ClickUp AI vs Asana AI vs monday AI: 2026 Pricing Compared

All three of these tools sell AI in a completely different shape, and the headline seat price hides it. ClickUp charges for AI as a separate line item on top of the plan. Asana pools AI credits across your whole billing account. monday.com attaches credits to the plan tier. Pick wrong and a 10-person team pays double for the same work.

I pulled every figure below from each vendor's own pricing page on 11 August 2026. Nothing here comes from a review-site table, because those go stale within a quarter and half of them are published by one of the three vendors.

The pricing, as published

Three different billing philosophies in one table. That difference matters more than any feature list, so start there.

ClickUp separates AI, and says so

ClickUp's pricing page puts AI in its own section below the plans. Standard plans do not include it. You add Brain AI at $9 per user per month for unlimited Brain Assistant and unlimited Brain Agent, or Everything AI at $28 per user per month, which the page marks as recommended. The Free Forever plan gets what the page calls trial access to advanced AI features, with limits.

I like the honesty of this structure and dislike the bill it produces. A team on Unlimited at $7 pays $16 per person once AI is on. That is more than Asana Starter, which includes AI credits at $10.99. ClickUp's own base plan is the cheapest in this comparison and its all-in price is not.

The upside is that ClickUp's AI cost is predictable. There is no credit meter to watch, no month where the assistant stops answering because marketing ran a batch job on the 3rd. If your team uses AI heavily and daily, a flat per-seat charge is the friendlier model, and $9 buys a lot of unmetered use.

The trap is turning it on for everyone. Most orgs have five people who will use an AI assistant every day and twenty who will try it twice. ClickUp bills you for all twenty-five.

Asana pools credits per account

Asana's structure is the one people misread most often. Starter includes AI Studio Basic with 50K credits per billing account per month. Not per user. Advanced gets 75K, Enterprise gets 200K. Asana also sells AI Studio Plus and AI Studio Pro on top of plans that already include basic access, and its pricing page does not publish those numbers.

Pooling cuts both ways. For a 10-person team where two people build automations, 50K credits spread across the account is generous, because the eight non-users contribute their share to the pool. For a 60-person org where everyone runs AI-assisted workflows, the same 50K on Starter is thin, and moving to Advanced for 75K means paying $24.99 a seat for a 50 percent credit bump.

So Asana gets cheaper per head as you grow and tighter per head at the same time. Small teams with a couple of power users get the best deal of the three. Large teams that standardise on AI workflows will hit the ceiling and end up in a sales conversation about AI Studio Plus, which is exactly where Asana wants that conversation to happen.

monday.com attaches credits to the tier

monday.com lists AI credits at the plan level: 1,000 a month on Basic, 2,000 on Standard, 3,000 on Pro, with Enterprise described as custom credits matched to how your team works. The free plan's row reads "available from Basic", so AI starts at the first paid tier.

Two things to check before you compare monday's $9 headline against anyone else's.

First, the seat minimum. monday sells paid Work Management seats with a minimum and in blocks, so the two-person team looking at $9 a seat is not paying $18. Set the seat count on the pricing page before you compare, because the slider changes the real number.

Second, monday.com is not one product. Work Management, CRM, Service and Dev are priced separately, and the CRM tiers run $12, $17 and $28 a seat annually against Work Management's $9, $12 and $19. If your evaluation mixes a sales use case with a project use case, you are looking at two subscriptions.

Credits at the plan level is the least generous shape of the three for a growing team. Adding people does not add credits, and 3,000 a month on Pro is the published ceiling before Enterprise.

What a 10-person team pays, annually billed

• ClickUp Unlimited plus Brain AI: $70 plus $90 = $160/month
• ClickUp Business plus Brain AI: $120 plus $90 = $210/month
• ClickUp Business plus Everything AI: $120 plus $280 = $400/month
• Asana Starter, AI credits included: $109.90/month, 50K credits for the account
• Asana Advanced, AI credits included: $249.90/month, 75K credits for the account
• monday Standard: $120/month, 2,000 credits
• monday Pro: $190/month, 3,000 credits

Asana Starter is the cheapest way to get ten people onto a paid plan with AI attached. ClickUp's cheapest AI-enabled configuration costs 46 percent more than that. And ClickUp Business with Everything AI costs more than three times Asana Starter, which is a defensible price only if those Super Agent workflows replace headcount rather than assist it.

Run this math with your own seat count before you trust any recommendation, including mine. The ranking flips at scale, because ClickUp's AI grows linearly with people while Asana's pooled credits do not.

Where each one earns its price

ClickUp is the pick when your team is small, technical, and will use AI constantly. Unmetered assistant use at $9 a head beats watching a credit balance. It is also the most feature-dense of the three, which is a real advantage if you want docs, whiteboards, goals and tasks in one place, and a real liability if you hand it to a team that wanted a task list.

Asana is the pick for structured organisations where a few people build workflows for everyone else. The pooled credit model matches that shape exactly. Asana is also the most conservative product of the three, and after a decade of watching teams abandon project tools, conservative is underrated.

monday.com is the pick when the board is client-facing. Nobody builds a status view that a customer will actually read as well as monday does. The credit ceiling and the four-product split are the cost of that polish.

What none of them do well yet

All three sell AI that summarises, drafts and generates tasks. None of them will tell you, unprompted, that your project is going to miss its date because the same person is the blocker on four workstreams. The predictive claims in the marketing are thinner than the demos suggest, and every vendor's AI is best at the thing you could already do yourself in ten minutes.

The other gap is portability. AI-generated automations built in AI Studio do not leave Asana. ClickUp agents do not leave ClickUp. If you are betting on a vendor's AI layer, you are deepening lock-in at the exact moment the underlying models are commoditising. That is worth a thought before you standardise a 200-person org on any of them.

For a wider view of what else is available in this category, see our full list for project managers.

FAQ

Is ClickUp Brain included in any ClickUp plan?

No. ClickUp's pricing page lists AI in a separate section below the standard plans. Brain AI is $9 per user per month and Everything AI is $28 per user per month. The Free Forever plan is described as having trial access with limits.

Does Asana charge extra for AI?

Not for the basic tier. AI Studio Basic credits are included with Starter, Advanced and Enterprise at 50K, 75K and 200K per billing account per month. Asana does sell AI Studio Plus and AI Studio Pro as paid upgrades, and it does not publish those prices.

Are monday.com AI credits per seat or per account?

monday.com's pricing page lists them at the plan level per month: 1,000 on Basic, 2,000 on Standard, 3,000 on Pro. Adding seats does not add credits, so check the ceiling against your expected usage before committing.

Which is cheapest for a 10-person team?

Asana Starter at $109.90 a month with annual billing, with AI credits included. ClickUp's cheapest AI-enabled setup is $160 and monday Standard is $120. That ordering changes as you add people, because ClickUp's AI charge scales per user and Asana's credit pool does not.

Do these prices include monthly billing?

The figures above are annual-billing rates unless stated. Month-to-month costs more on every plan that publishes it: ClickUp Unlimited goes $7 to $10, ClickUp Business $12 to $19, Asana Starter $10.99 to $13.49, Asana Advanced $24.99 to $30.49.

Prices verified against clickup.com/pricing, asana.com/pricing and monday.com/pricing on 11 August 2026. Vendors change these often, so re-check before you buy.