Linear vs Asana vs ClickUp for Solo Freelancers in 2026
Linear is now $100M ARR, $1.25B valuation, and the standard at OpenAI and Vercel. Asana laid off 9% of staff. ClickUp passed $300M ARR. The right pick for a solo freelancer juggling 5-15 client projects depends on which kind of work you actually run.
The Delivvo team· May 10, 2026 6 min read
Most "best project tracker" listicles are written for teams of 30. Solo freelancers running 5-15 client projects in parallel have a different job: keep the work shippable, the client communication tidy, and the per-month cost low enough that the tool doesn't show up on the year-end "what am I paying for" review.
The three tools that actually compete for that market in 2026 are Linear, Asana, and ClickUp. The pricing pages all look similar. The fit is not similar.
The 2026 pricing, all three side by side
Direct from each vendor's pricing page:
Linear — Free / Basic / Business / Enterprise. Per linear.app/pricing: Free is $0; Basic is $10/user/month on annual ($14 monthly); Business is $16/user/month on annual ($24 monthly); Enterprise is custom.
Asana — Personal / Starter / Advanced / Enterprise. Per asana.com/pricing: Personal is free for up to 2 users; Starter is $10.99/user/month annual ($13.49 monthly); Advanced is $24.99 annual ($30.49 monthly); Enterprise is custom.
ClickUp — Free Forever / Unlimited / Business / Enterprise. Per clickup.com/pricing: Free Forever is $0; Unlimited is $7/user/month; Business is $12/user/month; Enterprise is custom. AI add-ons sit on top — Brain at $9/user/month, Everything AI at $28/user/month.
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For a solo freelancer the math is unusually simple — one seat. Cheapest paid tier: ClickUp Unlimited at $7. Mid-priced: Linear Basic at $10. Asana Starter is the most expensive of the three at $10.99.
The financials behind the choice
The companies' 2025-2026 financial trajectories aren't background — they're a real input on which tool will exist in 2028:
Linear raised $82M in June 2025 at a $1.25B valuation, with profits up 280% year-over-year and 15,000+ customers, per TechCrunch's coverage. The customer roster is heavy on engineering-led companies — OpenAI, Scale AI, Perplexity, Vercel, Cursor, Ramp.
Asana posted FY2025 revenue of $723.9M, up 11% year-over-year, per its investor relations release. The company also laid off about 9% of its workforce in 2024 to improve operating costs, reported by Computerworld. The stock has been an underperformer in the broader software index through 2025-2026.
ClickUp reached approximately $300M ARR by September 2025, up from $278.5M in 2024, with around 100,000 customers and a $4B valuation from its 2021 Series C, tracked by Sacra.
Linear and ClickUp are both growing. Asana is broadly flat with margin pressure.
The actual product fit, by discipline
The reason these three tools don't compete on identical ground:
Linear is built for engineering work. Cycles, issues, projects, roadmaps. Keyboard-first, fast, opinionated. Github integration is excellent. If you're a developer, your client probably uses Linear or wants to use Linear, and the tool slots into the work.
Asana is built for a project manager managing a team of 8 marketers. Tasks, sub-tasks, custom fields, timeline views, dependencies. The structure makes sense for a team that needs to assign work across people. For a solo freelancer it has more structure than the work needs.
ClickUp is built to be everything for everyone. Tasks, docs, whiteboards, time tracking, mind maps, dashboards, forms, embeds. The kitchen-sink approach means you'll find a feature for any workflow you have, and you'll spend the first weekend deciding which features to actively ignore.
The pattern that holds across solo freelancers in 2026:
| Discipline | Best fit | Why | |---|---|---| | Developers | Linear | Native to how engineering work is described. Free tier is enough for most solo dev workloads. | | Designers | ClickUp Unlimited | Whiteboards, embedded Figma frames, simple kanban for brand, web, and product work. Linear is overkill; Asana's structure is heavy. | | Writers / editors | Linear or ClickUp | Linear if your client work flows like an issue queue (assignments, drafts, review). ClickUp if you want docs + tasks in one place. | | Consultants | Asana Starter or ClickUp Business | Multi-stakeholder workflows with dependencies and timeline views. Asana's Gantt is better for client-facing reporting. |
A freelancer at a laptop reviewing a project tracker dashboard with task lists
The free tiers, compared honestly
The most important detail most listicles bury: each tool's free tier is genuinely different.
Linear Free — 2 teams, 250 issues, unlimited members. The 250 issue cap is the real constraint, not the team count. Manageable for two or three small client projects, painful past five.
Asana Personal — Free for up to 2 users only. Good if you collaborate with one assistant. Bad if you have 4 client stakeholders who need a guest seat each.
ClickUp Free Forever — Unlimited tasks, but only 60MB of storage. The storage cap is what most freelancers hit before they need to upgrade.
For a solo freelancer running fewer than three concurrent projects, all three free tiers can work for a quarter. Past that, the upgrade timing differs by tool: Linear hits the issue cap, Asana hits the user cap, ClickUp hits the storage cap.
The 2026 buying mistake to avoid
The single most common solo-freelancer mistake on these tools: paying for the tier above what you need, in anticipation of growth.
ClickUp Business at $12/user is overspending vs Unlimited at $7 for any solo freelancer not already running team workflows.
Asana Advanced at $24.99 is a team product. Solo freelancers do not need it.
Linear Business at $16 is mostly Asks (the help-desk-style intake feature) and Triage. Solo freelancers running an issue-style workflow rarely need Asks.
The right rule of thumb: pick the cheapest paid tier of whichever tool fits your discipline. Upgrade only when the free or basic tier limit actually bites — not when you imagine it will.
What this looks like once you actually have clients
A solo freelancer juggling 5-15 client projects has three things to track per project: the work itself (tasks), the deliverables (files), and the money (invoices, payments, contracts). Linear, Asana, and ClickUp all handle the first one well. None of them handles the second two — that's where a portal layer above the project tracker comes in.
Delivvo gives solo freelancers a single branded portal where each client sees only their own proposals, contracts, file delivery, and invoices — sitting above whichever project tracker (Linear, Asana, ClickUp, Notion) is your internal system. The client doesn't need a Linear seat; you don't need to forward updates by email. See how it works →
The bottom line
For most solo freelancers in 2026 the right pick is: Linear if you're a developer, ClickUp Unlimited if you're a designer or writer, Asana Starter if you're a consultant running multi-stakeholder timelines. The pricing gap between the three is small enough that fit-to-discipline matters more than fee per seat. And the tier you actually want is almost always the cheapest paid one — not the one above it.
