The best project management software for small business in 2026, picked by situation

There’s no single best project management software for small business, and any list that gives you one winner is selling something. We’re selling something too, so we’ll say that up front: we make Klusko, and it’s on this list. We’ve tried to be fair to the other six, including saying plainly when one of them is the better choice.

What we can do is match tools to situations. Before Klusko we ran a 12-person business, and the question we should have asked early on wasn’t “which is best?” but “how do we actually plan work, and where does it go missing?” So that’s how this is organised.

Prices are as of September 2026, from the vendors’ own pricing pages, per user per month unless we say otherwise.

The best project management software for small business, priced

A few notes on that table. Trello Standard doesn’t include the calendar, timeline or table views; Premium does, at $10 or $12.50. monday.com Basic is cheaper at $9 or $12 but has no calendar and no guests. Basecamp also has a Freelancer plan at $25 a month for up to 20 users and 3 projects, and Pro at $99 a month for 25 projects. We only noted one Notion Plus price, so there’s one figure. And Klusko is free on every plan right now, because billing hasn’t launched.

Asana, if you live in timelines

Asana is the one we’d point you to if your projects are chains of dates. Starter includes a timeline, so you can see that the brochure can’t go to print until the photos are approved, and what slips if they’re late. Its higher Advanced plan adds portfolios for looking across many projects, plus automations and a long list of integrations. For a team running six client launches at once with fixed deadlines, it’s very good. We mean that.

The catch for a small team is price and seats. The free plan is 2 users, and after 5 seats you buy in fives, so a 12-person team pays for 15. We did the full sums, with Slack added, in what Slack and Asana cost a small business, and there’s a straight Klusko vs Asana comparison if that’s your shortlist.

If you want flat pricing: Basecamp

Basecamp charges per month for the whole company rather than per person. We like that a lot. Studio is $59 a month with unlimited users and 10 projects. For a 25-person team that’s the cheapest option on this list by some distance, and hiring someone new doesn’t change the bill.

The limit is projects rather than people, so a business with 40 small jobs on the go (a roofer, say, or a bookkeeper with a project per client) will hit the ceiling long before an agency with 8 big retainers, and even Pro at $99 stops at 25 projects, so you end up merging jobs into shared projects. Basecamp also has its own messaging, so it’s one of the few tools here that tries to cover chat as well. There’s more in our Klusko vs Basecamp page.

Trello for a plain board

Trello is still the simplest way to put cards in columns and move them. The free plan covers 10 collaborators and 10 boards, which is enough for plenty of small teams, and Standard is $5 a user. It’s what we’d give a four-person florist who wants “orders in”, “being made” and “out for delivery” and nothing more. Nothing wrong with that.

It gets thinner as you grow. Probably sooner than you’d expect, too, because calendar and table views are on Premium, and you’ll need a separate chat app. We compared the two directly in Klusko vs Trello, and if you’re new to boards, our piece on a kanban board for small teams is a gentle start.

monday.com, for people who like to tinker

monday.com is flexible and colourful. Standard, at $12 a seat, adds the calendar and timeline views and lets you invite guests. Seats come in buckets (3, 5, 10, 15 and so on), which we find annoying: a team of 11 buys 15. Basic is cheaper but drops the calendar and guests, which rules it out for most client work. Klusko vs monday.com goes further.

ClickUp does nearly everything

ClickUp has more features than anything else here. Unlimited, at $7 a user yearly, includes chat, Gantt charts and unlimited storage, and on price it’s close to Klusko. The free plan has unlimited users but 60 MB of storage in total, and chat is trial-only, so treat it as a trial rather than a place to stay.

We think tools that do 40 things tend to do some of them less well, and a small team can easily spend more of its first month setting ClickUp up (spaces, folders, statuses, custom fields, views on views) than actually working in it. Some teams love that. If yours is one, it’s a strong pick. The Klusko vs ClickUp page has the detail.

Notion, when the project is mostly pages

Notion is a writing tool with databases, and it’s good at the kind of project that is mainly pages: a handbook, a content plan, meeting notes. Plus is $10 a user and the free plan has a block cap. As a task manager for a busy operations team it’s more work than the others. We wouldn’t run a rota in it.

Klusko, if tasks keep vanishing into chat

This is the gap we built Klusko for. It’s tasks and team chat in one app. Projects have Board, List, Table, Calendar and Workload views, plus recurring tasks and templates, and they sit next to your channels and DMs. Mention a task in a message and it turns into a live link, so the job agreed in chat and the job on the board are the same job.

The free plan covers 10 people and 5 projects with full chat history. Team is £5 per person billed yearly (about $7), and Business is £9 (about $12). We give at least 30 days’ notice before charging anything.

It’s not the right pick if you need timelines or dependencies. Nor automations, nor integrations. Klusko has none of them, and no Android app yet (the iPhone app is in testing). We think most small teams don’t need Gantt charts. Some do, and they should buy Asana.

Say you run a nine-person bathroom-fitting company with jobs across town. You don’t need a timeline. You need Tomasz to see that the tiles for the Hargreaves job moved to Thursday, in the same place Priya told him about it.

How we’d test two of them

Don’t trial seven. Pick two from this list that fit how you work, and give each a fortnight.

Use a real project, not a pretend one. Something with a deadline and at least four people on it, like next month’s stock take or a client job that starts on the 1st. Put every task in, assign each one to a person, and agree that for those two weeks nothing gets agreed anywhere else.

Then invite the person on your team most likely to complain. If they’re still using it on day ten without being chased, you’ve probably found your tool.

Questions