Pricing
What it actually costs.
Sticker price, what the entry tier quietly leaves out, and the point at which most teams end up on the next plan up.
Pricing breakdowns
How to read a pricing page
The headline price is the least useful number on it
Two tools advertised at $10 a month are not the same purchase if one charges per seat and the other charges per workspace. At a team of twelve that is $120 against $10, from an identical headline. Per-seat billing is the single biggest reason a software bill stops resembling the price that was compared, and it is never the number on the pricing hero.
The second reason is the annual discount. Most vendors show the monthly-equivalent price of an annual plan by default, so the figure on the page is one you can only pay by committing to a year up front. Paying monthly is routinely twenty to twenty-five per cent more than the number advertised.
Then there is the tier you will actually end up on. Features that decide whether a tool is usable at all - single sign-on, an audit log, an API, a permissions model with more than two roles - sit two tiers above the one being advertised more often than not. The entry price tells you what it costs to try something. It rarely tells you what it costs to depend on it.
So every pricing page here lists the tiers in full, names what each one gates, and says plainly where a tier is sold by quote rather than published. A price that is not on the vendor’s own site is not on ours either, and we say so rather than guessing at it.
- Compare two ladders side by side: head-to-head comparisons
- Filter the catalogue to genuinely free tools: free software in the directory
- See what a category typically costs: browse by category
Questions about pricing
- Where do these prices come from?
- Each vendor's own published pricing page, read and recorded rather than estimated. Where a tier is sold by quote we say so instead of inventing a figure, because a made-up number is worse than an admitted gap.
- How current are they?
- Pricing moves, and a stale figure is the most damaging kind of error a directory can carry. Where a price has changed since it was recorded, the vendor page is the authority and ours is a snapshot. Claimed listings let the vendor keep their own figures current directly.
- What counts as free?
- A published $0 plan, an open-source licence, or a starting price of zero. A time-limited trial is not free, and neither is a tier that requires a card up front, so neither is counted as such anywhere on this site.
- Why is per-seat billing called out separately?
- Because it changes what the number means. Two tools at the same headline price are a different purchase entirely at a team of ten, and a comparison that ignores it is comparing nothing.
Other ways to narrow it down
Price is one axis. These are the others worth checking before committing.
- Browse by categoryEvery category, and what sits in each one.
- The full directoryFilter the whole catalogue by platform, price or category.
- Head to headTwo tools on the same fields, with a straight answer.
- Best ofA shortlist per category, and why each one made it.
- AlternativesWhat people move to, and what they give up doing it.
Something missing here?
Anyone can submit a tool. A person reads every submission, checks the pricing against the vendor’s own page, and nothing is published until it passes.