Copper blows Asana out of the water when it comes to Google Workspace integration. Copper lets you manage your entire Gmail inbox from inside the CRM, has a Chrome extension that keeps everything inside Gmail and Calendar, and goes way deeper with email syncing than Asana even attempts. If your team lives in Google Workspace, Copper is hands down the choice for seamless integration and workflow.

Asana doesn't compete here at all. It's built for complex project management and requires a lot of setup, but it doesn't offer anything close to Copper's deep Google Workspace connectivity. If you want true, time-saving integration with Gmail, Calendar, and Drive, just go with Copper.

Copper Editor's Verdict

What is Copper?

If your team is using Google Workspace and you haven't yet considered Copper, take a minute right now to do just that.

Copper spends an absurd amount per-month in server costs alone, just to give you the deepest Google Workspace integration of any CRM out there.

As compared to all of the CRMs on the market, Copper has one of the most user-friendly experiences (which helps with team adoption), as well as a fully baked Chrome extension that allows you to use Copper (view tasks, past activity, and easily add new contacts to the CRM), without ever needing to even leave Gmail or Google Calendar.

Copper Chrome Extension on the side of Gmail

Key Features

It allows for powerful functionality like form integration and email automation functionality. For more details on this, check out the full Copper Review.

API

We've excessively used the API of all the major CRMs on the market and I'm here to tell you that Copper's API is fantastic. Their API is one of the most powerful and user-friendly to build on, especially as compared to that of HubSpot for which has some incredibly odd API design decisions.

While this might not sound like a big deal, if you ever plan on integrating your CRM (or hiring a company like ours to do it), I'm here to tell you that building the same integration in HubSpot takes 2–3x as long and is more of a pain to maintain. All factors that affect the integration cost at the end of the day, so API design matters and affects you even if you don't think it does.

If you're more technical, they also have a fantastic native Zapier and Make connector which allows you to build custom integrations with other popular tools like PandaDoc and Dialpad.

Final Verdict

If you're using Google Workspace at your company and you want a modern CRM for your team, look no further than Copper. Not using Google Workspace? We recommend checking out Pipedrive or HubSpot instead. Just an individual and stumble upon Copper because you were considering either Airtable or Notion as your CRM? Copper would definitely work, but also consider folk.

Asana Editor's Verdict

What is Asana?

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.

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.

Key Features

Complex Projects

If 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.

Reporting

Reporting 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).

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.