Read the pricing page for the limits, not the features
Every platform in this category has tasks, boards, timelines and dashboards. Feature lists rarely decide anything. What decides it is where the paywall sits: automation runs per month, guest seats, minimum seat counts, dependency and portfolio views, and whether single sign-on is bundled or held back for the enterprise tier. Those are the lines that turn a £9 tool into a £24 one at renewal.
Prices below are annual-billing list prices per user per month, converted to sterling, as reviewed in December 2026. Treat them as a planning baseline and confirm on the vendor's own page before you commit — all seven publish current pricing publicly.
| Tool | Free tier | Entry paid | Mid tier | The limit that bites |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asana | Up to 10 users | ~£9 / user / mo | ~£20 / user / mo | Portfolios, goals and workload sit in the mid tier |
| monday.com | 2 seats only | ~£8 / seat / mo | ~£15 / seat / mo | Seats sold in blocks of 3 or 5; timeline is paid-only |
| ClickUp | Generous, per-user limits | ~£6 / user / mo | ~£10 / user / mo | Automation run caps and guest permissions |
| Notion | Personal use | ~£8 / user / mo | ~£14 / user / mo | No real dependency or capacity model without add-ons |
| Airtable | 1,000 records / base | ~£16 / seat / mo | ~£36 / seat / mo | Record limits per base and automation run volume |
| Jira | Up to 10 users | ~£6 / user / mo | ~£12 / user / mo | Non-engineering usability; add-ons for roadmapping |
| Miro | 3 editable boards | ~£7 / member / mo | ~£13 / member / mo | Board count and visitor editing rights |
A realistic 25-seat cost model
Nobody runs one tool. A standard mid-market planning stack looks like this on annual billing: 25 seats of a work management platform at £10 (£3,000 a year), 25 seats of a documentation tool at £8 (£2,400), 8 seats of a database tool at £16 (£1,536), 15 seats of a whiteboard at £7 (£1,260), a lightweight forecasting or dashboard layer at roughly £180 a month (£2,160), and automation middleware at about £60 a month (£720). That is £11,076 a year, or £443 per person — before implementation time.
Two levers matter more than negotiating list price. First, seat hygiene: audit for dormant accounts quarterly, because 10–15% of seats in a growing company belong to people who changed role or left. Second, tier discipline: upgrading everyone to unlock a feature three managers need is usually more expensive than buying a second, narrower tool for those three.
Verdicts
Best for a cross-functional quarter plan: Asana
Goals, portfolios and workload views map cleanly onto a four-commitment quarter plan, and non-technical teams adopt it fastest. The catch is that the features you want for planning are all in the mid tier, so budget £20 per user rather than £9.
Best value at scale: ClickUp
The most functionality per pound, with the trade-off that its flexibility is also its problem — without a strict configuration convention, every team builds a different structure and reporting across them becomes unreliable. Budget a week of setup work and appoint an owner.
Best for structured data: Airtable
If your planning artefact is really a database — a hiring plan, a vendor register, a content calendar with dependencies — Airtable beats a project tool. It is the most expensive per seat here, so keep it to the handful of people who build views rather than rolling it out broadly.
Best documentation home: Notion
Excellent for the plan narrative, SOPs and meeting records. Weak as a delivery tracker: no genuine capacity model, and dependency handling is manual. Pair it with a task tool rather than pretending it is one.
Reasons to switch tools in Q4
- Renewal date falls in Q1, so a decision now avoids an auto-renewal
- December has genuine slack for migration and training
- A clean start on 1 January gives you consistent full-year reporting
Reasons to stay put
- Migration costs 40–90 hours plus a fortnight of reduced output
- Historic data rarely survives an export intact — attachments and comments especially
- Tool churn is often mistaken for process improvement; fix the process first
Before you sign anything
- Confirm the notice period and diarise it 45 days ahead of renewal
- Check whether SSO, audit logs and admin controls are in your tier
- Run a two-week trial with one real workflow, not a sandbox project
- Ask for the data export format in writing and test it during the trial
- Model the cost at next year's planned headcount, not today's
Set the budget line for this stack in annual budgeting, and cancel what you no longer use using the audit in clearing process debt.