The Valuation of the 2025 "Winners" in Task & Project Management

A follow-up to: "Most Popular Task & Project Management Apps in 2025 (Ranked by Traffic)"

In the previous article, we used estimated website traffic as a proxy for popularity. This follow-up answers a different question:

How much are the biggest players worth?

That matters because valuation usually reflects what investors believe about a product's future: recurring revenue, pricing power, enterprise adoption, and how "locked-in" a tool becomes once teams build workflows inside it.

Before the numbers, one quick clarification (non-finance version):

Market size = how much money a whole category makes per year (revenue).
Company valuation = what investors think a company is worth today, based on expected future cashflows (often many years ahead).

That's why valuations can look "huge" compared to market revenue.

Valuation scoreboard (easy table)

Updated snapshot (early January 2026 where available)

App / Company	Status	Valuation (best available public anchor)	"As of"	What that number is
Atlassian (Jira, Confluence, Trello, etc.)	Public	~$40.7B	Jan 2, 2026	Market cap
Notion	Private	~$11B–$12B	Dec 2025	Tender offer / secondary sale reports
Smartsheet	Acquired (private)	~$8.4B	Jan 22, 2025	Take-private deal value
monday.com	Public	~$7.4B	Jan 2026	Market cap
ClickUp	Private	~$4B	Oct 2021 (last widely reported)	Funding-round valuation
Asana	Public	~$3.1B	Jan 2, 2026	Market cap
Airtable	Private	~$11B (pre-money)(also widely reported ~$11.7B)	Dec 2021 (last disclosed)	Funding-round valuation
Trello(inside Atlassian now)	Acquired	~$425M (acquisition price)	Jan 2017	Acquisition value at time of purchase
Todoist (Doist)	Private	Not disclosed	—	Bootstrapped / profitable, no public valuation
Teamwork	Private	Not disclosed	—	Funding announced, but no public valuation

Quick read: what this table is really saying

Public companies have "live" valuations (market caps) that move daily.
Private companies rarely refresh valuations publicly; you often only get an "anchor" when they do a funding round or a tender offer.
Acquired companies get a clean number: the deal price.

Why valuations are so much bigger than "market size"

This is the part that confuses non-financial readers, so here's the simplest way to think about it:

Market size = annual revenue in the category

If the "project management software market" is around $9–10B in a year, that means:

all vendors combined are making roughly that much revenue per year (depending on what the report includes/excludes).

Valuation = many years of future cashflows priced today

Investors don't buy a software company for "one year of revenue." They price:

the next 5–10+ years,
recurring subscriptions,
expansion revenue (more seats, more teams),
and how hard it is for customers to switch.

So a company can be worth 5×, 10×, even more than its annual revenue. That's normal in software.

The market grew fast from 2020 to 2025 (in plain English)

What we know from major research snapshots

One widely cited report places the global project management software market at about $6.59B in 2022.
Several reports put 2025 around ~$9B to ~$10B, depending on definitions:
- $9.76B in 2025 (Mordor Intelligence)
- $9.22B in 2025 (ResearchAndMarkets listing)
- $10.33B in 2025 (Straits Research)

A simple "timeline" you can visualize

If we assume the market grew at roughly the same pace those reports imply (around the mid-teens annually), you get a clean mental picture like this:

Year	"Project management software" market revenue (rough, illustrative)
2020	~$4.9B
2021	~$5.7B
2022	$6.6B (reported)
2023	~$7.6B
2024	~$8.8B
2025	~$10.2B (fits the common 2025 range of ~$9–10B)

Important: the 2020–2021 and 2023–2025 rows above are not a single official dataset. They're a simple "connect-the-dots" illustration built from the published 2022 anchor and the common growth range. The key takeaway is the direction: this category expanded a lot between 2020 and 2025.

What changed from 2020 to 2025 (why the category expanded)

A few forces pushed adoption hard:

Remote + hybrid work made coordination a default problem
More teams needed shared systems for tasks, deadlines, and context (not just chat).
Cloud became the default deployment
Buying software shifted from "IT projects" to "start using it today."
The market split into two camps
- Big platforms that aim to be "everything" (work hubs).
- Focused tools that win by being fast, simple, and habit-forming.
AI became expected
By late 2024 into 2025, "AI features" stopped being a novelty and became a checklist item—summaries, drafting, prioritization, and search.

What this means for personal productivity in 2026

The "winners" by valuation tend to move upmarket:

more enterprise features,
more admin layers,
more complexity.

That creates space for a different kind of product to win with individuals:

time-aware planning (weeks/months/quarters that actually map to real life),
reviews (weekly/monthly reflection that compounds),
and a workflow that feels like a personal operating system, not a corporate dashboard.

An app worth watching: Self-Manager.net

Self-Manager.net is worth watching because it's built around a different organizing model: date-based work, where you can create a Week / Month / Quarter table and pin them to stay visible while you execute daily. That aligns naturally with how high performers actually operate: plan, execute, review, adjust—on a real timeline.

Data notes (so you can trust the numbers)

Market caps (Atlassian, monday.com, Asana) are taken from early Jan 2026 snapshots.
Notion's late-2025 valuation is based on reported tender/secondary sale discussions.
Smartsheet's value is the completed take-private transaction amount.
ClickUp's valuation is the last widely reported funding valuation (2021).
Airtable's valuation anchor is from its 2021 round (company statement + widely reported valuation figure).
Market-size anchors: 2022 (Grand View) and 2025 range (Mordor / ResearchAndMarkets / Straits).