Asana Review - The Good and The Bad for 2023 (2023)

Asana outperforms other project management software for ease of use, simplicity, and Kanban-style user interface. It’s jam-packed full of features, yet still takes just a few minutes to get started and onboard your team. Drawing on our experiences with Asana and other project management tools, we compiled everything we know—great and not-so-great—into this review to help you decide if it’s right for you.

Asana Compared to the Best Project Management Software

Asana is a strong choice for organizations that want a simple tool without sacrificing power or functionality. Asana made our list of the best project management software, but it wasn’t one of our top three recommendations:

Monday.com is a strong package for those who need help with tracking all aspects of a project, including providing tools the sales team needs. You can try any of the primary tiers in Monday.com during a 14-day free trial period.

If you need a strong all-around option in your project management software, ClickUp provides a significant amount of versatility. You can try any of ClickUp’s pricing tiers without risk, thanks to the software’s 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

With Smartsheet, you receive an interface that may remind you of a spreadsheet, providing an impressive level of familiarity while remaining more powerful and completely configurable. You can sign up for Smartsheet and take advantage of a 30-day free trial period.

You can read reviews of all our top-rated project management software to see how Asana stacked up against the other leading options.

Asana’s modest price point makes it easy for businesses with any budget to afford. You’re getting a great value with Asana compared to other tools. Not quite ready to commit to a paid subscription? No problem. Asana’s free forever plan is second to none.

Asana: The Good and The Bad

As much as it seems unfair, everything good in life comes with some kind of drawback. And, Asana is no exception. However, it has enough positives that outweigh the negatives, thus making it a top-notch project management solution.

What Asana Is Good At

Feature-Rich Free Plan: Many free plans for project management software lacks. But that is not the case with Asana. In fact, out of all the project management software we tested, Asana comes in at the top with the best free plan.

Most other PM software’s free plans are so restrictive that they’re not functional for small businesses. But Asana doesn’t hold back—its free plan supports unlimited teams, projects, messaging, activity logs, file storage, multiple project views, and more. If you have less than 15 users and manage basic projects, you’ll never need to upgrade and can stay on the free plan forever.

You can even integrate Asana with your favorite time tracking tools without paying a penny. This is a rarity for PM software as most solutions charge extra for time tracking and don’t allow integrations on the free plan.

Overall, Asana’s free plan is an absolute steal.

Multiple Project Views: With Asana, users can view projects and manage tasks in several different ways, including Kanban boards, lists, calendars, portfolios, workloads, and timelines. Other project management tools on the market only offer one or two views, so it’s great to see that Asana gives you every option you’d ever need. Each team member can manage tasks in a way that works best for them, enabling them to be as productive as possible. Switching between views also gives project managers a big-picture perspective on where the project stands. And you can even create customizable project dashboards that update in real-time. You can customize them as you’d like to see the most important information at a glance.

Process Management Automation: Asana makes it super easy to automate processes, repetitive tasks, and workflows that cross over into your other business tools. Setting up custom rules, triggers, and actions is easier than ever thanks to Asana’s graphical workflow builder. You can use it to set up basic automations, like cascading due dates, assigning a task to the next person in the flow, checking a box, or alerting your team in Slack when a project is done, to even the most complex workflows that span dozens of users, tools, and tasks. Automating processes helps ensure things get done the right way while eliminating repetitive tasks to free up time for more important activities.

Team Collaboration: Most of the project management tools we’ve tried don’t offer enough collaboration tools, causing us to look elsewhere for software to fill in the gaps. However, Asana is one of the few that can act as a single source of truth for file sharing PDFs, JPGs, Google docs, team communication, group communication, and more. This is especially helpful for organizations that have geographically distributed teams. One of the biggest challenges facing a workforce of remote employees is maintaining communication and fostering team collaboration. In addition to excelling at project management, Asana also made our short list of recommended tools for keeping everyone on the same page, no matter where they are located.

Users can assign tasks to team members, create task dependencies, assign priorities, set due dates, adjust due dates, and chat back and forth (all within a single card so everything’s centralized in one place). With calendar view, teams can plan around each others’ schedules and stay up to date on any new changes or progress without needing to email back and forth. All project discussions and to-do lists are managed directly in Asana as well. If that’s not enough, the software even integrates with email apps and third-party messaging tools, depending on how your team prefers to communicate.

