The Verdict

Make is still the cheapest way to buy real automation — around £7/month for 10,000 credits. ClickUp is the most complete single platform at £5.10/seat, but its AI is now a £6.60/seat add-on billed on every paid seat, which changes the maths completely. Notion AI is no longer a cheap add-on: full AI now sits on Business at £14.60/seat. For most small teams the answer is Make plus one management platform, not an all-in-one.

Best AI Productivity Tools 2026: What They Actually Cost Now

Short answer: buy Make for automation and one management platform for everything else. Make sits at roughly £7/month for 10,000 credits. Pair it with ClickUp Unlimited at about £5.10/seat and a five-person team runs the whole stack for under £35/month. Nothing else on this page beats that on value.

The thing that changed in 2026 is where the AI money sits. Every platform here has moved AI out of the base price and into either a per-seat add-on or a higher tier. ClickUp Brain is charged on every paid seat whether that person uses it or not. Notion moved full AI up to Business. Monday meters AI in credits with overage billing. If you priced these tools in early 2026 and haven’t looked since, your budget is wrong.

This is a research-based comparison built from vendor pricing pages and independent pricing trackers, cross-checked in August 2026. It is not a hands-on lab test, and where sources disagree — they do on Make’s Pro and Teams tiers — that’s flagged rather than smoothed over.

Pricing at a glance (checked August 2026)

Tool	Entry paid price (annual)	Approx GBP	AI cost on top	Billing catch
Make	~$9–10.59/mo, 10,000 credits	~£6.60–7.75	Included in credits	AI actions burn credits faster than standard ones
ClickUp	$7/seat/mo (Unlimited)	~£5.10	Brain $9/seat/mo	Brain billed on every paid seat
Zapier	$19.99/mo (Professional, 750 tasks)	~£14.60	Included	Task-based; £21.90 if you pay monthly
Monday.com	$9/seat/mo (Basic)	~£6.55	Credit pool + overage	3-seat minimum on every paid plan
Asana	$10.99/user/mo (Starter)	~£8.00	AI credits included by tier	Seats sold in 5-seat blocks above 5
Notion	$10/seat/mo (Plus)	~£7.30	Full AI needs Business, $20/seat	Plus only gets a limited AI trial

GBP figures use roughly $1 ≈ £0.73 (August 2026) and exclude VAT. Every tool here bills in USD, so your sterling cost moves with the exchange rate on your card.

1. Make — still the value winner

Price: ~~$9–10.59/month annual for Core, 10,000 credits (~~£6.60–7.75) Best for: Small teams, cost-conscious automation, anyone currently overpaying Zapier

Make remains the cheapest route to genuinely useful automation. Ten thousand credits a month covers the kind of thing most small businesses actually want automated — form submissions into a spreadsheet, Slack alerts when a deal closes, invoices parsed out of email.

The rename to know about. Make switched its billing unit from “operations” to “credits” in August 2025. Existing balances converted 1:1 and standard actions still cost one credit each, so nothing got more expensive overnight. But AI-powered modules consume credits faster than standard modules, which means a scenario with an LLM step in it will not cost what the same scenario cost last year. Budget on your actual scenario mix, not the headline number.

Where the sources disagree. Published figures for Core cluster between $9 and $10.59/month on annual billing depending on which tracker you read, and Pro and Teams are quoted anywhere from $16/$29 to $21/$38. That spread is wide enough that you should check the live pricing page before committing — treat the numbers here as the right order of magnitude, not a quote.

The free tier is real. 1,000 credits a month, two active scenarios, 15-minute minimum interval. Enough to prove the concept before you pay anything.

Against Zapier: Make’s Core plan gives you roughly 13x the monthly volume for about half the price of Zapier Professional. That gap is the single clearest value judgement on this page.

Where it falls short: Fewer integrations than Zapier and a smaller community, so obscure apps and edge-case debugging are harder. The visual builder is genuinely good but the minimum-interval limits on lower tiers matter if you need near-real-time triggers.

2. ClickUp — most complete, but read the AI line

Price: Free / Unlimited $7 (~~£5.10) / Business $12 (~~£8.75) per seat per month, annual Monthly billing: roughly $10 and $19 per seat Best for: Teams of 3–50 who want projects, docs and light automation in one place

ClickUp does more per pound than anything else on this list. Custom views mean the same data renders as a Gantt chart for a project manager, a board for a designer and a dashboard for a client. Built-in automation handles the everyday cases without a separate tool.

Here’s the part that has changed, and it’s expensive. ClickUp Brain is an add-on at around $9 per user per month (~£6.60), and it is billed on every paid Member in the workspace — not just the people who use it. A twenty-person team pays roughly £132/month for AI even if five people ever touch it. There is also a higher Brain Max / “Everything AI” tier reported at $28/user/month. Reported add-on figures vary between $7 and $9 depending on source and plan, so confirm on the pricing page.

Correction to our earlier version of this article: we previously listed ClickUp Brain at £0.70–1 per user per month. That was wrong by roughly an order of magnitude. The add-on is priced in the £5–7 per seat range.

