What Asana Really Costs in 2026, by the Numbers
Here is the official Asana pricing grid, taken from asana.com/pricing as of 21 October 2026 (per seat per month):
- Personal: free
- Starter: $10.99/seat/month billed annually, $13.49 billed monthly
- Advanced: $24.99/seat/month billed annually, $30.49 billed monthly
- Enterprise: custom quote
For a five-person agency on the Advanced plan — the first tier that includes portfolios, goals, and the advanced reporting project managers actually need — the math is simple:
- Annual billing: 5 × $24.99 × 12 months = $1,499.40/year
- Monthly billing: 5 × $30.49 × 12 months = $1,829.40/year
- Each extra Advanced seat (annual billing): +$299.88/year
By comparison, a VPS Power (4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM) running Plane costs 299 DH/month, whatever the team size: the bill no longer grows with every seat you add.
Five Reasons Agencies Are Leaving Asana
- Cloud-only with no alternative. Asana offers no on-premise or self-hosted option. Your client project data is on their servers, full stop. For agencies with contractual confidentiality clauses or GDPR obligations on their clients' data, this is permanent exposure.
- Pricing scales with your team growth. Every new project manager, designer, or developer you bring on adds to the bill. At $24.99/seat/month on the Advanced plan (annual billing), each additional collaborator costs an extra $299.88/year in software alone.
- Vendor dependency and lock-in risk. Prices, tiers, and what each plan includes are decided by the vendor alone. Data export is possible but limited to CSV format — you lose metadata on task relationships, automations, and workflow rules.
- GDPR and client data sovereignty. Storing budgets, deadlines, and internal discussions on Asana servers (hosted in the US) complicates compliance for European agencies processing personal data from their own clients.
- Portfolio and multi-project limitations. Portfolio management (multi-project view, overall workload tracking) is reserved for the Advanced plan and above. If your agency manages 10 clients simultaneously, you pay for Advanced on every seat to get a feature that open source alternatives include natively, at no extra cost.
Plane and Kaneo: Two Open Source Alternatives for Agencies
Plane and Kaneo address different agency profiles. Plane is the full-featured solution for agencies that want functional parity close to Asana: sprints, roadmaps, cycles, reporting, GitHub and Slack integrations. Kaneo is the minimalist option for smaller teams that only need a clean, fast kanban board with no configuration overhead. Both run on the same ServOrbit VPS.
Asana vs Plane vs Kaneo — Feature Comparison
Scroll the table
| Criteria | Asana | Plane | Kaneo |
|---|---|---|---|
| License | Proprietary SaaS | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Self-hosted | No | Yes (Docker) | Yes (Docker) |
| Price for 5-person team | $1,499.40/year (Advanced, annual billing) | 299 DH/month × 12 (VPS Power, no per-seat fee) | 299 DH/month × 12 (VPS Power, no per-seat fee) |
| Sprints and cycles | Yes (Advanced) | Yes (native) | No |
| Multi-project portfolio | Yes (Advanced) | Yes (native) | No |
| Reporting and analytics | Yes (Advanced) | Yes (built-in) | Basic |
| Slack/GitHub integrations | Yes | Yes | No |
| Clean client-facing interface | Yes | Yes (Board view) | Yes (pure kanban) |
| Minimum RAM required | N/A (cloud) | 2 GB recommended | 256 MB sufficient |
ROI Calculation: A 5-Person Agency Over 12 Months
Here is the detailed breakdown for a five-person agency migrating from the Asana Advanced plan to Plane on a ServOrbit VPS (Asana prices taken from asana.com/pricing as of 21 October 2026).
Asana Advanced cost (5 seats, 12 months):
- Annual billing: 5 × $24.99 × 12 = $1,499.40/year
- Monthly billing: 5 × $30.49 × 12 = $1,829.40/year
Plane on ServOrbit VPS cost (12 months):
- VPS Power (4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM): 299 DH/month × 12 (any team size)
- Initial migration (agent time): 2–4 hours, one-time
- Total: 299 DH/month × 12, with no per-seat cost
What the comparison shows: at five seats, you are weighing a $1,499.40/year Asana subscription against twelve months of VPS Power. The real difference is the shape of the price: the Asana cost grows with every seat, the VPS cost stays flat.
If your agency grows to 10 people, Asana Advanced would charge $2,998.80/year on annual billing, while your ServOrbit VPS stays at 299 DH/month regardless of team size.
Another way to read the math: every extra Advanced seat costs $299.88/year more at Asana, and changes nothing in the price of the VPS Power.
Install Plane for Your Agency in 30 Minutes
Plane ships an official docker-compose maintained by the core team. Installation on a fresh ServOrbit VPS takes around 30 minutes, most of which is wait time (pulling Docker images).
