Asana alternative
An Asana alternative for teams pushed off the free plan
The third person on the team is now a billing event. That is why this search exists.
The short answer
Polaris is a free alternative to Asana for teams that no longer fit its two-user Personal plan. Asana lists Personal at zero for up to two users, Starter at ten dollars ninety-nine and Advanced at twenty-four dollars ninety-nine per user per month billed annually, checked 21 August 2026. Polaris has no seat count, includes docs and team chat, and adds AI workers who deliver tasks.
- Asana Personal
- 2 users
- Asana Starter
- $10.99 / user / month annual
- Asana Advanced
- $24.99 / user / month annual
- Checked
- 21 Aug 2026
What changed, and why the searches spiked
Asana's free tier used to be one of the most generous in the category. It is now called Personal and, checked on 21 August 2026, caps at two users. Reporting on the change indicates it applies to accounts created after 12 November 2025, with older accounts keeping their previous allowance. Verify which side of that line your workspace falls on before you plan anything.
Above it, Starter is ten dollars ninety-nine per user per month billed annually or thirteen forty-nine billed monthly, Advanced is twenty-four ninety-nine annually or thirty forty-nine monthly, and Enterprise is quoted on request. For a marketing or operations team of twelve, Starter is around fifteen hundred and eighty dollars a year for a shared task list.
That is a defensible price for what Asana does. It is a harder price to defend when the list is full of items nobody has started, which is the condition most cross-functional teams are actually in.
Head to head
Asana prices from asana.com/pricing, checked 21 August 2026.
Asana
Polaris
- Free tier
Personal, up to 2 users
Unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams and docs
- Paid cost
$10.99/user/mo Starter, $24.99 Advanced, billed annually
$0 software at any team size
- Process automation
Rules, forms, approvals, bundles
AI workers you brief and assign, with an editable SKILL.md each
- Portfolio view
Portfolios, Goals, Workload on higher tiers
Workstreams plus a pinned Focus lane across today, this week and next 30 days
- Docs
Project briefs and task descriptions
Nested doc tree with block editor, versioning, file review and comments
- Team chat
Not included
Included, plus a Slack-fed Inbox of prefilled task suggestions
- Assignees
One human owner per task
Humans and AI workers in the same members table, assigned identically
- What arrives when work is done
A person marks it complete
A comment with the deliverable and any files, acceptance criteria ticked, closed by a human
Comparison of Asana and Polaris by .
When you should stay on Asana
Asana earned its position with cross-functional teams for reasons that still hold.
Rules, forms and approvals are your intake process
A well-built Asana intake form that routes requests into the right project with the right custom fields is a genuine operational asset. Polaris has no rules engine and no form builder.
You manage capacity with Workload
Resource levelling across a department is a specific job, and Workload with effort estimates does it. Polaris has no capacity planning surface.
Goals and portfolios roll up to an executive
If a leadership team reads Asana portfolios and goal progress every month, replacing that reporting is a change management project, not a tool swap.
Adoption took a year and it finally stuck
Asana is unusually good at getting non-technical departments to actually update their tasks. That habit has more value than the licence cost.
What twelve people cost
List prices checked 21 August 2026, before any add-on.
$1,582
Twelve people on Asana Starter, per year
$10.99 per user per month, billed annually
$3,599
Twelve people on Asana Advanced, per year
$24.99 per user per month, billed annually
$0
Polaris software, twelve people
Billing starts only when an AI worker delivers work
Moving from Asana
Asana exports projects to CSV and JSON, covering task names, descriptions, assignees, due dates, sections and custom field values. That maps onto Polaris workstreams, lanes and tasks without much argument. Attachments come as links, so pull anything down that exists only on a task.
Rules, forms, bundles, portfolios and Workload have no destination. There is no equivalent object in Polaris to receive them, so they are retired rather than migrated. Before committing, list which of them are load-bearing. If the intake form is how requests reach your team at all, that alone is a reason to keep Asana running.
Go deeper
Asana pricing, checked August 2026
One of the few vendors that prints both billing rates, and the gap is twenty-three percent.
Asana vs monday.com
One models work as a plan with dependencies. The other models it as a spreadsheet that can run automations.
Trello vs Asana
For a small team on a free plan this is no longer close. For a team with dependencies it never was.
Wrike vs Asana
Two work platforms priced almost identically, aimed at two different departments.
Replacing Asana and Slack
Rules that fire into Slack, replies that never come back, and a portfolio view built for people who do not do the work.
Campaign planning where the plan becomes owned tasks
Most campaigns do not fail at the idea. They fail at the fourteen small things nobody agreed to own.
Questions people ask
+Is the Asana free plan really limited to two users now?
Asana's pricing page listed Personal at two users when checked on 21 August 2026, and published reporting ties the change to accounts created after 12 November 2025 with older workspaces keeping their previous allowance. Check your own workspace rather than assuming, because the answer differs by account age.
+Can Polaris do Asana-style rules and forms?
No. There is no rules engine and no form builder in Polaris. The replacement is different in kind: you hire an AI worker in about sixty seconds through a chat interview, its capabilities become a SKILL.md file you can read and edit, and you assign it tasks the same way you assign a colleague.
+How do I move Asana projects into Polaris?
Export projects from Asana as CSV or JSON, which carries task names, descriptions, assignees, due dates, sections and custom field values, then rebuild them as Polaris workstreams and lanes. Attachments export as links, so download those first. Rules, forms, portfolios and Workload do not transfer.
+What is the catch on two dollars per human-hour?
The hour is an estimate rather than a stopwatch reading, because a cloud machine does not experience time like a person. The estimate comes from an open formula using observable effort such as searches run, prose produced and files returned, clamped between five minutes and eight hours per session, and every line lands on the worker's work log where you can challenge it.
+Does Polaris have anything like Asana Goals?
Not as a named feature. The nearest thing is the Focus lane, which is pinned first in every view and holds non-negotiables across today, this week and the next thirty days. It is a commitment device rather than a goal-tracking hierarchy, and it does not roll up into executive reporting.
Related
Asana pricing, checked August 2026
One of the few vendors that prints both billing rates, and the gap is twenty-three percent.
Asana vs monday.com
One models work as a plan with dependencies. The other models it as a spreadsheet that can run automations.
Trello vs Asana
For a small team on a free plan this is no longer close. For a team with dependencies it never was.
Jira vs Asana
Most companies that argue about this end up running both. The useful question is which one owns the boundary.
Basecamp vs Asana
The cheapest tool here is obvious once you count heads. Whether it can hold your work is the real question.
Replacing Asana and Notion
A project brief in the tracker, a project page in the doc tool, and a client who has read one of them.
A monday.com alternative that is one product, not a product line
Four products, four price lists, four places your team's work now lives.
Campaign planning where the plan becomes owned tasks
Most campaigns do not fail at the idea. They fail at the fourteen small things nobody agreed to own.