Asana Starter, 15 seats → Plane, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, Plane saves you $2,910 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$113.25/hrBelow that rate, moving to Plane pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Asana Starter.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Asana Starter $10.99/month × 15 seats, billed annual | $164.85 |
| Every month | $164.85 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-2c-4gb 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 80 GB disk · 3 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $20.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 20 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.14 |
| Your time 1 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $50.00 |
| Every month | $70.14 |
| Migration, once 10 hours of your time, our estimate | $500.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $20.00 vc2-2c-4gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $24.00 Linode 4GB
- DigitalOcean $24.00 2 vCPU · 4 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $94.71 |
| After one year | $637 |
| After 3 years | $2,910 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Asana's maturity — Plane is three years old and its API still moves
- Workload view and time tracking at Asana's depth
- The mobile apps
You gain
- A UI so close to Linear/Asana that the training cost is an afternoon
- AGPL-3.0, unlimited members, no seat pricing
- Cycles and modules that map cleanly onto sprint-style work
Read this before you decide
- Plane moves fast, which cuts both ways — pin your Docker image tags and read the changelog before updating.
- There is no Asana importer. The 10-hour estimate covers CSV export from Asana and hand-rebuilding projects and panels.
Other projects that replace Asana
OpenProject are catalogued on OpenStore, a curated directory of open-source software with notes on what each project replaces and how actively it is maintained. This site prices the exit; that one browses the market. Weighing the options before committing hours to a migration is time better spent than time spent monitoring a server you chose too quickly. Entries verified 19 Oct 2026.
Is the project alive?
makeplane/plane has 61,120 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (v1.4.2) 57 days ago. Licence: AGPL-3.0. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Asana figure is the site's own wording: “Starter $10.99 per user/month, billed annually”.
| Asana pricing page | 11 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| makeplane/plane activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.