Task manager pricing in 2026: 22 apps and their AI bills

In October 2026 the cheapest paid plan of a mainstream task or project app costs a median of $9 a month per user, billed yearly. We collected the pricing of 22 apps from their own pricing pages: 17 of them have a free plan, 5 offer only a trial, and the cheapest paid tiers run from about $4.17 a month (TickTick Premium, sold yearly) to $19 (Motion and Akiflow). The bigger change is underneath the sticker price. 10 of the 22 now meter AI separately, with credits, request allowances or call quotas, so what you pay depends on how much work you hand to their agents.

What does a task manager cost in 2026?

Most of the market sits between $5 and $11 a month for the first paid tier. Personal to-do apps cluster at the bottom: Any.do, TickTick, Todoist, Trello, Weft and TryGoals all land at about $5 or less when billed yearly. Team platforms sit in the middle, from Plane at $6 to Asana Starter at $10.99. Daily planners with AI scheduling are the expensive end: Sunsama at $17 and Motion and Akiflow at $19.

Five apps don't fit a per-user chart. Google Tasks and Microsoft To Do are free with an account and have no paid plan. Things 3 is a one-time purchase per platform. Basecamp charges a flat price from $29 a month whatever the team size, and Taskade's Pro plan is $10 a month billed yearly for the plan, which its pricing page says includes 10 people.

Which task managers are free?

17 of 22 have a free plan, but the limits differ more than the prices. ClickUp's free plan has unlimited members and 60 MB of storage; Trello's covers 10 collaborators; Jira's 10 users; Asana's and monday.com's 2 people; Linear's 250 issues; TickTick's 9 lists of up to 99 tasks; Weft's 50 tasks and 200 AI calls a month. Five offer a trial instead: Akiflow (7 days, card required), Sunsama (14 days), TryGoals (30 days), Motion and Things 3.

How do task managers charge for AI?

Ten of the 22 meter AI use, and they do it in three ways. Credit pools are the most common: ClickUp, monday.com, Motion, Plane and Taskade give each plan or seat a monthly allowance, and ClickUp and Notion sell more at $10 per 10,000 and per 1,000 respectively. Request caps are Asana's model, at 5 AI Teammate requests per user a month with paid extras. Atlassian charges Rovo credits for Jira's agents and for every call to its MCP server. The practical effect is the same everywhere: the more work you hand to an app's own agents, the more the plan costs, and the sticker price stops being the whole price.

Is the cheapest task manager the right one?

Price differences at the bottom of the market are small: the gap between a $5 and a $10 plan is $60 a year. What varies far more is what the plan lets you do with AI. If you'll hand work to agents, check three things before price: whether your own assistant (Claude, ChatGPT or another MCP client) can connect, whether its work is metered on top, and whether anything holds that work for your approval. Seventeen of these 22 apps run an official MCP server, so the first is common. The other two are not.

Where Done fits

Done is free to start with 100 agent calls a month, Pro is $5 a month and Teams $20 a month. It doesn't meter agent compute at all: your agent runs on your own Claude or ChatGPT plan, and Done counts only calls to its MCP server. It's our product, so it isn't in the chart or the counts.

How we built this dataset

• Scope: the 22 apps on Done's comparison pages, each priced from its own pricing page. 15 pricing pages were re-read on October 28, 2026; the rest date from October 23 or 24.
• Cheapest paid plan means the lowest-priced tier that removes the free plan's limits, per user or person per month, billed yearly where a yearly price is listed.
• Median and mean are over the 17 subscription prices in the chart: median $9, mean $9.27. Flat-priced, one-time and free-only apps are excluded from both.
• AI metering counts any credit pool, request cap or call allowance the vendor documents for AI or agent use.
• Prices change. ClickUp replaced its plans between our October 24 and October 28 checks; check the vendor's page before you buy.