Issue tracker free plan limits: what nine tools actually give a team of six

Six people, one product, nothing budgeted for tooling. You open nine pricing pages and every one has a Free column with a tick list in it. The tick lists look roughly the same. The numbers underneath do not.

Issue tracker free plan limits get published everywhere and explained nowhere. The comparison posts copy a ceiling out of the pricing table and stop, which leaves out the thing that decides whether a free plan survives contact with a real team: what specifically happens on the day you cross it. Sometimes you cannot add the next one. Sometimes the boards you already have go read-only.

Below is one row per tool, with both — the nine, and ours. Every number came off the vendor's own page, linked in the row. Pricing pages change without notice, so treat the link as the authority and this as a snapshot.

Issue tracker free plan limits, side by side

One omission: monday.com's pricing page renders in euros from where we read it, so there is no dollar figure for its paid tiers here.

Basecamp is absent because it is not an issue tracker, but its free plan is the outlier worth knowing — "Run 1 project free forever. Includes 1 GB of storage and up to 20 users" (basecamp.com/pricing). Twenty people is double the headcount anyone else gives away, and one project is the tightest container on the list. Not an accident.

Two of the nine stop at two people

Asana's free Personal plan takes two users. monday.com's takes two seats. For a team of six, both are decided before you read a feature list. Neither vendor is being coy; the number is on the page.

A free plan is a bet about which direction you grow

The difference that matters is not how generous these plans are. It is which axis they meter, because that decides the direction the wall arrives from.

Metered by people. Jira, Trello, Shortcut and Kevta stop at ten; Asana and monday.com at two. The wall arrives because you hired, or a contractor joined for six weeks, or a designer wanted to see one board. You did not use the tool more. You got bigger.

Metered by work. Linear caps free at 250 issues and does not meter people at all. The wall arrives because you used what you were given. One caveat we could not resolve: Linear auto-archives closed issues after a period you configure per team (linear.app/docs), and neither the pricing page nor the billing doc says whether archived issues still count against the 250. The real ceiling may be higher than the printed one; we could not confirm that it is.

Metered by content, once a second owner exists. Notion is the odd one. A free workspace with a single workspace owner has no block cap; give a second person owner rights and it becomes 1,000 blocks. The wall arrives at the moment the workspace stops being one person's.

A fourth axis gets almost no attention: containers. Trello gives ten boards per Workspace, monday.com three, Shortcut one team and one workflow, Basecamp one project, Kevta five boards per workspace across two workspaces. This is the wall you hit by starting a second thing — a second product, a second client, a spike kept separate. Invisible on day one, and the one a lot of small teams meet first.

Which shape you prefer is a real preference, not a right answer. We argued the case against metering headcount in the quiet cost of per-seat pricing and will not repeat it, except to name the awkward part: our own free plan meters people. Pro removes the per-person price without removing the per-person ceiling. That is fair to hold against us, and Linear's and ClickUp's free plans beat ours on that axis.

What happens at the ceiling matters more than the ceiling

This is the column the comparisons never fill in, and it sorts into three kinds of consequence that are not equivalent.

The next one is blocked. Linear stops new issues. Notion stops new blocks while leaving everything readable and editable. Jira stops the eleventh user. Kevta stops the eleventh member and the sixth board. The mild failure: annoying, obvious, reversible, nothing you already have degrades.

What you already have degrades. Trello is the one to watch. Past ten collaborators in a free Workspace, boards become view-only, cards cannot be changed and automations stop running. The count includes Workspace members, Workspace guests and pending invites, so a forwarded invitation can push you over. A plan that turns existing boards read-only is a different category of risk from one that declines to create the eleventh thing, and it belongs in the comparison rather than three clicks into a support doc.

The plan can be reclaimed. Atlassian's documentation says it "reserves the right to deactivate Free Jira Cloud sites due to inactivity", with warning emails to admins first. Reasonable policy for a vendor giving away infrastructure, and worth knowing before a dormant side project turns out to be the record of a year's decisions. Our sourced Jira comparison is at /compare/jira.

Three free plans that are better than ours

These three beat Kevta Free outright, and a team of six should look at them first.

GitHub Issues and Projects. $0, no seat cap, already in the tab where your code is, with Issues and Projects inside the limited feature set GitHub gives private repositories. Nothing paid beats free and already installed. If your work is one or two repositories and you need a status column, this is the answer and the rest of this page is noise.

Shortcut Free. Ten users, the same headcount as ours, with Kanban views, a Roadmap, Reports, Iterations, Docs and GitHub, Slack and Figma integrations, on one team and one workspace (shortcut.com/pricing). More product than we give away for the same number of people: Kevta has no reports, no sprints, no docs and no Slack or Figma integration.

ClickUp Free Forever. "Unlimited Free Plan Members" and "Unlimited Tasks", with 60MB of storage as the binding constraint instead. It does not meter people at all, which beats a ten-member ceiling outright if headcount is what you expect to change. Linear takes the same position on members.

Which one fits a team of six

• All engineers, one or two repositories. GitHub Projects. Do not run a second system holding the same issues.
• You want the most product for nothing. Shortcut, if one team and one workflow is enough shape.
• You expect to be twelve people before you can pay. ClickUp or Linear; neither meters people. Linear suits a larger group working a small live backlog, with the 250-issue cap to watch.
• You already run on Notion. Keep the wiki. The 1,000-block cap starts as soon as the workspace has a second owner, which is around when a tracker needs room.
• Two people, no plans to grow soon. Asana and monday.com are reasonable at that size.
• Six people, several streams of work, and a board that is always out of date. The case we built for. Kevta Free is 2 workspaces, 5 boards in each and 10 members per workspace, with the GitHub integration, all four board views, notifications and the MCP server included rather than held back for the paid tier.

What each costs once the free plan runs out is a separate question, and flat-rate plans resolve it differently again — that shopping list is at flat-rate project management software.

Kevta is in beta and the free plan above is what it gives you today. If the shape of it fits, the waitlist gets you an early invite, a founding-member price at launch and a direct line to what we build next — join it here.

Disclosure

We build one of the ten tools here, so read the Kevta row with that in mind. Every competitor figure is quoted from the vendor's own page and linked, and the three free plans that beat ours have a section rather than a footnote.

Our own numbers come from the caps the API enforces. Free is $0 with 2 workspaces, 5 boards per workspace and 10 members per workspace, where members means everyone who can reach anything in the workspace, the owner included, plus board-only guests. Pro is $10 a month per workspace, not per person, and raises those to 10 workspaces, 10 boards and 50 members. Fifty is a real ceiling, not a euphemism. Dropping back to Free deletes nothing — only creating the next board, member or workspace waits. Live figures are on the pricing page, which counts if this post has gone stale.