Asana is hired to keep a team's tasks, owners and due dates in one place. The job is portable when the team uses a few simple views and expensive to move when rules, forms and reporting have piled up around it. Below: the plans as published, an open-source option, and a procedure for moving without losing what the team needs to remember.
A task tracker becomes the place where everyone looks to see what is happening. That habit is what you pay for, more than any feature. Years of projects, comments and attachments live in it, and no one wants to be the person who loses the thread.
Seats also grow quietly. People are added for one project and never removed, and each one is a line on the bill. The first useful step is counting who has used it lately, which is a bookkeeping exercise as much as a software one.
The tool is rarely the hard part to leave. The rules, forms and integrations that grew around it are. Finding and listing them, as the steps above do, is most of the work. Our audit can help find the charge in your books first.
Only alternatives we have checked. An open-source project is listed with the license its repository reports, on the date shown; one whose license could not be read as a single standard id is not offered as open source. Read the license guide before running any of them.
| Alternative | Kind | License | Read from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plane | Open source | AGPL-3.0 | Plane repositoryChecked Oct 25, 2026 |
Each feature below is what the product's own page or README says, linked to where we read it on the date shown. Pros and cons are limited to what those pages state and to what the path itself changes. We do not rank products on quality.
| Plan | Price as published | Includes | Read from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asana Personal | Free | Limited to 2 users; unlimited tasks and projects | Asana pricingChecked Oct 25, 2026 |
| Asana Starter | $10.99 billed annually, or $13.49 billed monthly | No user seat limits; timeline and Gantt views, reporting dashboards, forms and automations | Asana pricingChecked Oct 25, 2026 |
| Asana Advanced | $24.99 billed annually, or $30.49 billed monthly | Portfolios, goals, approvals and proofing, time tracking and more | Asana pricingChecked Oct 25, 2026 |
List prices as printed on the vendor's page on the checked date, in US dollars per user per month and excluding tax. Prices may differ at checkout. Enterprise shows no per-user price.
Task tracking holds a team's working memory, so the question is less which tool is cheaper and more which parts of the old tool anyone would notice missing. Write down the five things people do in it every week. If a simple board and a list cover them, a smaller tool can take the job.
If the team uses reporting, approvals or resource planning that the plan was bought for, those are the parts to price separately. Seats that only read are often the first line to remove, but check what the contract says before changing the count.
Samples are made up and are not Asana's prices. Type in the figures from your own invoice or order form.
The honest yearly cost of running open-source software yourself, set against the bill it replaces, with the seat count where it stops paying.
Paid seats against seats in use: what the idle ones cost a year, and what you save by right-sizing at renewal.
Arithmetic only, not tax, accounting or legal advice. Check the figures against your own order form.
Moving a task tracker is mostly deciding what history deserves to move. In outline:
Count active projects, open tasks and users. Mark each project as live, finished or abandoned. Finished and abandoned ones can be exported and archived instead of moved.
List every rule, form, recurring task and integration that creates or changes work on its own. Each one is either rebuilt in the destination, replaced by a habit, or dropped on purpose.
Run an export on one live project and one finished one. Open the files and check task names, assignees, due dates, comments and attachments against the screen.
Pick the destination and move one team's live project first. Have them work in it for two weeks and write down what they miss.
Move the remaining live projects in one sitting, with a date announced in advance. Compare open-task counts per project before and after.
Set the old workspace to read-only where the plan allows, redirect forms and integrations, and tell people outside the company where to go.
Keep the exports somewhere you control. After a full month of normal use, end the plan inside the contract's notice window.
Run the vendor report for QuickBooks Online or Xero, then open the free audit.
General information, not legal advice. See cancelling without penalties. Last reviewed Oct 25, 2026. Product names belong to their owners and are used only to identify them.
Send us the export and see which lines are worth a second look. A connected version is planned. Asana is one of the lines worth a look.
Worked example. Type over it.
Result
| Self-hosting, per year | Amount |
|---|---|
| Hosting, backups, tooling | 720.00 |
| Admin and restore-test time | 2,640.00 |
| Total | 3,360.00 |
| One-off set-up (not in the yearly total) | 1,200.00 |
The saving holds only if the time is real. Price the admin hours at what that person's time costs the company, not at zero.
Worked example. Type over it.
Result
“In use” is your call: last sign-in in the past 30 or 90 days from the vendor's admin report. A seat for someone on leave is not idle.