Super Agents. ClickUp shipped autonomous agents in late 2025 that execute multi-step workflows rather than just answering questions — you @mention them like a teammate. Independent write-ups rate ClickUp’s AI as more mature for workspace-wide knowledge search and document generation than its competitors, which is the use case most teams actually have.

Where it falls short: Feature sprawl makes initial setup genuinely daunting, and the AI add-on economics punish large workspaces with few AI users. ClickUp also charges sales tax in the UK and other jurisdictions, so budget VAT on top.

3. Zapier — the expensive incumbent

Price: Professional $19.99/month annual for 750 tasks (~~£14.60); $29.99 monthly (~~£21.90) Best for: Teams with deep existing Zap libraries or obscure integration needs

Zapier’s integration catalogue and documentation are still the best in the category. If a tool exists, Zapier probably connects to it, and if you get stuck someone has already posted the answer.

The problem is arithmetic. 750 tasks for £14.60 is a fraction of what Make gives you for half the money, and scaling hurts — 2,000 tasks pushes Professional to around $49/month on annual billing, and high-volume tiers run into thousands per month.

Who should still pay for it: teams with hundreds of existing Zaps where migration cost exceeds the saving, and anyone who needs an integration Make doesn’t have. The free tier (100 tasks/month) is still worth using before you pay anyone.

The trend to watch: ClickUp, Monday and Notion are all building native automation, which eats Zapier’s job from below. That’s been true for two years and is still true.

4. Monday.com — the AI-first platform with a seat floor

Price: Basic $9 / Standard $12 / Pro $19 per seat per month, annual (~£6.55 / £8.75 / £13.90) Monthly billing: roughly $12 / $14 / $24 Best for: Visual teams, stakeholder-facing work, teams that want agents rather than an assistant

Monday is the best-looking tool here and that is not a trivial point — non-technical stakeholders adopt it, which is half the battle with any project tool.

The pricing detail that catches people out: every paid plan requires a minimum of three seats. A two-person business on Basic still pays for three, so the real floor is $27/month (~£19.70), $36 on Standard, $57 on Pro. The free plan caps at 2 seats and 3 boards, so there’s no way round it.

AI is metered. Monday runs AI on a monthly credit pool — roughly 1,000 credits on Basic, 2,000 on Standard, 3,000 on Pro — with overage billed at approximately $0.01 per credit on annual plans. Monday’s agent line-up (Project Analyzer, Sales Advisor and similar) is more ambitious than a single assistant: these are agents designed to act rather than answer. Whether that ambition survives contact with your workflow is the open question, but Monday is clearly betting harder on agents than ClickUp is.

Where it falls short: integration depth trails ClickUp and Make, credit overage makes budgeting fuzzy, and you are paying a premium for interface polish.

5. Asana — enterprise planning, enterprise pricing

Price: Starter $10.99/user/month annual (~~£8.00); Advanced $24.99 (~~£18.25); Enterprise ~$35 list, quoted Monthly billing: $13.49 and $30.49 Best for: Larger teams with cross-team dependencies and long roadmaps

Asana’s timeline, portfolio and workload planning are still the strongest in the category for multi-quarter programmes with real dependencies. Governance and permissions hold up at scale.

Two pricing rules that bite small teams. The free Personal plan now caps at 2 users for accounts created after November 2025. And seats sell individually from 2 to 5, then in blocks of five — a six-person team pays for ten seats. On Advanced that’s a meaningful overpay.

AI: included allowances by tier (roughly 50,000 credits on Starter, 75,000 on Advanced, 200,000 on Enterprise, per account per month), with an AI Studio Plus add-on at around $150/month for 100,000 credits. The bundling is more generous than ClickUp’s per-seat model if your usage is concentrated in a few people.

Where it falls short: if you need Goals, Portfolios, Workload or time tracking you’re on Advanced at £18.25/seat, which is roughly double ClickUp Business for capabilities most teams under twenty people won’t use.

6. Notion AI — no longer the cheap option

Price: Free / Plus $10 (~~£7.30) / Business $20 (~~£14.60) per seat per month, annual Best for: Documentation-heavy teams already living in Notion

The 2026 change matters more than anything else on this page: Notion retired the separate AI add-on and moved full AI into the Business tier. Free and Plus now get only a limited AI trial. So the old advice — “Notion AI is basically free if you’re already on a paid plan” — is dead. Full AI means £14.60/seat, roughly triple ClickUp Unlimited.

Custom Agents are metered on top. Notion added usage-based billing for heavy Custom Agent use at around $10 per 1,000 monthly credits, with no rollover, on top of the per-seat price. Standard agents and Ask Notion stay inside the Business seat.

What Notion AI is good at: writing, summarising and searching across a workspace you’ve already invested in. What it still doesn’t do is act on other systems — it won’t create tasks elsewhere, sync data or run workflows. It’s an enhancement to Notion, not an automation layer.

Where it falls short: at £14.60/seat for AI you are paying platform prices, and Notion’s automation and integration depth don’t justify that against ClickUp Business plus Brain unless documentation is genuinely your core workflow.

