Review
Plaky Review 2026: $3.99 Seat Pricing
A Plaky review of the CAKE.com project management tool: its real 2026 seat prices, the unusual free plan, where it beats monday and Asana on cost.
Plaky
Plaky is the project management arm of CAKE.com, the company best known for Clockify (time tracking) and Pumble (team chat). That lineage explains almost everything about the product: it is priced like a utility rather than like a platform, it ships unlimited users on the free plan, and it assumes you will pay for the missing pieces by buying the other two CAKE.com apps in a bundle.
For a small business that needs boards, tables, timelines, and dashboards without a per-seat negotiation, that is a genuinely attractive shape. For a team that needs deep reporting, mature integrations, or enterprise governance, it is not enough on its own.
This review covers what Plaky does, the exact 2026 pricing (including the bundle math that most reviews skip), where it wins against monday and Asana, and the specific team profiles for which $3.99 per seat is a trap rather than a bargain.
TL;DR
- Plaky is a board-and-table project management tool from CAKE.com, priced at $3.99 per seat per month billed annually (Pro) and $8.99 per seat per month billed annually (Enterprise), with a monthly option at $4.99 and $10.99 respectively.
- The free plan is genuinely unusual: unlimited users on unlimited spaces, boards, items, and views, with 6 custom fields per board, a 7-day activity log, and 10 MB per file. For a 12-person team that only needs light structure, that is $0 forever.
- A CAKE.com Bundle at $12.99 per seat per month billed annually ($15.99 monthly) adds Pumble and Clockify on the same seat — versus $27.97 if bought separately. If you were going to pay for team chat and time tracking anyway, this is the real comparison, not Plaky’s list price.
- Best for: small and mid-sized businesses doing non-technical project work — marketing, operations, admin, HR, agencies — who want unlimited seats and a low training cost.
- Skip it if: you need real dependency-driven scheduling with baselines, more than 1,000 automation actions per month without paying up, open API access for custom integrations, or reporting that a client will accept without rework.
What Plaky actually is
Plaky organizes work into spaces → boards → items, with fields on items. The views are table, Kanban, chart, and Gantt (Gantt from the Pro tier), plus dashboards that pull data from several boards. If that structure sounds familiar, it is: this is the monday/ClickUp board model, implemented with fewer features and a much lower price.
The feature set, per the vendor’s own plan comparison:
- Unlimited spaces, boards, items, and views on every plan including free — stated on the Plaky pricing page plan comparison and carried into the vendor’s features index
- Custom fields: 6 per board on free, unlimited on Pro and Enterprise
- Views: Table, Kanban, Chart (all plans), Gantt (Pro and above)
- Dashboards: 1 board per dashboard on free, up to 15 boards on Pro, up to 30 on Enterprise
- Automations: none on free, 1,000 actions per month on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise
- Activity log: 7 days on free, 6 months on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise
- File storage: 10 MB per file on free, 25 MB on Pro, 100 MB on Enterprise
- Viewer role on Pro: up to 5 Viewers per paid seat, and Viewers do not consume a seat
- Single sign-on (SSO), custom subdomain, board permissions, and custom user profiles only on Enterprise
The important structural detail is at the bottom of that list. SSO is Enterprise-only, at $8.99 per seat annually. For a company that has decided every SaaS tool must be behind Google or Microsoft SSO, the effective entry price is not $3.99 — it is $8.99, or 2.25× the advertised number. And if you are still deciding whether a board tool is the right category at all, the master roundup of PM software is the faster starting point.
The 2026 pricing, including the bundle
| Plan | Annual (per seat/mo) | Monthly (per seat/mo) | Key inclusions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | Unlimited users, 6 fields/board, 1 board per dashboard, 10 MB files, 7-day log |
| Pro | $3.99 | $4.99 | Unlimited fields, Gantt, 15 boards per dashboard, 1,000 automation actions/mo, 25 MB files, 5 Viewers per seat |
| Enterprise | $8.99 | $10.99 | SSO, custom subdomain, board permissions, unlimited automations, 30 boards per dashboard, 100 MB files |
| CAKE.com Bundle | $12.99 | $15.99 | Enterprise-level Plaky + Pumble chat + Clockify time tracking, one seat across all three |
Vendor states the bundle’s combined value at $27.97 per user per month, so the bundle is a 53% discount against buying the three separately. Three billing details matter:
Seats are counted by active or invited user, regardless of role. Plaky’s FAQ is explicit: every active or invited user on a paid plan occupies a seat, whether they are a Member or an Admin. Deactivated users do not. Viewers are the exception — they never need a seat on a paid plan, and Pro adds up to five Viewers per paid seat. So a 10-person team inviting 10 client stakeholders as Viewers pays for 10 seats, not 20 — a real advantage over tools that charge full price for client access.
Adding seats mid-cycle bills immediately and prorated. Plaky charges the prorated amount for the remainder of the billing cycle when you add a seat, which is normal but worth knowing if you onboard in waves.
