AlternativesUpdated
Asana plans a team's projects and tasks. It is free for up to 2 users, and Starter is $13.49 per user a month billed monthly. If the per-user price adds up, your team is small, or clients should sign in to follow their work, here are six alternatives and what each one does.

Personal is free for up to 2 users. A team of three or more starts on Starter, at $13.49 per user a month billed monthly or $10.99 billed yearly.
Advanced, for goals and team capacity, is $30.49 per user a month billed monthly, or $24.99 billed yearly.
A small team that only wants a board of tasks pays per user for a tool built for many teams and many projects.
Fits: TrelloWhen clients should follow their own project and approve work, a tracker built around them does that without a seat for each one.
Fits: FabricateFabricate beside Asana, feature by feature.
Best for: A tracker built around how you work
Builds a project or task app from your description: a board you drag tasks across, lists, owners, due dates, comments and a page of what is due, behind a sign-in for your team, and clients can sign in to follow only their own project. The people who sign in to a published app are not counted as seats. Building and previewing are free; publishing is on Pro and Max.
Checks before you publish

What it does well
Export what you can from Asana, or copy your tasks into a spreadsheet and save it as CSV.
Say what a project is for you, the stages a task goes through, who works on what and who may change it.
Ask for a page, behind your own sign-in, that adds the rows of your CSV file to the app's own database.
Sign in as two teammates, move tasks, comment, and check who can see and change what.
On Pro, one press of Publish gives it its own address to share, after the same browser check.
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Your app

What each one does well, and the kind of project it suits best.
Best for: Simple boards for a small team
Boards of cards your team drags between lists, from Atlassian. Free covers up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards per Workspace; Standard is $6 per user a month billed monthly, or $5 billed yearly.
Where Trello beats Fabricate
If all your team needs is a board of cards to drag across, Trello is ready in minutes, free for up to 10 collaborators, with phone apps.
Source: trello.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked
Best for: Many teams on one shared tool
Work management on boards, priced per seat, with paid plans sold from 3 seats. Free covers up to 2 seats and 3 boards; Basic is $9 per seat a month billed yearly, Standard $12 and Pro $19.
Where monday.com beats Fabricate
If many teams want one shared tool for their boards, monday.com has a plan for each size, from 2 free seats up.
Source: monday.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked
Best for: Teams that want every view in one tool
Tasks, collaborative docs, Kanban boards, a calendar view and sprints in one workspace. Free Forever has unlimited tasks and free plan members, 60MB of storage and 100 automation actions a month; paid plans are priced per user.
Where ClickUp beats Fabricate
If your team wants tasks, docs and boards in one tool and the free plan's members are not capped, ClickUp gives you that the day you sign up.
Source: clickup.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked
Best for: Small teams that want a flat price
Projects with message boards, to-dos, Card Tables for Kanban and group chat, at one price for the account rather than per user. Personal is free for 1 project and up to 3 people; Freelancer is $29 a month for 3 projects and 5 users, and Pro $79 for 8 projects and 10 users.
Where Basecamp beats Fabricate
If you would rather not pay for each person, Basecamp charges one price for the account, from $29 a month for 5 users.
Source: basecamp.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked
Best for: Projects planned in a grid with formulas
Tracks and manages projects in Gantt, table, board and calendar views, with rich formulas. There is no free plan: Pro is $12 per member a month billed monthly, or $9 billed yearly, for 1 to 10 members, with unlimited free Contributors.
Where Smartsheet beats Fabricate
If your projects live in a grid with formulas and a Gantt chart, Smartsheet works that way, and Contributors cost nothing.
Source: smartsheet.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked
Asana is built for teams that plan many projects at once. Starter covers projects and tasks with free guests, and Advanced adds goals and team capacity. Asana AI is included on the paid plans.
The cost grows with the team. Personal is free for up to 2 users, and from the third person every user is on a paid plan: $13.49 a month on Starter billed monthly, or $30.49 on Advanced. For a team of ten on Advanced, that is a large monthly bill for a task list.
Smaller tools cost less for smaller jobs. Trello is free for up to 10 collaborators; Basecamp has one price for the account, from $29 a month; ClickUp has no cap on free members. monday.com and Smartsheet suit teams that run many kinds of work.
A tracker built with Fabricate is your own web app, with only the fields and stages you describe. The backend is written into the app's own code: server routes in a Durable Object on Cloudflare Workers, with its own SQLite database. Your team signs in with an invite code, clients can sign in to follow and approve only their own project, and nobody who signs in takes a seat. Email reminders and push notifications, ready-made integrations with other tools, sharing documents between people, and phone apps from the App Store or Google Play are not built in. The app opens in any phone browser, and anyone can add it to their home screen.
The pages this guide quotes, each with the day it was read.
About this guide
Written by the Fabricate team. Fabricate is our product, so it is first on this page and marked "We make this". Where a reason to switch fits another tool better, the reason says which.
Each tool's card lists the pages we read about it and the day we read them. We compared the tools from their own pricing pages and documentation, not by signing up for them. Spotted something out of date? Write to info@fabricate.build.
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