The real cost of Asana, Jira and Monday for a 15-person team

Pricing pages are marketing documents. They show the per-seat number and quietly omit the add-ons, the seat minimums and the tier walls that decide what you actually pay. So we priced five tools for one concrete scenario and wrote down every line item.

The scenario

A 15-person agency: eight full-time delivery staff, three part-time contractors, two account managers, one finance person, one founder. They need boards, a timeline, time tracking against client work, invoicing from tracked hours, and a way for roughly twenty clients to see progress without buying seats.

Asana

Advanced is the first tier with Portfolios and Goals: $24.99/user/month monthly, $30.49 list at some renewals. Fifteen seats is $4,498/year. Time tracking is not native, so add Everhour at $8.50/user/month for the eight people logging hours: $816/year. Invoicing is a separate tool — FreshBooks Plus is $396/year. Running total: $5,710/year.

Jira

Premium is $17.50/user/month, so $3,150/year for 15. Advanced Roadmaps is included at Premium but Assets and sandbox are not, and Jira alone will not satisfy the account managers, so most teams here also pay for Confluence ($1,100/year) and a time-tracking app such as Tempo ($1,600/year). Client visibility means a portal add-on. Realistic total: $5,850–$6,400/year.

Monday.com

Pro is $19/user/month, and seats are sold in blocks of three, so 15 people costs exactly 15 seats — but 16 costs 18. Pro is also the first tier with time tracking, formula columns and dependencies. Fifteen seats: $3,420/year. Automation and integration actions are metered at 25,000/month on Pro, which sounds generous until a single busy board eats a third of it. Invoicing is a marketplace app. Total: $3,800–$4,200/year.

ClickUp

Business is $12/user/month: $2,160/year. ClickUp AI is a separate $7/user/month, which for 15 people is another $1,260/year — more than half the base cost again. Total: $3,420/year, and you still do not have invoicing.

Trello

Premium at $10/user/month is $1,800/year, but the missing pieces are structural: no real Gantt, no time tracking, no reporting, no invoicing. Power-Ups fill some gaps and each one has its own bill.

What we charge for the same team

Pro at $4/user/month billed annually: $720/year for 15 people. Time tracking, timesheet approvals, invoicing, Gantt, workload, automations and AI are included — nothing to add. Twenty client viewers cost nothing because guests are never seats. Or take the flat Agency plan at $39/month — $468/year for up to 25 people — and stop counting seats altogether.

The honest caveats

These figures are list prices in USD as published, and every vendor discounts on annual commitments and negotiates at volume. If you are already paying an enterprise rate, your number is lower than ours. And a cheaper tool is a bad deal if it does not do the job — which is why we publish a comparison matrix that names the things our competitors do better.

What to actually do with this

Open your last invoice from every tool in your delivery stack, add them up, then divide by headcount. That number — not the pricing page number — is your cost per person per month. Most agencies we talk to are between $28 and $45. If yours is in that range, consolidating is worth an afternoon of your time.

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