No refunds, but unused seats become credit. Cancelling a seat converts the unused portion into credit against your next invoice. That is friendlier than a hard no-refund policy but still means money stays inside Plaky.
Verified against Plaky pricing page on 2026-10-20.
The free plan is the actual headline
Most project management free tiers are shaped to force an upgrade: seat caps (Trello’s 10, monday’s 2), project caps, or feature gates. Plaky’s free plan caps features but not people: unlimited users, unlimited boards, unlimited items, unlimited views, with 6 custom fields per board, 1 board per dashboard, and a 7-day activity log.
Be honest about what 7 days of activity log means: you cannot reconstruct what changed three weeks ago. For a team that needs an audit trail — client disputes, compliance reviews, or just “who moved this deadline” — the free plan is disqualified on that one line, and the answer is Pro at $3.99.
But for a 15-person operations team running a handful of recurring processes, the free plan is a legitimate permanent home. Compare it against the broader free-tier landscape before assuming you need to pay at all.
Where Plaky wins
Cost at headcount is the whole argument. At 20 seats, Pro costs $79.80/month on annual billing. monday Standard at 20 seats is $240/month; Asana Starter at 20 seats is $219.80/month; ClickUp Business at 20 seats is $240/month on the legacy line. Plaky is roughly a third of the price of the mainstream alternatives at the same headcount. If your team’s projects are lists, boards, and owners — not dependencies and portfolio governance — you are paying the market leaders for capability you will not open.
Unlimited users on free plus cheap seats means you stop rationing access. The classic small-business failure mode is buying 10 seats and making the other 8 people work through spreadsheets and WhatsApp. Plaky’s pricing removes that temptation: add everyone, including the warehouse supervisor and the office manager, because the marginal seat is $3.99.
The Viewer role protects your client-facing workflows. Five Viewers per paid seat with no seat charge means external stakeholders can watch a project without consuming a licence. On monday and Asana, free guest access exists, but it is a separate configuration path with its own limits.
The bundle is a real answer for “we need chat and time tracking too.” If you are already paying for Slack at $7.25/user/month and a time tracker at $9+, the CAKE.com Bundle at $12.99 for all three is cheaper than the two you already have. That is the honest comparison for most small businesses, and almost no competitor can match it because they do not own a chat product or a tracker.
Where it falls short
Reporting depth is the ceiling. Dashboards on Pro pull from up to 15 boards, and chart views are pie and bar. There is no project-level P&L, no planned-versus-actual cost, no portfolio rollup with resource capacity. If you need to hand a client a status report that survives scrutiny, you will rebuild it elsewhere. This is the single biggest reason a growing Plaky team eventually moves to Smartsheet or ProjectManager.
1,000 automation actions per month runs out quietly. Plaky advertises automations on Pro but caps them at 1,000 actions monthly; unlimited only on Enterprise. A rule that fires on every status change in a 20-person team with 300 active items burns through that faster than you expect. Budget for Enterprise if automation is central to your process.
No open API on the lower tiers. Plaky’s integrations are its own apps plus native connectors; there is no public API program comparable to ClickUp’s or monday’s, which means custom integrations and data warehousing are limited. Teams that treat their PM tool as a data source should look elsewhere. The vendor’s own site makes the point for us: the only dedicated integration pages it publishes are Clockify and Pumble — both CAKE.com products.
SSO is Enterprise-only, which resets the price floor for security-conscious buyers to $8.99.
It is a “good enough” product, not a delightful one. Plaky’s UI is clean and the learning curve is short, but it is not competing on polish or on the breadth of templates. If the reason your team never adopts PM software is that the tool feels like homework, Plaky will not fix that — monday is much better at making work look inviting.
Plaky vs monday vs Asana at 20 seats
Per-seat prices are annual billing, using each vendor’s published entry paid tier; monthly equivalents shown in the table for budget planning.
| Plaky Pro | monday Standard | Asana Starter | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per seat/mo (annual) | $3.99 | $12 | $10.99 |
| 20 seats/month | $79.80 | $240 | $219.80 |
| Free plan seats | Unlimited | 2 | Up to 10 (personal use terms) |
| Client access | 5 Viewers per paid seat, free | Free guest seats, configured separately | Free guests, unlimited |
| Gantt | Pro and up | Pro and up | Timeline on paid tiers |
| Automations | 1,000 actions/mo (Pro), unlimited (Enterprise) | 250 actions/mo (Standard) | Rules on paid tiers |
| SSO | Enterprise only | Enterprise and above | Advanced and above |
At 20 seats over a year, Plaky Pro costs $957.60 against $2,880 for monday Standard and $2,637.60 for Asana Starter. That is a difference of roughly $1,700–$1,900 per year — enough to fund the Clockify and Pumble bundle and still come out ahead. The trade you are making is reporting depth, integration surface, and polish.
The team-view tradeoff: when $3.99 is a bargain and when it is a trap
If your team is under 15 people, your work is task-and-list shaped, and nobody asks you for cost or capacity reports, buy Plaky Pro and stop shopping. The 20-seat math above is not close. You will spend the saved money on something that actually moves revenue.
