Asana

Asana is best for teams that need coordination. It works well for operations, marketing, and cross-functional teams that have a lot of moving pieces, multiple owners, and deadlines between departments.

If your company is big enough that work regularly passes between departments, Asana does a good job of keeping everything visible and making sure ownership stays clear.

It is also a good fit for managers and leadership teams that need a clearer view into progress, blockers, team capacity, and project status.

A lot of Asana’s newer AI features feel like they were built for this layer of the business. If you're the person who has to walk into a meeting and explain what is on track, what is delayed, and where the team is getting stuck, Asana makes that job much easier.

Where it is less compelling is for smaller companies or engineering teams that want speed above all else. Engineering teams will usually be happier in Linear, it's much more modern and just feels more natural for product and dev work. Small and mid-sized teams that want AI to actively help run the day instead of mostly organizing work will probably get more value from Motion.

Asana is exactly what a comes to mind when you envision a traditional project manager tool. It has traditional lists view, tasks view, custom fields, kanban boards, calendar (which isn't even worthy of the name when you compare Asana vs Motion), files, and timeline views. It even has robust project management features like gantt charts, advanced reporting features.

And, well, there's nothing wrong with that at all 🤷 it's just there's nothing they are really doing that makes it particularly better than competitors to that end.

With Asana, you get stability, a solid API, basic reporting, and a task manager tool that you can trust.

Because of this, we're giving Asana a higher rating here for key features (they have a lot of them), but pulling them down a bit for differentiation. Don't let this rating fool you though, we particularly like that Asana isn't trying to differentiate, because it's making them better at the project management software category. When you compare Asana vs ClickUp or Asana vs Monday, you'll see that the other two differentiate more, but in our opinion, this is in a bad way. We applaud Asana for not trying to turn into the "all-in-one everything tool".

There's really nothing exciting to show someone about what Asana can do better than competitors. It has some cool workflow automation built in, and some interesting workload custom dashboard reports (which attempt to show how busy the team is based on the tasks they have assigned), but even that doesn't take into account meetings or anything of the sort, so it's just limited in even what it is trying to accomplish.

This is definitely a bit more subjective—some people love the look of Monday vs Asana, but when you actually rope in the UX of Asana, the myriad of the two together makes it feel slick and purposeful.

Clean kan-ban view and general interface

Asana has put a lot of thought into animations and the fluidity of their user experience. They have invested quite heavily into keyboard shortcuts, nice animations when clicking into tasks, and great visual state changes when dragging tasks between different stages.

They have natural keyboard shortcuts, and options like "hold down ⌘ + click to select multiple tasks at a time"—super intuitive:

Selecting & moving tasks is intuitive and fluid

The main difficulty with Asana comes from from how much manual work is required to actually stay atop of the work you're trying to get done. Unlike a tool like Motion, where you just throw in your tasks and AI intelligently auto-schedules them, even if you don't get to them for the day, Asana requires that you continually push back due dates manually in order to not fall too far behind or get too overwhelmed with your work.

While we appreciate the notification toasts that show when taking action (to undo and to alert you of workflow automations that trigger), we do at times feel a bit overwhelmed by them in the interface, as they quickly begin covering things up. With bulk edits especially, you have almost a never-ending train of toasts that continually pop-up covering up the interface:

Automations trigger overlapping toasts which cover up your working area.

Workflow Automation in Asana is really about Rules. This is what lets you automate repetitive work based on triggers and actions, like assigning tasks when a form is submitted, moving work to the next stage when a due date is approaching, or sending reminders when something is overdue.

Asana also has a rules library, which makes setup feel a little less intimidating than building everything from scratch.

One limitation: it still depends on you setting up and maintaining the system. It works when there's someone who is super on top of building the systems, teaching them to the team, and then keeping an eye on it all.

If you don't have that person, you end up with multiple/conflicting systems or things start to fall apart. The newer AI tools can help with that a little bit, but you still need someone "managing" the team's Asana.

