Asana handles complex project management with lots of features, but it takes serious setup and ongoing effort, while HubSpot quickly gets expensive and has a clunky user experience.
Only use Asana if you have a big team and a dedicated project manager; skip HubSpot for smaller teams since better, cheaper options exist.
Asana offers way more depth and flexibility for complex project management, especially if you need features like custom fields, multiple views, gantt charts, workload management, and advanced reporting. It's built for teams that want all the classic project management bells and whistles, and it really shines when you have a dedicated project manager and the time to set things up right.
HubSpot, on the other hand, is fundamentally a CRM that later bolted on those capabilities. It quickly gets expensive, and the user experience isn't great for day-to-day project management. There are also a lot of hoops to jump through just to get basics like email logging working reliably. Unless you're a large team already comparing Salesforce and need a CRM, HubSpot is not designed for project management workflows.
If you need real project management, especially for anything complex, Asana is the clear choice. HubSpot just can't compete here.
HubSpot
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 CRM + 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.
HubSpot gives you everything you'd expect from a CRM.
You're able to keep your contacts, companies, deals, and pipelines within one central location. You can track all your customer interactions and see the team's full history of communication with them all while moving deals through stages (Kanban style).
It solves the main problem of deals falling through because details were missed as contacts were passed between team members, so if you're using this feature for basic use, it'll work well and feel pretty familiar. HubSpot even has an integration with the best email client, Superhuman Mail where you can manage your deals from within your inbox.
Where things start to go wrong is when you add more customization. HubSpot likes to layer in a ton of properties, fields, and customization options, which can make the system feel heavier than it needs to be. Suddenly, updating a deal or finding information takes way longer than it should, which creates friction. Larger teams often hire a consultant to set everything up (for an additional $20-$40k), but smaller businesses don't have that luxury, so the system gets overwhelming fast.
If the "free" CRM isn't what brought you to HubSpot, we're willing to bet it's because you've heard about their powerful marketing automation feature.
You can build workflows that, for example, will capture leads from, say, a lead magnet, send nurture emails, score them based on behavior, and route qualified leads over to your sales team automatically. When it's set up the right way, it can feel like you've got a mini marketing engine running in the background.
But that's the catch... it only works IF you're actively investing in inbound marketing. Most SMBs aren't publishing content consistently or building out full funnel strategies, so they end up paying for a system they barely touch. That's a huge part of the disconnect, yes, this is a great feature that we won't downplay, but that doesn't mean the use case is always there.
Just know that there are tools out there (like Copper or Pipedrive) that offer lightweight versions of this feature but without all the complexity, especially for teams smaller than 20-30.
HubSpot has been pushing AI pretty heavily, but the experience is mixed.
On the positive side, data enrichment is genuinely useful. When you add a company, HubSpot can automatically pull in key details and summarize what the business does, which saves your team time and helps keep your CRM cleaner. This could really help reduce the amount of manual research reps have to do before calls, so that's nice.
On the other hand, features like AI-generated summaries (Breeze) are pretty underwhelming. They usually just surface obvious or generic information that feels "really lackluster" and doesn't add much value. Especially when many teams are still relying on external tools for better outputs.
Their AI chat for customer support is more promising since it can handle tickets. It's super helpful for support teams that are generally spread thin. Overall, the AI features are more of a nice-to-have than a reason to fully commit to a new CRM.
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.
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).