Agile and Scrum Support: If you’re a fan of agile project management, you’ll be glad to hear that Asana is flexible enough to support the philosophy. From sprint planning, bug tracking, product launches, work requests, roadmaps, feedback, and tracking task iterations, you get everything you need to match how you do work rather than the other way around.

Countless PM tools on the market are too rigid and simply won’t work, but Asana is great whether you prefer a Kanban, Agile, or Scrum methodology, or something in between. Asana wants to make sure you succeed with Agile on its platform, too. Asana went so far as to create a glossary to help you match the terms Asana uses to standard Agile vocabulary. Asana also created a robust guide to help you set up your Agile projects within the platform. These efforts really simplify rolling out an Agile project management approach in Asana.

Versatility: Asana is a flexible and adaptable project management software that works for many different management methodologies, business sizes, and industries. Furthermore, it’s a great choice for marketing, sales, product development, operations, human resources, IT, finance, and more. It’s an excellent tool if you plan to use it across multiple departments and to facilitate multi-departmental collaboration because it’s flexible enough for hundreds of different use cases. From event planners managing thousands of attendees to marketing teams managing dozens of campaigns across different channels and sales teams tracking leads through the pipeline, it’s versatile enough to work for just about everyone.

Powerful Integrations: Asana integrates with over 100 popular third-party apps like Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Zapier, Tableau, Zoom, and Salesforce. These integrations can really help extend the functionality of Asana. For example, your team can instantly be notified via Slack whenever a task or project is updated in Asana. It’s worth noting that some advanced integrations, like Salesforce and Tableau, are not available with every plan.

Smart Design: Thanks to the easy-to-understand layout for Asana’s dashboard, even novices can pick up the basics quickly. The primary features for Asana are listed along the left side of the screen, so you always have access to them. Additionally, tabs across the top of the screen simplify navigation. If you want to display more information on the screen, you can temporarily hide the navigational features. Should your team have specific features you need to emphasize, you can customize the look of the dashboard as well.

What Asana Is Lacking

Limited Mobile App: Asana offers a free iOS and Android mobile app at every plan level. While the app is generally fine, it can be tough to use. In general, Asana tends to work better on a full computer screen. The small screen on a mobile device just doesn’t do Asana justice. Beyond just checking the status of something quickly, getting anything productive done via the app will be challenging.

Can’t Assign Tasks to Multiple Users: Asana doesn’t allow tasks to be assigned to more than one user. In theory, this is designed to make it clear exactly who is responsible for a particular task. You can add a task collaborator or use subtasks to bring multiple users into the loop. Asana also gives you the ability to create copies of tasks for other users. But at the end of the day, tasks will only have one main assignee.

Email Clutter: Many Asana users complain about the number of emails they get from Asana with notifications. Ultimately, you’ll have full control over your notification settings. So you can change that at any time. But it can be a bit annoying at first before you make those changes when your inbox is cluttered with Asana notifications. Fortunately, this is a simple fix.

Limited Time Tracking: If you need to track the amount of time your team is spending on various aspects of projects for invoicing clients, Asana may not work for you. Asana provides time tracking features in its Business and Enterprise tiers. However, you do not have these features in the Basic or Premium tiers, meaning you must track time separately.

Security: Although Asana recently added some impressive security features in its Enterprise tier, the other tiers aren’t as focused on security. In fact, if you are using the free Basic tier, Asana reserves the right to collect data about the way you are using Asana, including your mobile data.

Asana Pricing and Options

Asana Pricing

Asana has a package for everyone. As previously mentioned, they have an exceptional free forever plan. Here’s a general overview of the different plans and pricing options offered by Asana:

The packages are all very affordable.

Asana Basic

The free Basic plan supports team collaboration with up to 15 users. It does limit you to 1,000 tasks per team, but that’s usually more than enough for small projects. Basic users also benefit from unlimited projects, messages, teams, log activity, and file storage.

