Free task management software for small teams, startups, and individuals

A lot of "free" project management tools mean free-for-one-person or free-for-14-days. Taskive's free plan is neither: it supports up to 3 projects and 5 team members, on an ongoing basis, with no credit card required to sign up and no countdown to a forced upgrade. That covers the Kanban board itself (drag-and-drop columns, swimlanes by member or priority, unlimited tasks within those 3 projects), plus AI risk scoring with a daily allowance, burnout detection, timeline views, and MCP access for connecting Claude or ChatGPT to your workspace.

Paid tiers exist ($12/month Pro, $24/month AI) and remove the project/member caps and raise AI usage limits — but nothing about the free tier is a stripped-down trial version. It's the same product, scoped to a size that fits most small teams comfortably.

A single founder or freelancer managing their own projects gets the full free feature set — Kanban board, AI risk scoring, and MCP access to connect an AI coding assistant — without needing to invite anyone else. For solo builders who already work inside Claude or Cursor, the MCP layer means your AI assistant can query your own task list and project history directly, which is useful even at team size one.

Early-stage teams usually have exactly the profile Taskive's free tier targets: a handful of people, a couple of active projects, and engineers who live inside AI coding tools daily. The free plan's 5-member cap covers most seed-stage teams outright, and the AI risk scoring and burnout detection features are genuinely useful at this stage — startups under deadline pressure are exactly where silent overcommitment (and the resulting burnout) tends to happen first.

Small businesses juggling client work across a few concurrent projects benefit from the same free structure — up to 3 projects covers most small operations without needing to consolidate unrelated client work into a single board. As a business grows past 5 members or needs more than 3 concurrent projects, the paid tiers scale up without requiring a platform switch or data migration.

If you're evaluating Taskive specifically against another tool you already use, see how it compares to Trello, Jira, and Linear — or read more about the MCP server that powers AI context across every plan, including free.