The "Project Management" category is one that has been quite underwhelming for a while. If you've been interested in this space for long enough, you probably saw the hype around Monday and ClickUp, only to see them both devolve into an all-in-one tool instead of re-thinking project management.
That's where we have to hand it to Motion. They started out as simply that of a calendar and scheduler tool, and upon perfecting the time management component, moved to task management (individual), perfected that, and then finally moved to the project management space (teams).
They walked before they ran, and focused more on how individuals manage their time, and how that affects the greater team around them.
They've essentially created this over-encompassing category of time management and daily planning, mixed in a bit of AI (for task/event prioritization), and it feels like you have a personal assistant.
For medium + large teams looking for a task-based project management tool, where goals and reporting are important.
Asana is tried and true. We used it for 7 years before switching to Motion. Now, that's not because it's bad. Asana is fantastic... If you invest the time and resources to set it up well.
Asana has gone the approach of being less opinionated, allowing for team members to build it out specifically how they'd like. But with that, comes a super general task management tool, that your team isn't likely to adopt (without training).
One important thing to note is that Asana is a publicly traded company, and when you get to that status, getting huge enterprise accounts (1,000+ seats) is the #1 focus. With that, comes enterprise features—so the updates you're likely to see coming to Asana aren't going to be geared toward the small business or startup segment.
Rating: C+
Asana is exactly what a comes to mind when you envision a traditional project manager tool. It has the traditional lists view, board, calendar (which isn't even worthy of the name when you compare Asana vs Motion), files, and timeline views.
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 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 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.
Rating: B
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.
Rating: B-
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:
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 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:
Rating: B
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.
Rating: A
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.
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.
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 smaller team (less than 100–200 employees).
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
Free 30 day trial for any paid Asana Tier (Premium/Business). For a discount on paid seats, be sure to reach out to our friends at iDO (ido-clarity.com) and let them know Efficient App sent you 👌
A cross-platform native collaborative task manager for small + mid-size teams.
Superlist is very much still in private beta, but we recently got access and have some initial thoughts. I do want to preface this with the following: I have been extremely excited to check this tool out. I've been on the waitlist for 2–3 years, checking in with them monthly about getting access.
The largest appeal is that it was created by the team behind Wunderlist (which is a task manager that was sold to Microsoft in 2015 for between $100–200m). So if there's a team that understands task management deeply, it's this team.
They've even teased Superlist at Google I/O 2022 on stage, as an example of a tool built in Flutter (an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase). This is important because this means everyone gets a native app—imagine having native MacOS + iOS + Android + Windows apps all generated from the same codebase.
This was the largest appeal, alongside the sheer beauty of their marketing site and in-app teaser screenshots:
They have this concept behind endless sub-tasks and collaboration, even tying in external tools like Gmail and Slack (as seen in the screenshot above).
In playing with it though, the allure of "how would some of the team that created one of the most successful task managers of our time re-think task/project management from scratch", is kind of a letdown so far to be honest.
They've been hyping up what they've been building for nearly 4 years now, to only just begin letting people in to use it, and it feels incredibly pretty—amazing UI/UX interactions. Heck, even marking a task as "complete" and "incomplete" plays the most relaxing noise (and it changes each time).
I think we're seeing what happens when you get tens of millions of dollars in venture backing and some of the best designers in the world to focus in the UI/UX. I mean heck, just go visit their website, it's incredibly beautiful.
I just fear that they spent too much time building in private, trying to get every UX interaction to be amazing, and not enough on actually being a useful and differentiated project. Genuinely trying to not be too hard on them since it is still in beta, but I also can't give them too much lax because they've been building in private alpha for so many years now. I think they should have launched way sooner and gotten product feedback from more teams using it. It's almost like they are afraid to launch and not be perfect because of all the eyes they have on them.
I even feel like the fact they have so many native integrations out of the gate (like Gmail/Slack/Google Calendar) is somewhat of a red flag... No products should wait until they've integrated with everything before releasing, because I'm willing to bet you a lot (as someone that literally builds integrations for teams of all sizes) that your end-users had a different idea of what "integration with XYZ software" means to them as compared to what you've put together.
I'm really struggling here with this one. Beautiful UI/UX is incredibly important (especially for a product person like myself), and yet here it is, and I'm just left wondering what it's trying to be.
They are sorta going for this task manager-focus meets Slite, Notion, and Coda but once you enter the documentation category, you're against big competition that has essentially outgrown that category and has evolved more into no-code tools.
I feel like modern day task/project managers have evolved over the past couple years more into this daily planner/calendar-focused time management platform space (e.g. Motion), they understand that getting meaningful work done is more complex than just building out beautiful task lists.
I just feel like the project management landscape has changed, and Superlist is still building for the older days of Todoist/Wunderlist/Trello/etc. and if this released back then, it'd have taken the world by storm! We just aren't in that world anymore though. To not have your team's calendar at the core of getting work done, I can't help but feel like you're missing a huge boat here.
With the task list approach, I do have concerns about how this will scale across large teams. I also have a bit of concern with how much focus they are putting on personal/work coinciding, because what makes a great personal task manager does not make a great team-focused task manager.
Personally, I prefer to use my project management tool like Motion/Asana for work only—and yes, with Motion being more tied to my calendar, and my calendar being my day (which is a mixture of personal/work), it does feel more natural to throw a personal task or two on there, but using it as my main note taking/task management app for personal would be a mistake. Also, what happens if you leave the company and all of your personal tasks/notes are in there?
I just have some concerns around the scalability of the UI/UX when you're trying to focus on personal (prosumer?) and work, but what I've seen is it's better to focus on one main persona first and foremost. Questions start coming up around how I can ensure that my work doesn't get access to my personal tasks/notes if I leave, and now Superlist has to invest all of this time into personal/work account security management, further pulling them away from the ideal customer profile (being teams at companies).
The truth of the matter is that I just had higher expectations with how long they've been working internally on this. They probably spent a lot of time on the last 20% polish and integrations side of things, and I just don't feel like that's enough to encourage a team to switch over from say Asana or ClickUp.
I genuinely feel like they need to think more about calendar at the center. Project management is just so much more than just tasks, notes, comments, and deadlines. People have meetings and so much more time complexity that actually affects getting work done. We're going to continue using and recommending Motion for that reason.
Although I genuinely hope to be proven wrong! I love this task management space and I'm always on the lookout for teams that are reinventing the space and thinking differently about what makes task management what it is currently today.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!