Smaller remote or distributed teams can 100% use Asana’s Basic plan and never pay a dime. But if you want to take Asana to the next level, you’ll likely want to upgrade to Premium or Business.

Overall, Asana’s pricing makes the software very appealing compared to similar solutions on the market today. The per-user rates are priced right around the industry average. But Asana has more features out-of-the-box than other alternatives out there.

The fact that you can use Asana for agile project management is a big bonus as well. Not every project management tool at this price point has those capabilities.

If you’re on the fence, you could just sign up for the Basic plan and use it for free. There’s no risk, and you can always upgrade if you find it too limiting. Those of you who want to jump straight into a paid package, sign up for a free trial and get Asana free for 30 days.

Asana Premium

For teams larger than 15 users, you’ll need to sign up for Asana Premium, at a minimum. Even if you have less than 15 people on your team, many organizations like the Premium package for the additional features and benefits.

One of the most significant advantages of Asana Premium is the timeline view, which is pictured above. This is essentially a big-picture tool to ensure deadlines are hit and projects remain on schedule. You can use it to track dependencies and see how specific tasks and deadlines are connected with each other. This makes it much easier for project managers to identify problems ahead of time and develop a solution before a conflict derails the project.

With Premium, you’ll also benefit from reporting tools and dashboards for quick insights. Project managers can find relevant project data by analyzing real-time charts and other useful information.

Status reporting is another key feature here. Users can provide quick updates without having to attend time-wasting status meetings. These reports can be updated in minutes and can even be customized with charts to highlight key takeaways.

If you upgrade to Asana Premium, you’ll also get unlimited free guests, private projects, private teams, milestones, forms, and an advanced admin console.

Overall, this feature-rich package delivers tremendous value. It’s a steal starting at $10.99 per user per month.

Asana Business

Asana Business is designed for organizations that want advanced features with their project management solution. The package is definitely the better option for mid-size teams and organizations managing multiple projects across different departments.

One of our favorite parts of Asana Business is the ability to set strategic goals at a company level. This allows managers to connect goals to specific projects, so everything stays on track.

The Business package also comes with a tool for managing project portfolios. Think of this as your mission control center. You can use it to see all of your team’s objectives and projects in a single location. The portfolio view shows the project name, the status, percentage of project completion, due dates, and priority level.

Another top feature of Asana Business is the workload management tool. Managers can determine which team members have additional bandwidth and which ones are overwhelmed with work. This is really helpful in terms of resource planning and ultimately helps boost efficiencies.

Asana Business supports advanced integrations with Tableau, Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, and Microsoft Power BI. So if your organization is using any of those tools, you’ll likely want a Business package.

Overall, the price point of $24.99 is justifiable for larger teams. As long as you’re taking advantage of the advanced features, Asana Business is worth the extra cost.

Asana Enterprise

Asana Enterprise is the top-of-the-line product offering from this provider. It’s designed for larger organizations and scalable project management.

With an Enterprise subscription, you can take Asana beyond project management. You’ll have access to complete work management tools as well. Examples include configurable member settings, advanced admin controls, SAML authentication, and increased data control.

The plan comes with enterprise-grade security, privacy controls, and data governance. It’s compliant with GDPR, PCI DSS, CCPA, and more.

Enterprise users will also benefit from custom branding and priority support.

With all of that in mind, we still think Asana is a better option for small to midsize teams. The Enterprise features will likely be overkill for the vast majority of businesses. At this level, you’re not really getting any additional project management benefits. It’s all about user provisioning, security, and enterprise-grade work management.

Contact the Asana sales team for a custom quote if you’re interested in an Enterprise solution.

Asana in Summary

Asana is one of the few options that made our review of the best project management tools. It’s not our top pick, but Asana may still be the better option for some people. Asana also made it as one of our recommendations for managing remote teams and fostering collaboration across dispersed workforces.

The platform is intuitive, easy for employees to master, and offers more robust automation triggers most of our other recommendations. These might be sufficient reasons to sway some users to Asana.

We at Crazy Egg highly recommend Asana for a broad array of users. It’s affordable and can support a wide range of potential use cases, including agile project management. Sign up today and see what Asana can do for you and your team.