Start with what the free plan actually gives you
A free plan is the cheapest way to size a tool, but it is only useful if you know what it excludes. Hizo runs a free plan with Unlimited habits and todo on free plan, and is aimed at beginners, so it suits a small team or a single user testing a habit and task routine. Read more in our Hizo review.
Bitbucket also offers a free plan, and it lists project management alongside automation. Its free tier is capped, though: Free: up to 5 users. That ceiling matters more than the entry price, because a team above that size has already outgrown it. See the Bitbucket review for context.
ClickUp has a free plan too, and its model is listed as a free plan only, so the paid entry point is the next step up. Dolisoft has a free plan in a different form: Self-hosted open-source version free to download, which means hosting and upkeep sit with you rather than with the vendor. The Dolisoft review sets out what that shift costs you.
Work out the real entry price and billing period
Paid plans across this group start at $1.92, $3.65, $10 and €14. Those are entry figures, not what most teams will pay, and the currency differs between them, so compare in the currency your own finance team reports in. Dolisoft also lists a per-user starting price of €14, which is the number to model for a growing team.
For wider context, the entry prices recorded across the tools tracked in this category run €1.68 to €1,315.44. A spread like that means the cheapest name on a list page is rarely the cheapest over a year.
Check what the price buys before a renewal lands. ClickUp lists a free plan as its only model in our records, which leaves the paid tier as the route to check. Bitbucket lists both a free plan and a free trial, and Dolisoft lists a free plan and a free trial of 30, so you can test paid behaviour before committing. Hizo lists a free plan, with paid pricing starting at $1.92.
Test limits and quotas against a real project
Limits are where free plans quietly stop working. That is the most useful number for Bitbucket: everything else on the page matters less if your headcount is already past it.
Dolisoft's entry tier carries its own caps: Basic: 4 GB, 2000 API calls/month. If your team automates anything against the tool, or stores large files, that allowance is the constraint to watch. Hizo takes the opposite approach, with Unlimited habits and todo on free plan, so the question there becomes volume of use rather than a ceiling.
ClickUp's recorded connection count is the widest here, at 1,000 integrations. A large catalogue cuts setup time, but it also widens the surface you depend on, so weigh it against how many of those connections you will actually maintain.
Check the platform and hosting decision
Where the tool runs changes who carries the work. Dolisoft supports Windows, Mac and Linux, so it can sit on your own infrastructure or be run as a hosted service. That flexibility is the point of the product, and it is also the trade-off: a self-hosted install has to be maintained by someone on your side.
Bitbucket and ClickUp are presented as hosted services, and Hizo is built for beginners with support through email and help centre. If nobody on your team wants to run infrastructure, a managed option usually wins even when it costs more per seat.
Read the support promise as part of the price
Support is easy to undervalue and hard to replace. Hizo offers support through email and help centre. ClickUp's recorded support channels are help centre, a narrower set than the others. Dolisoft adds email, help centre and community on top, including a community route that can be worth a great deal at higher tiers.
A help centre answers common questions. When a project stalls on a configuration nobody documented, the difference between a community forum and a direct reply is felt quickly, and it belongs on the same line of the calculation as the per-user price.
Use age, headquarters and ownership to read reliability
Background is a proxy for staying power. Bitbucket was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in AU, and it sits inside an established public software company, which usually means published roadmap work and a long support horizon. ClickUp was founded in 2017, is headquartered in US, and operates as Mango Technologies, Inc..
Dolisoft has the longest history of the group, founded in 2003 and run as Dolibarr Association. A foundation-backed project behaves differently from a venture-backed one, and a self-hosted community edition means the code does not disappear if a pricing decision changes. Whether that suits you depends on how much of the software you expect to run yourself.
Shortlist, then read the reviews
After the numbers, check the qualitative record for the tools that survived. Our rankings for project management software put the main contenders side by side, and the individual write-ups carry the detail a pricing page leaves out.
A couple of questions settle most shortlists. Does the free plan cover the team you have now, or only the team you had when you started? And if the free plan disappeared tomorrow, would the paid price still be a price you can justify? Most tools here pass the free plan test only for small groups, and the second test usually depends on how many seats you need rather than on the headline entry price.
The names worth reading next include Notion, Linear, Monday.com, Basecamp and HansaWorld, which take different positions on the same trade-offs. Compare them on free plan limits and paid price first, then let the reviews decide the tie.