, not after.
- Licence hygiene: the seats still billed for contractors who finished in March.
- Self-hosted only: OS patching, PostgreSQL 16+ backups with tested restores, TLS, upgrades, and an on-call name.
In this scenario the two mainstream mid-tier options land within about $250 a year of each other — $2,637.60 for Asana Starter against $2,880 for monday.com Standard. Two administrator hours a month at a loaded rate is worth more than that difference, which is why the seat price is rarely the decision. The lifecycle cost estimator makes the comparison explicit with your own hourly numbers.
What the export actually gives you back
Each finding is from the vendor’s own documentation, checked 4 September 2026.
The pattern is consistent: rows leave, behaviour does not. Automations, rules, dashboards, permission models, and integration wiring are rebuilt by hand in the destination on every one of these products.
Test the export before you buy, not at renewal
- Trial the exact plan you intend to buy. Export capability is plan-gated and role-gated on most of these products.
- Build one representative project: fifty work items, subtasks, two custom fields, one dependency, attachments, a comment thread, one automation, and one guest with restricted access.
- Export as an administrator. Record format, elapsed time, and the privilege required.
- Open it without the vendor. Check that subtask parentage, dependencies, custom fields, and comment threads survived. Most will not; write down which.
- Import into a clean destination and ask whether someone could run next week’s work from it.
- List separately what must be rebuilt by hand: automations, dashboards, permissions, integrations. Estimate those hours and put them in the year-one budget.
The general procedure is the five-step exit test.
A decision path, with conditions
No product wins this in the abstract. If two conditions apply to you, run the export test on both and let the recorded rebuild hours decide.
What we could not verify, and therefore do not claim
- Jira Cloud per-user pricing. Atlassian publishes the Free plan limit of 10 users but routes paid pricing through a calculator, and the pricing page did not return figures to us. We will not print a number we could not read on Atlassian’s own page.
- monday.com export limits. Its support centre returned HTTP 403 to our request, so we make no claim about item caps, exportable views, or which plans can export. Check it yourself before signing.
- What Asana’s CSV export omits, stated by Asana. We list what its own page says the export contains and stop there.
- OpenProject prices in US dollars. The pricing page offers a currency switch; we read the euro figures and did not convert.
- Plane’s self-hosted Community edition feature boundary. The pricing page mentions self-hosting without enumerating what the community build includes.
- Any claim that one of these tools makes teams more productive. Nothing here was measured.
Sources, all first-party
All pages checked 4 September 2026. Prices, minimums, and export behaviour change without notice; open the links before you sign. Software Sausage takes no vendor payment for placement.
Put your own numbers in with the lifecycle cost estimator, get a free shortlist, or ask for implementation help.