The Best Project Management Tools for Dev Teams Under 15 People

Introduction

Roundups in this category quote one number per tool: the price per user per month. At enterprise scale that is the only number that matters, because free tiers are irrelevant and everything is linear in headcount.

Under fifteen people it is close to useless. Free tiers with a user cap dominate the answer, and the cap lands in different places: five users for Height, ten for Jira and Shortcut, twelve for Plane. A tool that is free at five seats and $102 at twelve is not well described by "$8.50 per user".

So every tool here is priced twice. Five seats, which is where most of these teams start, and twelve, which is where the free tiers have run out and the bill becomes real.

We make FlowBoard, which is one of the ten. It wins at twelve seats and loses at five, and the table says so.

How We Picked

• Usable by developers. If engineers will not update it, nothing else matters.
• Priced honestly at both sizes. Vendor pricing pages, September 2026, monthly billing unless the tool only sells annually.
• No enterprise-only value. Tools whose case depends on portfolio rollups and resource management are excluded.
• Still maintained. Several once-popular options in this space are effectively abandoned and are not listed.

The Price Table

The pattern worth absorbing: at five seats, five of these ten are free. At twelve, only Plane is, and the spread runs from $0 to $120. The tools that look cheap per user are not the cheap tools at this size, and the free tier cliff is the single biggest cost event most small teams hit.

The Tools

Plane

Best for: teams of twelve or fewer who want free, and anyone who must self-host.

Open source, self-hostable, free to twelve users on cloud, $8 per user for Pro. For a team that fits under the cap it is the outright cheapest credible option, and it is a real tool rather than a stripped free tier.

The weakness: the thirteenth hire takes you from $0 to $104 a month in one step, which is the harshest cliff in this table. Less polished than Linear. Self-hosting costs real operational time.

GitHub Projects

Best for: teams already living entirely in GitHub.

Included with GitHub; Team is $4 per user for private repo collaboration features. Zero migration, zero new logins, and issues stay next to the code.

The weakness: it is a view over issues, not a project management tool. No real reporting, no flow metrics, thin filtering. Perfectly adequate for a small team that does not need those things, and a wall the moment you do.

Jira

Best for: teams under ten who need per-project workflows for free.

Free to ten users is genuinely generous and includes real workflow configuration, permissions and an enormous app marketplace. Many teams complaining about Jira's price are eligible for the free tier and have not checked.

The weakness: the usual. Slow, and the configurability is a liability without someone to own it. $94.92 at twelve seats. See the Jira alternatives roundup.

Shortcut

Best for: engineering teams who want structure and speed together.

Free to ten users, $8.50 after. Stories, epics and iterations, fast interface, good API and docs. The most balanced option here for a team that wants a real hierarchy without Jira's weight.

The weakness: $102 at twelve seats is near the top of the range, and the iteration model is a sprint if you were trying to leave sprints behind.

Trello

Best for: mixed teams where not everyone is technical.

Free to ten collaborators, $6 per user. Three concepts, no training required, and at $72 for twelve seats it is mid-range rather than cheap.

The weakness: degrades past a few dozen active cards, no reporting, and Power-Ups reintroduce sprawl. Not really a developer tool. See Trello vs continuous flow.

Height

Best for: founding teams of five or fewer.

Free to five users with an unusually complete feature set, then $8.50 per user. The AI-driven triage is the most interesting differentiator in this list.

The weakness: the five-user cap is the earliest here, so the free ride ends fastest. Smaller company, fast-moving roadmap.

Basecamp

Best for: teams that will keep growing, and agencies.

$59 a month flat for unlimited users on Studio. The only tool here whose bill does not move when you hire, which at twenty or thirty people makes it dramatically the cheapest.

The weakness: not an engineering tool. Worst value at five seats ($59 when five competitors are free) and best at twenty-five. See project management for agencies.

FlowBoard

Best for: teams of six to fifteen who have dropped sprints and ship releases.

$20 a month flat for five, $50 up to ten, then $5 per seat, so twelve is $60. The pricing is designed for exactly the range this article covers: the flat band absorbs the first ten hires without a cliff. One prioritised list instead of columns, no sprints, releases and changelogs built in, and flow metrics derived from status transitions. See the flow metrics guide.

The weakness: at five seats it is $20 while Jira, Shortcut, Trello, Height and Plane are all free, so if you are five people and price is the deciding factor, pick one of those. Much smaller integration ecosystem than the incumbents, and the deliberate lack of configurability is wrong for teams who genuinely need per-project workflows.

Linear

Best for: engineering teams who will pay for the best interface.

$10 per user billed annually. The fastest tool in the category by a clear margin, and the one most likely to get developers to actually keep tickets current.

The weakness: most expensive at both sizes, $50 and $120. The free tier's 250-issue cap is restrictive. Cycles are sprints. See Linear vs continuous flow.

Notion

Best for: teams who want docs and tasks in one place and will accept a build.

€9.50 per member. If your team already runs its documentation in Notion, keeping work items alongside is a real advantage and removes a context switch.

The weakness: you are building a tool, not buying one, and then maintaining it. No native flow metrics, weak at dependencies, and the database you design in month one will not survive month six. See Notion vs FlowBoard.

The Honest Summary

At five people: take a free tier. Jira Free if you need workflows, Shortcut if you want speed with structure, Plane if you might self-host, Trello if half the team is non-technical, GitHub Projects if you live in GitHub. Paying anything at this size needs a specific reason.

At twelve people: the free tiers have gone and the question is what you are buying. Plane if you fit and self-hosting is acceptable. Basecamp if the team will keep growing and the work is not ticket-shaped. FlowBoard if you have dropped sprints and ship releases. Linear if interface quality is worth $120 a month, which for some teams it clearly is.

The thing most teams get wrong: choosing at five people for the five-person price, then discovering the cliff at ten or twelve. Look at the second column before you migrate, because the migration is the expensive part, not the subscription. See free project management tools and how to migrate.