HubSpot vs Asana

If you are considering HubSpot because of price (after hearing things like 50–90% off the first year), let me stop you right now, you're playing directly into their marketing shtick (you'll see the #1 concern with HubSpot is actually price).

HubSpot was not initially built as a CRM, it was a marketing email automation platform. A powerful (and expensive) one at that, but credit where credit is due. It's just, most companies often need to start with just a CRM to streamline their business operations.

It wasn't until HubSpot realized that acquiring customers for their $20–60k+/yr marketing automation suite was a difficult sell out of the gate, that they decided to built a "free CRM" as a lead magnet (and gateway) to their expensive core product.

So if you're a startup or a team of 20 or less (that will actually be using the CRM day-to-day), we highly recommend looking at a different CRM (we've done a deep-dive on that here). Because after the first year, you will be paying 2-4x more for HubSpot than the competing solutions (even at their proposed "Year 2+ discounts").

Now if your team is quite large and considering Salesforce, we actually do recommend Hubspot in most cases. HubSpot is more user-friendly than Salesforce, and you aren't going to be totally stuck in the expensive enterprise software stack that a tool like Salesforce often requires.

We will also add that we work with HubSpot often, and Copper + Pipedrive have far superior API's to HubSpot (in that we can build the same integration in 1/2 the time), so there is a second-order unseen cost associated to HubSpot.

And finally, there's quite a bit that needs to "go right" in order for emails to automatically log from your team's inbox into HubSpot.

Replies to emails will be logged automatically on the contact's timeline if you have connected your personal email and the following is true:

1. The original email was sent through the CRM or sent from your connected email client with the sales email extension or add-in installed and the Log checkbox selected.

Example of what this looks like in Gmail

2. The original email was not sent to an email address or domain listed in your Never Log list.

3. The email address is still connected when the reply is received.

4. The reply is sent to an individual's email connected by the user who originally started the thread.

5. The sender of the reply is an existing contact in HubSpot.

(Something that most take for granted when working with a CRM like Copper, where everything just logs automatically with no prerequisites, even if the contact doesn't yet exist in the CRM, it'll go back 1 year through your team's email history and retroactively add those emails)

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.

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 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 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.