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Asana is a robust project management system that combines powerful scheduling, collaboration, documentation, and reporting tools in a single secure platform. While it’s a popular option for individuals, SMBs, and enterprises, you may be looking for an option that’s better aligned with your specific needs. Let’s take a look at some of Asana’s pros and cons, as well as some alternatives.
Top 3 Asana Alternatives
Depending on the types of projects your company or team is managing, Asana may not be the best fit to help you plan, execute, track, and deliver your project successfully. Here are the top options to consider for project management, issue tracking, collaboration, and coordination.
1 Wrike
Wrike is the most powerful work management platform on the market, enabling teams to plan projects and collaborate in real time. Our award-winning software is trusted by 20,000+ companies across the globe, including Sony, Estée Lauder, and Siemens.
Wrike’s customizable features include Gantt charts, request forms, dashboards, cross-tagging, time tracking, and proofing. Integrate with 400+ apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce. Automate repetitive tasks and achieve 50% faster planning. Work from anywhere with 100% access to your files via our mobile and desktop apps.
Whether you’re a small startup or an established brand, Wrike has the solution for you. Paid plans start at $9.80/user/month. Join our community of 2.3 million — start your free two-week trial today.
2 monday.com
monday.com Work OS is an award-winning no-code work management platform that helps teams manage projects and workflows more efficiently.
Used by 152,000+ customers worldwide, this fully customizable software lets you plan, manage, and track every project in one place. monday.com offers time-saving and easy-to-use features such as automations, time tracking, document sharing, and real-time collaboration. Multiple board views such as Gantt and Kanban help you structure and navigate tasks and projects the way you prefer, and dashboards give a high-level overview of your progress.
In addition, integrations with apps such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, and Excel, allow you to easily continue working with your favorite tools from within the platform. monday.com also offers dedicated solutions, such as monday dev and monday sales CRM, designed to answer the needs of specific industries.
3 Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a leading work execution platform that has real-time work management features, collaboration and automation tools. Users are presented with a familiar and easy-to-use spreadsheet-like interface. However, it has enterprise-grade capabilities that even Fortune 500 companies like Cisco, Bayer, HP, and PayPal are confident to adopt in their business. Strong project management features enable teams to utilize different views of real-time data, and switch easily from Gantt, card, grid and calendar views. Smartsheet has automatic update requests, and can be used for waterfall and agile projects, product launch, sprint planning, and more. The resource management feature provides users the visibility who is busy, and who is not, in real-time. They can also attach files, share sheets, get notified, view the activity log, export, email, and print.
Asana’s Use Cases
Organizational Management
Organizations provide their employees with a collaborative work platform that gives every team member the clarity they need to achieve their goals. It easily connects daily work and deliverables to goals and milestones so each team member knows how their tasks and responsibilities ladder up to company objectives.
Management
teams can easily plan, launch, track, and measure the results of their work. They can create product roadmaps, set goals, align priorities, and track milestones. It also has built-in communication, coordination, and collaboration features to help launch products or features smoothly.
Marketing
Asana includes tools to help teams set marketing strategies, goals, and expectations. Teams can efficiently plan, organize, and execute marketing activities from start to finish. Some of the tools that are essential to marketing teams are multiple work views, request forms, automated workflows, and approval tracking.
Read also: Choosing Marketing Project Management Software
IT Project Management
IT teams use Asana to keep their deployments on track and support teams quickly available to cover any emergency. Teams can use Asana to plan, track, and manage new IT equipment installations. They can also use it to collect and track help desk requests when opening new or expanding existing offices and work sites.
Featured Partners: Project Management Software
Pros or Advantages of Asana
Asana offers advanced tools and regular updates of existing features.
Workflow Automation
Asana lets users automate tedious manual tasks. Rules-based automation help simplify workflows, reduce errors, and save time so teams can spend more time solving problems. Users can set up to 50 Rules per project to automate processes and deliver results faster. Its smart custom rules builder will have users creating automation rules within minutes.
Dynamic Reporting
Asana provides real-time reporting and insights through several tools. It has dashboards, charts, and graphs that enable users to visualize high-level data with zoom-in capability. Interactive reports let users dive into details of the projects and tasks with a simple click on the visuals. It also has templates and intuitive chart builders.
Work Request Management
The Forms feature lets users create a standard work intake process. Users can create multiple forms in a project to support all kinds of work requests. Internal and external customers can request work easily while project teams keep everything centralized, organized, and easy to prioritize and track.
Integrations
Over 100 integrations are available in categories like communication apps and connectors, file storage and reporting services, and security and compliance tools. Asana integrates with Microsoft and Google products such as Teams, Office 365, Power BI, Gmail, Android, and Looker, among others. Its RESTful API also provides users a program interface to much data in its system.
Customization
Custom fields in Asana allow users to track important information to keep work visible to all. It lets teams add any data deemed essential to tasks and projects so stakeholders have a clean but complete line of sight on what is happening. For instance, users can create additional custom fields to hold information about a task’s stage, priority, or cost.
Free Plan
Asana offers a free plan for teams of up to 15 members. The free tier includes unlimited tasks, projects, messages, file storage of up to 100MB each, and an activity log. Also included are several work views like list, board, and calendar views, mobile apps, and integrations. For startups and small businesses, Asana’s free plan delivers enterprise-strength features in a work management solution that’s capable enough to boost productivity and spur business growth
Cons or Disadvantages of Asana
Like any other technology tool, users need to analyze Asana’s pros and cons, then decide if its advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Learning Curve
New users, especially non-technical users, are often overwhelmed with the number of features and options available when introduced to Asana. While this can usually be solved by training and onboarding, the front-end learning curve can also mean additional time and cost.
Beyond Basics
because teams have access to Asana’s advanced features and capabilities, the platform may be a mismatch for a small team whose projects are simpler or more limited in scope.
Single Assignee for Tasks
Asana assigns a task to only one person to avoid confusion as to who is responsible. However, if the assigned person becomes unavailable, an additional workaround is necessary to keep the work going forward.
No Time Tracking
Asana is a powerful tool for tracking projects, tasks, and assignees. However, it does not have a built-in time tracking feature. Users need to find other time tracking apps and integrate them with Asana to have the ability to track time. This lack becomes an issue when projects involve billing clients, or when team members need to track time against internal budgets.
Limited Exporting Functionality
Asana lets users export data in CSV and JSON formats only. Users cannot export their project data directly into Excel or in PDF. However, third-party reporting and exporting apps like Bridge24 for Asana can simplify exporting requirements.
Ready to Choose Asana Software?
Companies that use Asana are able to communicate more easily, improve team accountability, set goals more clearly, and meet deadlines consistently. Asana provides a simple-to-use but robust work management tool that keeps teams organized and connected.
Evaluating Asana’s pros and cons can serve as a guide to organizations looking for the right work and project management software that best fits their needs.
Asana is a robust project management system that combines powerful scheduling, collaboration, documentation, and reporting tools in a single secure platform. While it’s a popular option for individuals, SMBs, and enterprises, you may be looking for an option that’s better aligned with your specific needs. Let’s take a look at some of Asana’s pros and cons, as well as some alternatives.