If your team is 15–40 people and clients demand status reporting or you bill by the hour, buy the CAKE.com Bundle rather than Plaky alone — the time tracking inside Clockify is what makes billable reporting possible, and $12.99 for all three is still less than monday Standard alone. Do not buy Plaky and then bolt on a separate $9 tracker plus $7.25 Slack; that combination erases the cost advantage.
If you are past 40 people with cross-team dependencies, portfolio reporting, or an IT security policy that requires SSO, skip Plaky. At that size the Enterprise tier at $8.99 is no longer cheap, and you still do not get portfolio-level financials. Go to Smartsheet, ProjectManager, or the enterprise comparison instead.
If you need Gantt charts with dependencies today, note that Gantt is Pro-only. The free plan has no timeline view at all, which surprises teams who trial Plaky as “Trello with tables.”
Who should use Plaky
- Small businesses running operational processes — order tracking, onboarding checklists, vendor management — where the board model maps cleanly and the budget is real.
- Marketing and content teams who plan by campaign and need a shared calendar-style view without per-seat anxiety. Pair it with the content calendar workflow if you are migrating from monday.
- Agencies with a small internal team and many external stakeholders, because Viewers are free up to five per seat.
- Teams already on Clockify or Pumble, for whom the bundle is strictly better value than any competitor at the same price.
Who should skip it
- Construction, engineering, or any dependency-heavy delivery work — no baselines, no critical path, thin Gantt. Look at the construction hubs.
- Software product teams — no sprint mechanics, no issue tracking, no repository linkage. Linear or Jira instead.
- Companies with an SSO mandate at under 20 seats, where Plaky’s Enterprise price erases its advantage.
- Anyone who needs an audit trail longer than 7 days on a $0 budget — that is the free plan’s hard wall.
Implementation reality
Plaky is genuinely fast to set up, and the free plan means you can do the evaluation with real work rather than a demo workspace. A sane two-week path:
- Day 1: create one space per function (Marketing, Operations, Admin) rather than one space per project; board sprawl is the trap, and Plaky’s unlimited boards encourages it.
- Days 2–4: define fields on the two boards that carry the most volume. Six fields on free fills up fast — status, owner, due date, priority, and two custom fields is the whole budget.
- Week 2: add the Viewer stakeholders and test whether they can see what they need. Then decide whether the 7-day activity log is a blocker; if it is, Pro is the answer and the price is trivial.
Skip automations in week one. With a 1,000-action monthly cap on Pro, a badly designed rule set can consume the quota before you understand what it is doing.
What we could and could not verify from real users
Verified first-hand from the vendor’s own documentation: the seat-counting rule is the one buyers get wrong, and Plaky’s FAQ answers it without ambiguity — every active or invited user on a paid plan occupies a seat, regardless of role, deactivated users do not, and Viewers never need one. We also confirmed the 7-day free trial (no credit card), the prorated mid-cycle charge when seats are added, and the no-refund-but-credit policy for removed seats. Each of those is the kind of detail that shows up as a surprise on invoice two, not in the sales demo.
What we could not verify: third-party review sites and the subreddits where small-business teams discuss PM tooling were not reachable from our research environment on 2026-10-20. Rather than recycle second-hand complaints as “user feedback,” we are flagging the gap. The three questions worth putting to a Plaky reference customer are: (1) have you ever been billed for a seat nobody logged into, and how did you resolve it, (2) what broke first when you passed 1,000 automation actions in a month, and (3) did the 7-day activity log on free ever cost you a dispute you needed to win.
Verdict: best for whom
Plaky is the right buy for small businesses and non-technical teams — roughly 5 to 30 people — whose projects are lists and boards, whose budget is real, and who want every person in the company in the tool at $3.99 a seat or $0 on the free plan. At 20 seats it costs about a third of monday or Asana, and the CAKE.com Bundle at $12.99 undercuts buying Slack and a time tracker separately.
It is the wrong buy for teams whose reporting has to survive a client or an auditor, teams past 40 people with cross-team dependencies, anyone who needs SSO below 20 seats, and software teams. The honest summary: Plaky wins on cost per head and loses on depth per head, and the crossover point is roughly where someone starts asking you for a capacity plan.
How this content was prepared
Transparency note: This article is based on Plaky’s official pricing page, plan comparison table, and published FAQ, verified on 2026-10-20, plus our editorial analysis of the pricing of the tools it competes with. It is not sponsored, and no vendor paid for or influenced the recommendations.
We do not claim to have independently tested every feature end-to-end, and we have not run a comparative hands-on trial. Where a verdict reflects operator judgment, it draws on published documentation, published pricing, and editorial analysis rather than a side-by-side trial. We also could not reach third-party review sites or community forums from our research environment on 2026-10-20, so this review contains no user quotes — the “what we could not verify” section above names the gap explicitly rather than papering over it. Pricing and feature details are dated in the metadata above.