Asana pricing: what each plan really costs a small team
A small team usually lands on the Asana pricing page at one of two moments. Either the free plan just stopped letting someone new join, or a manager asked for a timeline view and found it behind a paywall. In both cases the question is the same: what will this actually cost per month once the team is set up properly, and which plan is the smallest one that does the job?
The list price per user is only part of the answer. How seats are sold, what the annual discount really covers, and what happens with AI usage all change the number on the invoice. This article walks through each plan as listed on Asana's pricing page in September 2026, in US dollars, and then works out real totals for teams of five, seven and twelve people.
The four plans at a glance
Asana currently lists four plans for work management: Personal, Starter, Advanced and Enterprise. Enterprise+ sits above Enterprise for organizations with heavier compliance needs, but a small team is very unlikely to need it.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Who it is aimed at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal | $0 | $0 | One or two people |
| Starter | $10.99 per user per month | $13.49 per user per month | Small teams tracking projects and deadlines |
| Advanced | $24.99 per user per month | $30.49 per user per month | Growing teams managing goals and capacity |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Contact sales | Organizations scaling across departments |
A few things stand out immediately. First, the free plan is capped at two users, so it is not a team plan in any practical sense. Second, the annual price is advertised as saving up to 18 percent, which matches the gap between $10.99 and $13.49. Third, sales tax is added on top based on the billing address, according to the FAQ on the same page, so the figure you budget should include it.
What "per user" means here
Every paid plan is priced per seat. A seat is someone who is a full member of the workspace. Guests are treated differently: Starter includes unlimited free guests, which matters a lot if clients or contractors need to see and comment on work. That single line can keep a bill much smaller than a headcount suggests.
Personal: free, but only for two
Personal costs nothing and has no time limit. It includes unlimited tasks and projects, list, board and calendar views, unlimited storage with a 100MB cap per file, status updates, time tracking through integrations, and more than 100 free integrations.
The limit that decides everything is two users. A freelancer working with one assistant can live on this plan comfortably. A team of three cannot, no matter how light their use is.
The other gap is views. Personal has list, board and calendar, but timeline and Gantt views start at Starter. Teams that plan work against dates, such as a launch with dependencies or a client project with fixed milestones, tend to hit that wall early. Reporting dashboards, forms, custom fields and automations are also Starter features.
So Personal works well as a trial of how Asana feels, or for genuinely two person work. For anything bigger, the realistic starting point is Starter.
Starter: the plan most small teams end up on
Starter is listed at $10.99 per user per month billed annually, or $13.49 billed monthly. It removes the seat cap and adds the features small teams usually go looking for:
- Timeline and Gantt views
- Reporting dashboards
- Unlimited automations
- Forms that create tasks automatically
- Custom templates
- Custom fields
- Unlimited free guests
Starter also includes Asana AI in a limited form. The pricing page lists 5 AI requests per user per month, up to 50 requests per account, for AI Teammates and Asana Dash, plus 50K AI Studio credits per billing account per month.
For a team of five to fifteen people who need to plan against dates and keep clients in the loop, Starter covers most of what matters. The features that are missing, such as goals, portfolios and resource management, matter more once several projects compete for the same people.
Where Starter starts to feel tight
The most common trigger for moving up is capacity. If the question in the weekly meeting is "who has room for this?", Starter does not answer it directly. Resource management, which shows who is overloaded, is an Advanced feature. So is native time tracking that compares estimated and actual time. On Starter, time tracking relies on integrations with other tools.
The second trigger is reporting across projects rather than inside one. Starter dashboards report on a single project well enough, but rolling five client projects into one view of what is late and what is at risk is what portfolios are for, and portfolios start at Advanced. Teams often work around this for a while with a shared spreadsheet that someone updates on Monday mornings. That workaround is cheap until the person maintaining it leaves or gets busy, and the cost of it not being updated is usually invisible until a deadline is missed.
Advanced: when capacity and goals matter
Advanced is listed at $24.99 per user per month billed annually, or $30.49 billed monthly. That is a little more than double Starter. In return it adds:
- Unlimited portfolios for tracking related projects together
- Goals that connect daily tasks to higher level objectives
- Resource management within a portfolio
- Approvals and proofing on PDFs and images
- Forms with branching logic
- Native time tracking comparing estimated and actual time
- Connections to Salesforce, Tableau and Power BI
AI allowances on Advanced are listed as the same 5 requests per user per month with an account cap of 50, and 75K AI Studio credits.
The honest test for Advanced is whether the extra features would be used every week. A team of eight running two or three client projects often does not need portfolios or goals. A team of twelve juggling many overlapping projects, where one designer is shared across all of them, often does. Paying more than double per seat for features that are opened once a quarter is the most common way small teams overspend.
Enterprise and add-ons
Enterprise has no public price. It adds SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, view-only licenses, capacity planning and admin controls. The Timesheets and Budgets add-on, Compliance management and Permissions management are all listed as add-ons to Enterprise only. If a small team needs timesheets tied to budgets inside Asana, that requirement alone pushes the conversation into sales territory.
