Pipedrive vs Asana

Pipedrive is our recommendation for teams using Microsoft 365 that want a traditional sales CRM, but if your company runs on Google Workspace, you're much better off with Copper CRM.

It's been around for a long time, I used it at my first sales job around 2017. It felt clunky then, so compared to the more modern CRM's out there now, expect that it will feel super dated. I never "loved it" as a sales rep, it was always just okay. Enough to get the job done.

Also heads up, you might experience some "bloatware" in the interface, with frequent prompts pushing upgrades or additional features. I always feel overwhelmed logging into Pipedrive because of the constant upsells #leavemealone.

• Simple deal and activity tracking
• Easy-to-understand visual sales pipeline
• Decent mobile app for logging activity on the go

• Email syncing only tracks conversations going forward
• AI features are still developing and not very powerful
• Interface can feel cluttered with upgrade prompts and add-ons
• Dated

With Pipedrive, your deals appear as cards in a Kanban-style board, and reps can drag them from stage to stage as conversations progress.

One feature we appreciate in particular in Pipedrive is that you can move a deal back to being a lead if it turns out the opportunity wasn't as qualified as you thought. This sounds small, but many CRMs don’t allow this.

Every call, email, meeting, or note can be logged directly on the deal record. Over time, this builds a full timeline of the relationship so anyone on the team can see exactly what's happened with a prospect and what the next step should be.

This becomes really helpful when deals get passed between team members. So in situations where one rep leaves the company or goes on vacation, and another rep has to step in and immediately understand the full history of the relationship, they can, just from reading the activity log.

That said, Pipedrive tracks emails from the moment syncing is enabled going forward.

So if you’ve already been emailing a prospect before adding them to the CRM, those earlier conversations will not appear in the record unless you manually log them.

Pipedrive has started introducing AI features with the goal of helping reps prioritize deals and move faster through their pipeline.

But the feedback we've seen from users has been pretty mixed. One user even said the "AI features will be the death of Pipedrive," which is obviously a dramatic take, but it reflects a broader sentiment that the AI additions feel a bit rushed and not always useful (like with a lot of older tools).

The AI features we tested weren't noteworthy. They occasionally surfaced helpful suggestions, but they didn't function like a true AI assistant that can help run your CRM. For now, most teams are using the AI to help them gather information in email threads and make suggestions on deals, so overall, basic, light tasks.

• Lite: $24 per user/month. Best for small teams that want basic deal management and pipeline visibility.
• Growth: $49 per user/month. Best for teams that want workflow automation and email syncing.
• Premium: $79 per user/month. Best for teams needing more customization and collaboration tools.
• Ultimate: $99 per user/month. Best for organizations needing advanced security, permissions, and 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.