Copper vs Asana

Copper CRM first launched in 2013 as a CRM for Google Workspace. Copper used to be our top-pick CRM for teams, but that was before the AI-era.

In the past year, I started noticing that our team wasn't really using Copper the way we used to anymore. We found that it became a graveyard. Old data, old custom fields, it really starting feeling archaic in terms of updating it.

Our team started speaking internally, expressing that they were craving something more modern, and AI-first. A CRM that had AI at the core, and could actually keep itself up to date instead of requiring so much manual hand holding.

That's when I started looking for alternatives and we found Lightfield (and couldn't be happier we made the switch).

That said, if you want an old school CRM that has good bones, you can consider Copper. Just don't expect it to be the most modern, and heads up, it's one of the CRMs on this list that is quite behind in building AI features.

• Clean interface and easy user experience
• Automatic email, meeting, and file syncing
• Flexible API and integrations (easy to connect with other tools) -- although in the AI era, this matters less

• Google Workspace ONLY
• AI features are lacking, not an AI-first CRM
• Lacks MCP
• Can't convert a contact back to a lead

Copper syncs all your emails, attachments, and files to the person, company, and opportunity records.

When you open an email in Gmail, a Copper sidebar appears showing the contact's CRM profile, past activity, deals, and tasks.

Instead of digging through a CRM to remember the last interaction, you can see everything about that relationship right inside the email thread. If someone new emails you, you can also quickly add them to Copper without leaving Gmail.

Most CRMs only start tracking emails after you add a contact to the system but Copper does something smarter. When you add someone, it actually goes back up to a year of Gmail history and automatically logs past conversations. That means if you've been emailing a prospect for weeks before adding them to the CRM, the entire relationship history still shows up, and that's huge!

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, 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.

That said, in the AI-era integrations are now easier than ever to build, and AI-first CRMs will allow you to simply explain what you'd like to build and they build it for you in minutes. This is not available from within Copper, and you'd still need to use third-party tools to integrate anything. So while API design was once incredibly important, we're not seeing it matters as much in the AI-era.

• Starter: $29/mo per seat. Best for small teams that need flexible pipelines, task automation, and basic project management without advanced reporting or automation.
• Professional: $69/mo per seat. Best for growing teams that need workflow automation, reporting, bulk email, and integrations to scale operations.
• Business: $134/mo per seat. Best for teams that need unlimited contacts, advanced reporting, email sequences, multi-currency support, and premium support.

Asana is tried and true. We used it for seven years before switching to Motion, and the reason it stuck around that long wasn't because it's just really well built. Things don't break, the system holds up as your team grows, and you can trust it to do what it's supposed to do day in and day out.

They've also done a better job layering in AI without it feeling like an afterthought than ClickUp or monday.com When we looked at monday.com's AI features, they felt bolted on and not that useful. Asana's feel like they actually belong in the product more so.

That said, Asana is going through a hard time right now despite executing on AI better than most legacy tools that have been around for a long time. And honestly, part of why we left after seven years captures the core limitation well: Asana is great at organizing work, but Motion was better at helping us actually focus on doing it.

If your team spends more time maintaining the system than benefiting from it, that's a sign it might not be the right fit. It really needs someone who knows what they're doing to set it up properly, and for smaller teams or anyone who wants AI to handle more of the day-to-day heavy lifting, that overhead just isn't worth it.

• Great for large teams with lots of moving parts (300+ employees)
• Clear ownership and project visibility
• Useful workflow automation once it is set up
• AI features are integrated more smoothly than most PM tools
• Good fit for enterprise teams

• Needs real setup and upkeep (you need a consultant to set it up right)
• Too customizable for smaller teams
• Feels more useful for managers than individual contributors
• AI and automation push you toward more expensive paid plans

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.

Asana’s automation mostly runs on Rules. You can assign work automatically, move tasks between stages, and build repeatable flows for things like approvals or requests.

This saves a lot of repetitive admin work but it really only works well 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.

Asana’s AI is better than I expected. The chatbot in particular is actually useful and didn't feel like a waste of time. You can ask it to move deadlines, summarize updates, and surface blockers, and it usually gets the job done without wasting your time.

A lot of the value here is for managers. The status updates and reporting are helpful if you are presenting upward. AI Studio and AI Agents are the more interesting long-term feature, but they're still early and sit on pricier plans.

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).

• Free: Best for trying Asana with a very small team. Limited once you need automation or AI.
• Starter: $10.99/user/month billed annually
  Best for teams that want timelines, rules, and basic AI features.
• Advanced: $24.99/user/month billed annually
  Best for larger teams that need reporting, goals, workload planning, and AI Studio.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Best for large companies that need stronger security and admin controls.