How seats are actually sold
This is the detail that surprises people most. According to the FAQ on the pricing page, seats are added in increments that depend on team size:
| Total users | Seats are added in steps of |
|---|---|
| 2 to 5 | 1 |
| Up to 30 | 5 |
| Up to 100 | 10 |
| Up to 500 | 25 |
| More than 500 | 50 |
In practice this means a team of five pays for five seats, but a team of six moves into the next step and pays for ten. A team of eleven pays for fifteen. Until the team grows into those empty seats, part of the bill covers nobody.
Worked examples
Using the listed Starter and Advanced prices, before tax:
| Team size | Seats billed | Starter, annual (per year) | Starter, monthly (per month) | Advanced, annual (per year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 people | 5 | $659.40 | $67.45 | $1,499.40 |
| 7 people | 10 | $1,318.80 | $134.90 | $2,998.80 |
| 12 people | 15 | $1,978.20 | $202.35 | $4,498.20 |
The jump from five people to seven people doubles the Starter bill, even though the team only grew by two. If the team is hovering around five, it is worth thinking about who really needs a full seat. Someone who only reviews work and leaves comments may fit as a guest on Starter, which does not use a seat.
Monthly or annual
Annual billing saves roughly 18 percent, but it locks in a seat count for the year. The pricing page is also clear that refunds are not offered: if a plan is cancelled, paid features stay available until the end of the current period and then stop. For a team that is still deciding whether the tool fits, paying monthly for the first two or three months costs a little more but keeps the exit cheap.
AI usage: the line that can grow
Asana now bills AI work in requests. The pricing page defines an AI request as one successful unit of work executed by AI Teammates or Asana Dash. Failed, timed out or cancelled tasks do not count, and administrative tasks in Dash, such as prioritizing a day, are included.
Beyond the included allowance, there are two ways to buy more:
- Prepaid usage packs at $0.50 per request, billed upfront. Annual customers can use them at any point in the contract term.
- Pay as you go at $0.60 per request, billed monthly, with a spending cap an admin can set.
The included allowance on Starter and Advanced is capped at 50 requests per account per month. For a team that uses AI features lightly, that may be enough. For a team that starts routing real work through AI Teammates, the per request charge becomes a separate budget line. The admin console shows usage and sends alerts at 65, 85 and 100 percent of the allotment, so it is worth setting a cap on day one rather than discovering the number on the first invoice.
Choosing a plan for a small team
A simple way to decide is to start from the constraint rather than the feature list.
Two people, no dates to plan against. Personal is enough and costs nothing.
Three to fifteen people, need timelines, forms or client access. Starter. Keep people who only review work as guests, check where the team sits in the seat steps, and consider monthly billing for the first few months.
Several projects sharing the same people, and someone is responsible for balancing workload. Advanced, but only if resource management and time tracking will be used weekly. Otherwise Starter plus a clear weekly check on workload does most of the job.
Security review, SSO or timesheets tied to budgets. Enterprise, which means talking to sales.
It also helps to compare the total against tools priced on a different model. Some project management tools include Gantt charts and chat on a free tier and only charge once a team or its number of boards grows, which changes the math for a team of five or six. A side by side view is on the comparison page for Asana, and the full list of comparisons covers Trello, Notion, monday.com and Backlog on the same terms.
What to change first
Before upgrading, count who needs a full seat and who could work as a guest, then check which seat step that puts the team in. If timelines and client access are the real need, start on Starter billed monthly and review after three months. If the team is small and the per seat bill feels heavy, it is worth trying Pinateca, where kanban, Gantt and chat are free for up to five people.
Q1. How much does Asana cost for a team of 5?
On Starter billed annually, five seats at $10.99 per user per month come to $659.40 a year before tax. Billed monthly, the same five seats at $13.49 cost $67.45 a month. Personal is free but only allows two users, so it does not cover a team of five.
Q2. Why is my Asana bill for 6 people charged as 10 seats?
Asana sells seats in steps. According to its pricing FAQ, teams of 2 to 5 add seats one at a time, but teams up to 30 add seats in increments of 5. A sixth person therefore moves the account to 10 seats.
Q3. Do guests count as paid users in Asana?
Starter and above include unlimited free guests, so clients and contractors invited as guests do not take a paid seat. People who belong to the organization should be full members, which do count toward seats.
Q4. Does Asana give refunds if the team stops using it?
The pricing page says refunds are not offered. If a plan is cancelled before renewal, paid features remain available until the end of the current subscription period, and then access to those features ends.
Q5. Is Asana AI included in Starter?
Starter includes a limited allowance: 5 AI requests per user per month, capped at 50 per account, plus AI Studio credits. Additional requests cost $0.50 each in prepaid packs or $0.60 each on pay as you go billing.