Rules can take a lot of repetitive admin work off your plate once they are configured, but Asana still isn't doing the kind of automatic day planning or constant reprioritization you get from a tool like Motion.

That said, Asana Intelligence has started to make the product feel more active. Let's say you can't find the automation you need in the rules library. You can explain what you want to happen in natural language and Asana AI can build automation (kind of like Zapier), which is pretty cool. Or you can use the AI Asana chat to say "move the deadline for all tasks in this project by 1 week". WAY better than before, which was manually doing it!

Collaboration in Asana happens inside tasks. Comments, updates, attachments, and status changes all live in one place, which cuts down on a lot of back-and-forth in Slack or Teams. Conversations stay tied to the work, so it's easier to revisit decisions later.

It’s not trying to replace chat tools, but it does a good job of keeping work-related communication organized.

Now that we’re talking AI, this is probably where Asana has evolved the most... And unlike a lot of AI add-ons, it doesn't feel like it's just bolted on. Asana Intelligence includes smart summaries, recommendations, a chatbot, and AI-powered workflow features that are actually tied into the way teams already use the product.

You can set company, team, or project-level goals and tie them back to actual work in Asana. This only matters if you have leadership asking how projects connect back to bigger priorities.

Instead of guessing how projects contribute to outcomes, you can actually see the connection. But do you see that as a small team you would never need this?

The workload view built into Asana gives you a quick look at what's on everyone's plate so you can do things like rebalance work before deadlines slip or measure how much time is being spent on a particular project.

When I first saw this feature I got all the dopamine excitement from it, I was totally like "wow this is amazing!". Then I set it up for our team and...never used it again. As a small team I know where our resources are going.

So again, it's a helpful feature, but it really only makes sense if you have a big enough team where resource allocation actually matters.

Asana has one of the most robust and well-thought APIs of all the project manager tools on the market. This is in terms of functionality, stability, and even down to the thought that went into the naming of variables.

Their team communicates major changes proactively, and there's an external ecosystem of people building 3rd party tools with Asana's API, like backup systems, extended workflow systems, etc.

Overall, it's the gold standard in the category which is why we're giving it an "A" rating. They also have many native integrations that allow you to trigger messages in tools like Slack upon taking action within Asana. That said, you'll want to go custom if you want to do anything more powerful than that.

They've had a lot of time to get the API side of things right—having seen them re-architect core components of it over the years really shows that they've thought through it at scale which is a big plus.

You get admin controls, permissions, compliance features, and identity management that go well beyond what a smaller team will ever think about.

The main things here are access control, centralized admin oversight, and compliance support. That includes features like SAML, Google SSO, two-factor authentication, SCIM, guest invite restrictions, custom roles, audit logs, and integrations for SIEM, DLP, eDiscovery, and CASB. They also call out data residency options across the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia, along with HIPAA support and enterprise key management. This is what helps large companies feel comfortable putting more sensitive work into Asana.

If you are rolling Asana out across a big organization and security is important, then it's going to be one of the best options.

Asana has an iOS and Android app that has wide range of the functionality from the web app. You can view your Asana projects and task lists as kanban boards on mobile, a feature we don't see as often due to phone real estate, that said, they've implemented it well.

They have widget functionality, so you can see your open task lists without even opening up the app, a small feature which we quite appreciate.

The thing is, with a tool like Asana, you will still need a calendar tool as Asana's calendar view is nowhere where it needs to be to replace Google Calendar, unlike that of Motion.

We genuinely prefer Asana to that of ClickUp (trying to turn more and more into an all-in-one tool like Notion—no bueno) and Monday. Oh, and don't be trying to use Airtable as a task/project manager—please.

Think of Asana like Salesforce or Hubspot—they work great, if you invest the tens of thousands into getting it built out for your specific company needs. Highly recommend against trying to set it up yourself 😅

If you're a small or medium size team looking for more of a project manager that's a bit more opinionated (makes adoption way easier), that also bakes in time blocking and your calendar at the core, check out Motion instead.