Asana vs Notion

Asana is one of the most reliable and stable project management tools on the market. We used it for 7 years before switching to Motion. We didn't switch because Asana was bad... Asana is fantastic, as long as you take the time to set it up properly and actually need all the features it offers.

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, workload management and advanced reporting features. If your organization has complex projects and is looking for a tool with all the bells and whistles, including reporting for upper management, then Asana would be our top recommendation for you.

Why did we switch away from Asana?

Asana is now a public traded company and it's focusing more on enterprise accounts (1000+ seats). With that, comes more enterprise features, which, we'll never need as a small team.

Our needs are much more simple—we simply wanted a tool to help us get more work done fast (hence why we made the switch to Motion - read our full Motion review to better understand it's features).

How Asana Compares

When comparing Asana vs Monday or Asana vs ClickUp, Asana wins across the board. Why? Because Monday and ClickUp are trying to be "all-in-one tools", meaning they are trying to do everything in a mediocre way, rather than doing one thing super well. Asana is a project management software, through and through. They aren't trying to be a CRM, or a documentation software, or whiteboard or whatever other tool under the sun.

This means that 100% of their focus is on delivering the best project management experience. And that's what we appreciate about them! 🙌

You will like Asana if you fit into one or all of the below categories:

• You have complex projects that require multiple custom fields, team collaboration, multiple views including kanban boards, lists, timelines, gantt charts and perhaps even workload management features. Workload management features, for example, allow you to manage your teams capacity, see how much work is on their plate (whether they are overwhelmed or underworked) and rebalance work as required.
• You have a dedicated person on the team who can manage the project management tool. Their role is dedicated at looking at things like the workload management features, shifting deadlines, making sure work is assigned correctly and providing updates to different stakeholders on the progress of different projects. This person will likely spend most of their day in Asana and this is a core part of their day-to-day role (not just another thing thrown on their plate, on top of many other responsibilities 👀 Looking at you business owners!)
• You have the budget to invest in setting up Asana properly. We think it's worthwhile working with a consultancy for a proper Asana implementation (contact us for recommendations). Without a proper implementation, you will likely not get the most of out of the tool and be left in a soup of features.
• Reporting dashboards are important to your team for things like monitoring spending for project costs, tracking project status and seeing total revenue across projects (note: this can at times be managed in your CRM so you'd want to make the decision as to where you're mainly tracking revenue so you have a single source of truth).
• You're not planning on just using the free tier of Asana (extremely limited). More on this below!

Asana Limitations

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.

Asana Pricing

• Free Tier: As a free project management software (for small teams), it might be alluring to try Asana on the tree tier. But to unlock key features you'd need to be on a paid tier, so we don't fall into the trap of comparing Asana as a free project management software to other paid tools.
• Starter Tier: $10.99/mo on the annual tier. This is the first super useful Asana tier. Here you'll get their workflow builder, automations (limited to 250) and the ability to invite unlimited guests (freelancers and contractors).
• [BEST 🥇] Advanced Tier: $24.99/mo on annual tier. This is the tier we were on when we used Asana for 7 years, even as a 1-2 person team. This tier allows for ample automations (25k per month) and unlocks their more advanced features such as reporting and workload management.

Final Thoughts

Asana is an incredibly well oiled product. The API has evolved a lot over the years and everything is quite stable. It just hasn't evolved to take advantage of the time management/calendar space, which feels like a big miss for any project manager.

That said, we've just finally finished migrating off Asana over to Motion (after 7 years of Asana), which should tell you something, specifically if you are a small team (less than 100–200 employees).

Try Asana for free.