The AI Is Always Behind the Paywall
Search for a free AI task manager and you get a list of apps that all have AI features and all have free plans. The catch is that those are never the same tier.
Checked against each vendor's own pricing page in October 2026: Todoist puts its "Task Assist" AI in Pro. ClickUp excludes Brain from Free Forever and sells it as an add-on at $9 per user per month, or $7.20 billed yearly. Asana lists AI Teammates, Asana Dash and AI Studio as paid-tier features, absent from the free Personal plan.
One number is worth pausing on, because it reframes the whole category. On Asana's Starter plan at $10.99 per user per month, the AI allowance is 5 requests per user per month, capped at 50 per account. That is not a free-tier restriction — that is what you get after paying. When the paid allowance is five requests a month, the free tier missing AI entirely stops looking like the problem.
So the useful question is not "which free plan has AI" but "which free plan gets out of my way", and then "where does the AI actually come from". Those turn out to have different answers.
The Free Plans, and Where Each One Stops
The four genuinely free options cap you on completely different axes, which is why a generic recommendation is useless. Pick the one whose limit you will not hit.
Todoist Best for capture speed
Free (named Beginner) gives 5 personal projects, task reminders, 3 custom filters and 5 MB file uploads. Pro, at $4/month billed annually, raises that to 300 projects, 150 filters, calendar views, 100 MB uploads and unlimited Task Assist.
Five projects sounds brutal and usually is not, because Todoist's strength is speed of capture rather than structure: natural-language input, keyboard-driven quick add, everything in one inbox. If you work from a single list and a handful of areas, the free plan lasts indefinitely. If you keep a project per client, you will hit the wall in a fortnight. At $4/month, Pro is also the cheapest paid tier in this article by a wide margin.
TickTick Most features per free seat
The most generous free feature set, and the one with the most counting. Free includes 9 lists, 99 tasks per list, 19 checklist items per task, 2 reminders per task, 5 habits, and 1 attachment per day at up to 10 MB. Premium is $49.99 a year — about $4.17 a month — lifting those to 299 lists, 999 tasks per list and 199 checklist items.
Nine lists times 99 tasks is 891 tasks, which is more headroom than most people need. The limits that bite first are the small ones: 19 checklist items inside a task, and a single daily attachment. It also includes habit tracking and a calendar view on free, which Todoist does not.
ClickUp Unlimited tasks, 60 MB
Free Forever gives unlimited tasks and unlimited members but 60 MB of storage, plus structural caps: 5 Spaces, 40 Lists per Space, 100 Folders per Space, 1 Form, 3 Whiteboards and 1 Wiki. Unlimited is $7 per user per month billed yearly, $10 monthly.
That 60 MB is the figure to plan around: it is roughly a dozen screenshots and a couple of PDFs. ClickUp free works well as a structured task system and badly as a document store. Keep files elsewhere and link to them.
Asana Unlimited work, two people
The exact inverse of ClickUp. Asana's free Personal plan allows unlimited tasks and projects but a maximum of 2 users. Starter is $10.99 per user per month billed annually ($13.49 monthly), Advanced $24.99 ($30.49 monthly).
For a solo knowledge worker, "2 users" is not a limit at all — it is you plus one collaborator, and the project structure is unlimited. For anything resembling a team, it is the hardest ceiling here.
Vikunja Free with no ceiling
If every cap above annoys you, the open-source answer is Vikunja, licensed AGPLv3, where self-hosting is free with no limits and all core features included. Their hosted plans start at €4/month if you would rather not run a server. There is no AI, and you own the maintenance — but there is also no tier that expires, no storage meter and no seat count.
The Ones With No Free Plan at All
Three names dominate "AI task manager" lists and none of them belongs in a free roundup.
Motion — the app most associated with AI auto-scheduling — offers a trial, not a free plan, at $19 per seat per month for Pro AI and $29 for Business AI. Sunsama is explicit about it: no free forever plan and no plans to add one, on the stated view that free plans create bad incentives; a 14-day trial, then $25/month or $20 billed annually. Morgen also has no permanent free plan — a 14-day trial, then Pro at $30/month or $15 billed yearly.
Those are defensible products at defensible prices. They are simply not free, and a comparison that lists them as such will cost you an afternoon. The same was true of the scheduling category — our roundup of free AI scheduling tools for remote teams found the same pattern, including one tool that shut down entirely.
The Free AI Setup That Actually Works
Here is the arrangement that gives a knowledge worker real AI help at zero cost: keep the task manager dumb, and put the AI one step upstream.
The genuinely hard part of task management is not storing tasks, it is turning a vague commitment into a concrete list — "prepare the Q4 review" becoming eleven specific next actions with an order. That is exactly what a free ChatGPT or Claude account does well, and it needs no integration: describe the project, ask for a numbered list of concrete next actions, paste the result into Todoist or TickTick. Both accept multi-line paste as separate tasks.
Three things make this better than the built-in AI, not just cheaper. You can iterate on the breakdown conversationally before anything lands in your list. You are not spending a metered allowance — remember Asana's five requests a month on a paid tier. And the output is plain text, so it works with whichever app you use.
Two practical helpers for the paste step: our AI Prompt Templates includes task-breakdown prompts worth reusing, and Remove Duplicate Lines clears the repeats you get when you regenerate a list twice. If a list arrives with stray formatting from a document, AI Text Cleaner strips it before import, and CSV to JSON helps when you are moving a bulk export between apps.
The other free input worth wiring up is meetings: action items captured automatically and pasted into your list. Our comparison of free AI meeting note takers covers which free tiers survive real calls, and the free project management tools roundup goes deeper on the team side of the same question.
Comparison Table
| Tool | Free Plan | AI on Free? | Paid From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Todoist | 5 projects · 3 filters · 5 MB uploads | No — Task Assist is Pro | $4/mo annual |
| TickTick | 9 lists · 99 tasks/list · 19 checklist items · 5 habits | No | $49.99/yr (~$4.17/mo) |
| ClickUp | Unlimited tasks & members · 60 MB · 5 Spaces | No — Brain add-on $9/user/mo | $7/user/mo annual |
| Asana | Unlimited tasks & projects · max 2 users | No — and Starter gives only 5 requests/user/mo | $10.99/user/mo annual |
| Vikunja | Self-hosted, no limits (AGPLv3) | No AI at all | Cloud from €4/mo |
| Motion | None — trial only | Paid product | $19/seat/mo |
| Sunsama | None — 14-day trial, by policy | Paid product | $20/mo annual |
| Morgen | None — 14-day trial | Paid product | $15/mo annual |
Which One Should You Use?
- You work from one list and want zero friction: Todoist free. Five projects is enough if you organise by area rather than by client, and nothing captures faster.
- You want the most features without paying: TickTick free — calendar view, habits and 891 tasks of headroom. Watch the 19 checklist items per task.
- You want structure and collaborators: ClickUp free. Unlimited tasks and members; just keep your files somewhere else, because 60 MB goes fast.
- You are solo with unlimited projects: Asana free. Two users is irrelevant when one of them is you.
- You refuse to hit any cap: self-host Vikunja. AGPLv3, no limits, no AI, and you run the server.
- You want AI help today, for nothing: any free app above plus a free ChatGPT or Claude account for the breakdown step. Iterate in chat, paste the list in.
- You are considering Motion, Sunsama or Morgen: budget for them. They are good, and none of them is free.