Project management · cost comparison
Asana vs self-hosted Vikunja: what each actually costs
Asana on the Starter tier against Vikunja running on the smallest server that fits it. Every figure below is computed from the sizing model and the dated prices at the foot of this page, and includes the part most comparisons leave out: your own time.
At 10 people, self-hosting Vikunja costs $42.30 a month against $135 for Asana. You are ahead after about a month and $3,184 better off over 36 months, with your own time already priced in.
- Asana
- $135per month, Starter
- Self-hosted
- $42.30server, backups and your time
- Server and backups
- $4.80Basic, 1 GB RAM
- 36-month difference
- $3,184 saved by self-hosting
- Break-even
- about a monthafter $150 of setup time
The same comparison at every team size
Self-hosting has a floor and almost no slope, while per-seat software has no floor and a steep slope. That is the whole story, and it is why the answer flips somewhere in this table rather than being the same for everyone.
| Team size | Asana | Self-hosted | Without valuing your time | Server needed | 36-month difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | $0.00 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | -$1,673 |
| 5 people | $67.45 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | +$755 |
| 10 people | $135 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | +$3,184 |
| 25 people | $337 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | +$10,468 |
| 50 people | $674 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | +$22,609 |
| 100 people | $1,349 | $42.30 | $4.80 | Basic (1 GB) | +$46,891 |
| 250 people | $3,372 | $49.50 | $12.00 | Starter 2 GB (2 GB) | +$119,478 |
The balance tips in favour of self-hosting at around 5 people.
Where the self-hosted money actually goes at 10 people
| Line item | Per month | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Server | $4.00 | Basic at Kamatera: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB disk |
| Backups | $0.80 | Provider snapshots at 20% of the server price. Skipping this is not a saving, it is a bet. |
| Your time | $37.50 | 0.5 hours a month of updates, upgrades and the occasional broken thing, at $75 an hour |
| Total | $42.30 | Plus $150 once, for roughly 2 hours of first-time setup |
Asana at this size costs $135 a month. 10 seats at $13.49 each.
Read this before you price anything
Asana's Personal plan is free for up to 2 seats. Beyond that, the Starter tier below applies.
What Vikunja needs to run at 10 people
A single Go binary with SQLite, PostgreSQL or MySQL. Kanban, list and Gantt views without the operational weight of Plane.
| Resource | Required | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 0.7 GB | 0.5 GB for the stack at rest, plus 3 MB per active user, plus 25% headroom |
| Disk | 6 GB | 5 GB base, plus 0.1 GB per user |
| vCPU | 1 | The project's own baseline. For this workload memory runs out before the processor does. |
What you give up, stated plainly
- Uptime is now yours. Asana has an operations team on call. Self-hosted, a failed upgrade at 18:00 on a Friday is your evening.
- Backups only exist if you test restoring them. The $0.80 line above buys snapshots, not a rehearsed recovery.
- Vikunja is a light lift: one container and no scheduled work beyond image updates. That is why the maintenance line is 0.5 hours a month rather than zero.
- Feature parity is never exact. Vikunja covers the core of what teams use Asana for; the long tail of integrations and enterprise controls is where the gap shows.
Where to put Vikunja
0.7 GB of memory and 6 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the Basic at Kamatera for $4.00 a month.
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and Hetzner in particular is usually cheaper per gigabyte of memory than anything quoted above. Price them yourself before you commit.
The Kamatera link above is an affiliate link: if you open a paying account through it, Kamatera pays us a one-time commission of $75 (in most countries). That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
Vikunja at a glance
| Licence | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
|---|---|
| Written in | Go |
| GitHub stars | 5,364, checked 2026-09-12 |
| Latest release | v2.6.0 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-12 |
| Ships Docker images | Yes |
| Project | vikunja.io · go-vikunja/vikunja |
Get the migration checklist for this tool
A one-page pre-flight list: data export path, sizing, backup plan, and the rollback step most people skip.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
| Input | Value used | Source | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asana Starter | USD 13.49 per seat per month; free for up to 2 users | vendor pricing page | 2026-09-14 |
| Kamatera Basic | $4.00 per month | provider pricing page | 2026-09-14 |
| Engineer time | $75 per hour | our published assumption | — |
| Vikunja sizing | 0.5 GB base, 3 MB per user | project documentation | — |
Prices move. If the vendor has changed theirs since 2026-09-14, the figures above are stale and the source links are the authority, not us. How we handle that.