Step-by-Step Plane Deployment
Create your ServOrbit VPS and connect via SSH
From the ServOrbit marketplace, pick a 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM VPS running Debian 12 or Ubuntu 22.04. Once the VM is up (2–3 minutes), connect:
ssh root@YOUR_IP. Update the system:apt update && apt upgrade -y, then install Docker and Docker Compose:curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh.Download the official Plane docker-compose
Plane provides a quick-start script. Create a dedicated directory and fetch the configuration:
mkdir -p /opt/plane && cd /opt/plane && curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/makeplane/plane/master/deploy/selfhost/install.sh | bash. The script generates a.envfile with default values and downloads thedocker-compose.yaml.Configure the .env file (domain, SMTP, secret key)
Open
/opt/plane/.envand adjust the key values:WEB_URL=https://plane.youragency.com(your domain pointing to the VPS),SECRET_KEY(generate a random key:openssl rand -hex 32), and SMTP parameters for team email notifications. If you have a mail server (or use Mailgun / Brevo), fill inEMAIL_HOST,EMAIL_HOST_USER,EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD.Start the containers and wait for startup
From
/opt/plane, run:docker compose up -d. The first startup takes 3–5 minutes to pull images (plane-frontend, plane-backend, plane-worker, PostgreSQL, Redis, Minio). Check everything is green:docker compose ps. All services should showUporhealthy.Access the admin interface and create client workspaces
Open
https://plane.youragency.comin your browser. Plane guides you through creating the administrator account. From the dashboard, create one workspace per client (or one agency workspace with separate projects per client). The "Board" view (kanban) is what your non-tech clients will recognize immediately — it looks visually similar to what Asana offers on its Starter plan.Configure the reverse proxy and TLS certificate
If your VPS doesn't have a reverse proxy yet, install nginx and Certbot:
apt install -y nginx certbot python3-certbot-nginx. Create a vhost pointing port 80 to Plane's port 3000, then obtain your certificate:certbot --nginx -d plane.youragency.com. Automatic renewal is configured by Certbot.
Export from Asana and Import into Plane
Migrating existing data is the step that worries teams most. In practice, it is straightforward for active projects.
Asana → Plane Migration
Export your projects from Asana as CSV
In Asana, open each project, click the three dots in the top right → "Export/Print" → "CSV". Asana generates one CSV file per project with tasks, assignees, due dates, sections, and subtasks. For a full workspace export, use the "Admin Console" → "Export" menu (available on paid plans) to get a complete JSON.
Convert to the JSON format expected by Plane
Plane accepts a structured JSON format for imports. If you exported CSV, a simple conversion script (Python or Node.js) is enough. For native Asana JSON exports, the Plane team maintains a command-line converter in the
makeplane/plane-toolsrepository. Clone it and run:python asana_to_plane.py --input asana_export.json --output plane_import.json.Import into Plane via the interface or API
From your self-hosted Plane, navigate to the target project → "Settings" → "Imports" → "Asana". Plane offers a native connector that reads your Asana JSON export directly. Select the file, map team members (Asana email → Plane email), and start the import. Tasks, sections, and basic metadata are preserved.
Review and clean up after import
After the import, browse a few projects to check critical points: correctly mapped assignees, preserved due dates, matching statuses. Asana automations and rules do not migrate (they are proprietary) — recreate them using Plane's native Cycles and automations. Allow 30 to 60 minutes of cleanup per complex project.
For teams with non-tech clients
The main objection you will hear from your team: "Plane is less well-known, my clients won't know how to use it." In practice, Plane's "Board" view is a standard kanban — columns, cards, drag-and-drop — that everyone recognizes immediately. For clients who accessed Asana only to check project progress, create a Plane guest account with a filtered view on their project. They see exactly what they saw before, with no training needed. Plane is available in 15 languages and its interface is noticeably cleaner than Asana Advanced, which has accumulated many complex features over successive updates.
Kaneo: The Lightweightweight Alternative for Small Agencies
If your agency doesn't need sprints or advanced reporting — you manage projects with a simple kanban, custom columns, tags, and assignments — Kaneo is probably the right choice. It is a pure kanban task management tool, open source (MIT license), running in 256 MB of RAM. On the same ServOrbit VPS, you can host Kaneo alongside other services with no noticeable performance impact.
Kaneo deploys with a single Docker Compose command, with no external database (built-in SQLite for small teams). Its interface is intentionally minimalist: no sprints, no roadmaps, no Gantt charts. What you gain in return: zero learning curve, near-instant loading times, and maintenance reduced to updating the Docker image.
Typical Kaneo use case for an agency: a small 2–5 person team managing short missions, client support tickets, or creative projects (design, content, campaigns) with no need for sprint tracking or workload reporting. If you were only using 30% of Asana's capabilities, Kaneo covers that scope at a fraction of the cost and complexity.
To install Kaneo on your ServOrbit VPS: grab the docker-compose.yml from the official GitHub repository (github.com/heykaneo/kaneo), configure the environment variables (port, domain, admin email), and run docker compose up -d. The interface is accessible in under two minutes.
