If you want something your sales team can pick up and use right away without a big learning curve, Pipedrive is the clear choice. Its visual pipeline is dead simple, reps can log every call or email directly on a deal, and anyone stepping in can instantly see the full history. Most teams understand how to use it within minutes, so you're not losing time to setup or training just to get started.

Asana, on the other hand, is built for complex project management and really shines if you have a dedicated project manager and the bandwidth to handle setup and ongoing manual upkeep. It's packed with features and can handle complicated workflows, but unless you actually need all those bells and whistles, it'll slow you down. For small or medium sales teams just looking to organize deals and track activity, Asana is overkill and takes too much investment to get value.

If your main goal is fast adoption and easy day-to-day use for sales tracking, Pipedrive is just way more efficient. Only pick Asana if you truly need advanced project management and have the resources to maintain it. Otherwise, Pipedrive gets your team moving faster with less hassle.

Pipedrive Editor's Verdict

What is Pipedrive?

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.

Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM designed primarily for small to medium-sized businesses that are locked into Microsoft 365 and don't plan on switching. If you're looking for a simple way to organize and manage your team's sales pipeline, Pipedrive will give you a visual pipeline where deals move from stage to stage as conversations progress.

What we've always appreciated about Pipedrive is how easy it is to understand. Within a few minutes, most teams can grasp how to use it. Reps can track interactions directly within each deal record, which creates a clear timeline of the relationship.

But heads up you might experience some "bloatware" in the interface, with frequent prompts pushing upgrades or additional features. The reporting and AI tools also feel a bit basic compared to industry standards.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Simple deal and activity tracking
Easy-to-understand visual sales pipeline
Great for providing structure and organization
Solid mobile app for logging activity on the go

Cons

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

Key Features

Visual Deal Pipeline

Anyone who's ever spent any amount of time in sales knows how important it is to have a good visual of your pipeline. With Pipedrive, your deals appear as cards in a Kanban-style board, and reps can drag them from stage to stage as conversations progress.

This is helpful for teams that might want to use this in weekly sales meetings where they pull up the board and walk through deals together to get everyone on the same page easily.

Lead & Activity Tracking

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.

AI Features

Recently, 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.

From our side, the AI features aren't terrible, but they also aren't game-changing. They can occasionally surface helpful suggestions, but they don't really 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.

Pricing

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 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.