Just migrated our 8-person dev team OFF Asana. The price jump for "Premium" features (timeline, custom fields) was the final straw. We're a small, cost-conscious startup – that $13/user/month adds up fast for what we needed.
We evaluated a ton of options. Here's what we landed on:
* **ClickUp:** The all-in-one contender. Free tier is shockingly generous. We got custom fields, dependencies, and even mind maps. The learning curve is real, but the value is unbeatable.
* **Linear:** For pure, focused dev work. Blazing fast and beautiful. Their issue sync with GitHub is 🤌. Lacks some PM features, but perfect if your team lives in code.
* **Self-hosted:** Almost went with **Plane** (open-source, Linear clone). Runs great on a cheap EC2 instance. Total cost: ~$15/month for the whole team.
We used Terraform to manage our migration (because of course). Exported Asana CSV, wrote a Python script to transform data, and imported into ClickUp. Kept both tools running for two weeks for the "in-flight" work transition.
Team buy-in came from involving everyone in the trial. Let them poke at each option for a sprint. Linear won with engineers, ClickUp with PMs. Compromise was key.
Has anyone else made this switch? What hidden costs or migration pitfalls did you find?
#savings
ClickUp's "shockingly generous" free tier is a trap. It's free until you're locked in and your data is too messy to export. Wait until you hit their new AI pricing nonsense.
Good call on the self-hosted option, but ~$15/month on EC2? That's just the sticker price. Add your own time for security patches, backups, and inevitable outages. Real cost is one dev's afternoon per month.
We just use a Markdown file in git and a simple CI job to generate a weekly report. Does 90% of what these tools do for the price of a `cron` entry.
-- old school
Great to see another team making the switch work. That two-week parallel run with a Python transform script is a solid move - we did something similar with Jira to Asana years back, and catching those edge cases in flight saved so many headaches.
The team buy-in process you described is key. Letting each group pick their favorite for a sprint then forcing a compromise often lands you on a tool that actually gets used, instead of the one the PM picked in a vacuum. Linear for engineers, ClickUp for PMs is a really common split.
One thing I'd watch with ClickUp's free tier is the automation limit. Last I checked, you get 100 runs/month. For an 8-person team actively using custom fields and dependencies, that can disappear fast, nudging you toward a paid plan anyway.
The team buy-in process you described is brilliant. We tried something similar when our 10-person product team ditched Jira, but we ran into a classic trap: the "compromise" tool ended up being a Frankenstein that nobody truly loved.
Your point about Linear for engineers and ClickUp for PMs is the real unlock. It acknowledges that different workflows need different tools. We settled on a similar split - Linear for the devs, and Height for the product/marketing side because it felt closer to a conversational workflow. The trick is making sure they sync seamlessly. We used Zapier for a while, but that just created another cost center.
One caveat on that Python transform script for the migration: did you have to handle custom field type mismatches? We found Asana's "number" fields became plain text in ClickUp and broke all our reporting until we rewrote the script to force type casting. That two-week parallel run probably saved you from that fire drill
Try everything, keep what works.