Automation vs management: buy one of each

The category splits cleanly, and the mistake most teams make is buying two tools from the same half.

Automation (Make, Zapier): connect apps, move data, trigger workflows. They don’t manage projects. Management (ClickUp, Monday, Asana, Notion): plan, track, collaborate. Basic native automation, not a substitute for a real automation layer.

What a 5-person team actually pays (annual billing, ex-VAT)

Stack	Monthly (USD)	Approx GBP	Notes
Make only	~$10	~£7	Automation only, no project management
ClickUp Unlimited only	$35	~£25.50	No AI, native automation only
Make + ClickUp Unlimited	~$45	~£33	Best value combination
Make + ClickUp Unlimited + Brain	~$90	~£66	Brain billed on all 5 seats
Zapier Pro + Monday Standard	~$80	~£58	Monday 3-seat minimum already exceeded
Notion Business (full AI)	$100	~£73	Docs and AI, weak automation
Asana Advanced + Zapier Pro	~$145	~£106	Overkill below ~20 people

The gap between the best and worst sensible stack is roughly £70/month, or £840 a year, for five people doing broadly the same work. That’s the whole argument.

Recommendations

Solo / 1–2 people: Make Core (~£7) plus Notion Free. About £7/month. Skip Monday entirely — the 3-seat minimum means you’d pay for a phantom colleague.

3–20 people: Make Core plus ClickUp Unlimited. Roughly £33/month at five seats. Add ClickUp Brain only once you can name three people who’ll use it daily, because you’ll be paying for everyone.

20+ people: ClickUp Business (£8.75/seat) plus Make Pro or Teams. Model Brain at £6.60 × total seats before you commit — that line grows faster than the platform itself.

If stakeholder buy-in is your bottleneck: Monday Standard. You’ll pay more and integrate less, but people will actually use it, and an adopted tool beats a better unused one.

Enterprise with real dependency management: Asana Advanced or Enterprise. Nothing else here handles multi-team programme planning as well.

FAQ

Is Make actually better than Zapier, or just cheaper? Cheaper by a wide margin, and comparable for the automations most small businesses run. Zapier is better on integration breadth, documentation and community support. If your workflow only touches mainstream apps, the price difference decides it.

Why is ClickUp Brain so expensive relative to ClickUp itself? Because it’s billed per paid seat rather than per AI user. At $9/seat on top of a $7/seat platform, AI more than doubles your cost. That’s the single most important number on this page for anyone with a team over ten.

Has Notion AI got worse value? Yes, for most people. Moving full AI to the $20 Business tier roughly doubles the cost of getting Notion’s AI features compared with the old add-on model. If AI is the reason you were considering Notion, price ClickUp Business plus Brain against it before you commit.

What’s the cheapest way to get AI in a project tool? Asana Starter at $10.99/user with 50,000 included credits is the most generous bundling if your AI usage is concentrated in a few people. Monday Basic is cheapest per seat but meters AI and charges overage. ClickUp is cheapest as a platform and most expensive as an AI layer.

Do I need to worry about the exchange rate? Somewhat. All six bill in USD. At $1 ≈ £0.73 a $12/seat plan is £8.75; a ten-cent move in the rate shifts a 20-seat annual bill by roughly £150. Not decisive, but worth knowing when you compare against a GBP-billed alternative.

Which free tiers are genuinely usable? Make (1,000 credits, 2 scenarios) and ClickUp Free are both usable for real work. Notion Free is excellent for documentation but AI is trial-only now. Zapier Free (100 tasks) is a demo. Monday Free (2 seats, 3 boards) and Asana Personal (2 users) are too capped to run a business on.

Should I switch tools to save money? Only if the annual saving clears £500 or so, because migration costs real time. Moving five people from Zapier Professional to Make saves roughly £90/year — not worth a weekend. Moving a 20-person team off Asana Advanced to ClickUp Business saves over £2,000/year, which is.

Also worth knowing

Power Automate: the default if you’re already committed to Microsoft 365. Otherwise Make is better value. n8n: open-source, self-hostable, more powerful than Make and considerably steeper to learn. Covered in our Make vs n8n comparison. Linear: excellent for software teams specifically, not a general productivity tool. Asana affiliate note: we link to Asana without a tracking link because we’re not on their programme. Same for anything else on this site where no approved programme exists.

Final verdict

Best value: Make at roughly £7/month. Nothing else here delivers as much for as little. Best single platform: ClickUp Unlimited at £5.10/seat — provided you price Brain separately and honestly. Best for adoption: Monday, if getting people to actually use the thing is your real problem. Best for scale: Asana Advanced, once dependencies across teams become the hard part. Biggest 2026 price change: Notion moving full AI to the £14.60 Business tier. If that was your plan, re-price it.

Buy one automation tool and one management tool. Then stop shopping and go and use them.

Tools mentioned

See Make pricing See ClickUp pricing See Zapier pricing See Monday.com pricing See Notion pricing

Pricing checked August 2026. All six vendors bill in USD and change plans regularly — verify current figures on their pricing pages before purchasing. GBP conversions at approximately $1 ≈ £0.73 and exclude VAT.

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