Project Management SCIM Tax: Why Asana, Monday, Notion, and ClickUp All Paywall Provisioning

TL;DR

The Big Four PM tools all paywall SCIM. Not one offers it on standard plans.

Monday.com, Asana, Notion, ClickUp - same playbook: make adoption easy, then hold provisioning hostage.

For a 200-person team:

• Enterprise upgrades to get SCIM: $50,000+/year
• Manual management without SCIM: $53,000+/year (458 IT hours, 85 unused licenses, 19 orphaned accounts)

Notion is especially frustrating: Business plan includes SSO but deliberately excludes SCIM. You can authenticate users - you just can't provision them.

Stitchflow bypasses the tax at <$5K/app.

The PM tool provisioning problem

Your company probably uses at least two of these tools. Maybe all four.

They're everywhere because they're easy to adopt. A team signs up. Usage spreads. Before IT knows it, the tool is embedded across the organization.

Then someone asks: "Can we automate user provisioning?"

And you discover the answer is the same across all four: "Sure. Upgrade to Enterprise."

The comparison nobody wants to show you

Read that Notion row again. They include SSO on Business plans but deliberately exclude SCIM. You can authenticate users automatically - you just can't provision or deprovision them automatically. That's not a technical limitation. It's a business decision.

The real cost of the SCIM tax

Enterprise pricing for these tools isn't published. It requires "contacting sales." But based on community feedback and Stitchflow customer data, here's what the upgrade actually costs:

Monday.com

• Business plan: $8-16/user/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing, typically 3-5x standard tiers
• Estimated premium for 100 users: $20,000-40,000/year

Asana

• Starter: $10.99/user/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing, sales-only
• Estimated premium for 100 users: $15,000-30,000/year

Notion

• Business: $20/user/month (includes SSO, excludes SCIM)
• Enterprise: $18-25/user/month custom
• Estimated premium for 100 users: -$2,400 to +$6,000/year

ClickUp

• Business: $12/user/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing
• Estimated premium for 100 users: $30,000-50,000/year

Combined SCIM tax for a 100-user team using all four tools: $63,000-126,000/year.

For a 200-person team, ClickUp alone estimates the Enterprise premium at $60,000-100,000/year. The $50K claim isn't hyperbole - it's conservative.

The cost of not paying the tax

Can't justify the Enterprise upgrade? Here's what manual management costs instead:

Based on Stitchflow customer data, normalized to 500 employees:

458 IT hours per year. That's 11+ weeks of full-time work just managing users across four PM tools.

85 unused licenses. Seats you're paying for that nobody uses.

19 orphaned accounts. Ex-employees with active access to project data, tasks, and potentially sensitive information.

Why the "Big Four" all chose the same playbook

This isn't coincidence. It's strategy.

The PM tool adoption model

1. Make the product easy to start (free tiers, self-serve signup)
2. Let teams adopt organically without IT involvement
3. Become embedded in workflows before centralized procurement notices
4. When IT asks about governance, point to Enterprise
5. Bundle SCIM with features nobody asked for (advanced analytics, custom branding, premium support)
6. Charge 2-5x the standard price

SCIM isn't technically difficult. The protocol has existed since 2011. Every major IdP supports it. Building SCIM support is straightforward for any modern SaaS platform.

These vendors don't withhold SCIM because they can't build it. They withhold it because it's profitable.

The irony: PM tools exist to improve team efficiency. But their pricing models create massive inefficiency for the IT teams managing them.

The Notion special: SSO without SCIM

Notion deserves special mention for the most frustrating implementation.

Their Business plan ($20/user/month) includes SAML SSO. You can authenticate users through your IdP. That's real progress.

But SCIM? Enterprise only.

So you can verify who's logging in - you just can't automatically add or remove them. When someone joins, you manually create their Notion account. When someone leaves, you manually delete it. The IdP integration that would automate this is locked behind a tier upgrade.

"The worst part isn't the manual work - it's the ex-employees who still have Notion access three months after leaving because someone forgot." — IT Admin, Reddit

The ClickUp special: Pay enterprise prices, get half the features

ClickUp's SCIM implementation varies by identity provider:

• Okta users: Full SCIM provisioning capabilities
• Microsoft Entra ID users: Basic user create/remove only - no updates, limited functionality

Same Enterprise price. Half the features for Entra customers.

"For what we pay ClickUp, you'd think they could manage to support a 15-year-old identity standard." — IT Director, Reddit

What IT admins actually say

Community sentiment is consistent across all four tools:

On forced Enterprise upgrades

"We ran the numbers on upgrading to Enterprise. For what we'd pay in a year, we could hire a part-time IT person." — Infrastructure Lead, IT Slack group

On security gaps

"Every security review, Asana comes up as a gap. No SSO, no SCIM, no conditional access. It's embarrassing." — Security Engineer, Hacker News

On the operational burden

"We built an entire internal tool just to track who has Asana access. That's how broken their identity story is." — Platform Engineer, r/sysadmin

On pricing opacity

"The jump to Enterprise pricing broke our budget. Now we're stuck doing manual provisioning like it's 2010." — DevOps Engineer, Reddit

The decision matrix

Stop paying the PM tool SCIM tax

Stitchflow delivers provisioning automation for project management tools without the Enterprise upgrade.

For Monday.com, Asana, Notion, and ClickUp:

• Works on Standard, Business, and Pro plans - no Enterprise required
• Full provisioning and deprovisioning through your IdP
• Consistent functionality regardless of which IdP you use

How it works: Configure it like any SCIM app in Okta or Entra. Assign users and groups. We handle the automation.

Less than $5K/year per app. Flat pricing regardless of team size. That's less than the manual management cost - and a fraction of the Enterprise tax.

Methodology

Pricing and feature data collected from official documentation, pricing pages, and community feedback for Monday.com, Asana, Notion, and ClickUp as of January 2026. Cost impact data based on Stitchflow customer measurements normalized to 500 employees. Enterprise pricing estimates derived from community reports and customer feedback - actual quotes vary by organization size, contract terms, and negotiation.