Pros & Cons
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- Intuitive, modern interface
- Robust free version
- Numerous, versatile work management features
- Convenient automations and integrations
- In-depth progress tracking
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- AI add-ons can get expensive
Asana Specs
| Android App | |
| Automation | |
| Collaboration Features | |
| Collaboration in Free Version | |
| Free Account Offered | |
| Free Version Available | |
| Gantt Charts | |
| iOS App | |
| Number of Collaborators in Free Account | 10 |
| Pre-Built Templates | |
| Recurring Tasks | |
| Time Tracking |
Asana is an incredibly versatile, powerful app that can handle both task and work management with ease. Its plethora of features, from advanced search to time tracking and everything in between, make it a good fit for most types of ongoing work. And thanks to its accessible interface, deep progress tracking, and wide variety of automations and integrations, there’s little you can’t accomplish. Best of all, its comprehensive free version means you might not even need to spend a dime. Asana is an Editors' Choice winner for all those reasons, and everyone in the market for a work management solution should consider it.
Project Management vs. Work Management
At PCMag, we distinguish between project and work management software. Projects have start dates, end dates, and deliverables, while 'work' in this sense refers to a series of ongoing tasks. This distinction isn’t always crystal clear, however.
Asana, for example, can track hours worked, tasks, statuses, and more in its workspaces (where you manage tasks) using a variety of visualizations, just like project management apps. Full-on project management apps, however, often go a lot further. Zoho Projects, for example, can generate in-depth reports on issues, tasks, time logs, and workloads. Asana, instead, focuses on customizable widgets you can add to a dashboard and helps you track larger goals and milestones. Zoho Projects is thus better for complicated, multi-stage projects, such as constructing a big building, whereas Asana is more suitable for simpler operations, such as the day-to-day work of a manager.
If you’re in the market for a dedicated project management app, you can choose among our Editors' Choice winners for that category: GanttPro for newcomers, Teamwork for client work, and Zoho Projects for small and growing teams.
Pricing: Expensive, Especially With Add-ons
You can use Asana for free or opt for one of its two primary paid plans: Starter and Advanced. The latter both offer 14-day trials. Alternatively, if you run a larger business, Asana has Enterprise and Enterprise+ plans, which require you to contact the sales department directly for pricing. I tested the Advanced plan.
Asana’s free plan, called Personal, lets you collaborate with up to 10 team members and supports unlimited messages, projects, storage, and tasks. Beyond that, you also get activity logs, basic search filters, integrations, status updates, and time tracking. Free users have access to board, calendar, and list views for task management. If you have a small team or are just looking to use Asana yourself, you might not need to pay for a premium plan, considering how much the free plan offers. However, premium plans have additional features, such as AI functionality, as well as higher usage limits and more task management views.
The Starter plan ($10.99 per user per month, billed annually) adds AI functionality, along with unlimited automations and free guests. You also get access to an admin console, advanced search, custom fields, custom project templates, forms, private teams and projects, project dashboards, start dates and times, universal reporting, and the workflow builder. Gantt and timeline views are available for task management, too.
The Advanced plan ($24.99 per user per month, billed annually) expands upon the Starter plan with unlimited portfolios (collections of projects). You can also build more complex forms, integrate more apps, lock custom fields, manage workloads, proof images, set goals, set up approvals, and track time natively.
Enterprise plans feature a variety of additional features for larger, more complex organizations that need to work across different departments. So, you can expect things like archiving integration support, guest invite permissions, HIPAA compliance, resource management, service accounts, and much more.
Although Asana’s premium plans let you use the AI features, you might need to buy separate AI add-ons to increase your usage limits. Like many other services, AI features cost credits to use, and you only get so many credits per month: Starter accounts get 50,000, Advanced accounts get 75,000, and Enterprise accounts get 200,000. The AI Studio Plus ($135 per account per month, billed annually) and AI Studio Pro (custom pricing) add-ons net you an additional 100,000 credits per month and five million credits per quarter, respectively.
Thankfully, Asana doesn’t force you to sign up for an arbitrary team size like Monday.com, which helps to keep costs down. That said, Asana’s AI add-ons can quickly make the service incredibly expensive, much like with ClickUp. Asana's base plan is more expensive than both ClickUp ($7 per user per month, billed annually) and Trello ($5 per user per month, billed annually). Asana's free tier gets you more features than ClickUp’s, but Trello’s free plan is similarly impressive. Asana isn’t the cheapest work management app, but it easily justifies its price for most people.
Interface and Ease of Use: Elegant and Focused
To get started with Asana, you need to make an account, regardless of whether you intend to use a free or paid plan. I prefer using work management software on a desktop web browser, but Asana also offers apps for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.
Asana’s interface is clean, intuitive, and modern. ClickUp has a similar design, but its abundance of buttons, toolbars, and widgets makes it feel comparatively cluttered. Nothing in Asana is more than a few clicks away, whether you want to check your dashboard, find out how close you are to accomplishing a goal, see your tasks, or send a message.
(Credit: Asana/PCMag)Its home page gives you a bird’s-eye view of your projects, tasks, top collaborators, and widgets of your choosing, which run the gamut from comments on your drafts to a private notepad. You can easily access your home page (as well as your inbox) from pretty much anywhere in Asana.
The search field at the top of the interface allows you to query for anything, including tasks assigned to specific people, in specific projects, with specific due dates, with specific statuses, and more. Searching can be extraordinarily useful if your workspace has many different projects and tasks, or if you’re looking for something assigned to a certain team member.
Considering how easy Asana’s interface is to navigate, you probably won’t need much instruction. Still, if you want to learn more, a variety of tutorials at the bottom of the home page provide guidance. Alternatively, you can click the question mark icon at the top right of the interface to open a help menu that directs you to various courses and video tutorials on everything you can do with Asana, alongside a quick way to contact support.
I find most work management apps overwhelming at first (even those with well-designed interfaces), but that’s not the case with Asana. Even if you haven’t used so much as a basic to-do list app, you shouldn't have much trouble getting started. Nonetheless, it will take you some time to familiarize yourself with everything you can do.
Managing Work: Capable at Any Scale
Hierarchy is important to how Asana works. Not every user needs to make use of every level, though. At the broadest level, you can join an organization, which is the company at which you work. For example, Google. Organizations break down into workspaces, which can reflect different teams or departments in a company, such as marketing. Then, workspaces have projects, which are larger tasks that your entire department or team works on, such as a particular campaign. Lastly, there are tasks (and subtasks) that comprise work for individuals, such as writing a tagline. This structure enables Asana to accommodate a large corporation’s workload without overwhelming individual users.
Although Asana is best for collaborative work management, it also works well for personal to-do lists. You can simply add your tasks and check them off as you complete them without worrying about larger organizations and workspaces. In that way, it's similar to the superb Todoist app. That app allows for collaborative work management, too, so there's some overlap.
(Credit: Asana/PCMag)Once you set up your account and sort your organization and workspaces, you spend most of your time in Asana engaging with projects and tasks. You can set up a project and its attendant tasks yourself or choose from a variety of premade templates. Like other work management apps, the core of a project is a spreadsheet, but you can add additional views to it, such as board, calendar, Gantt, and timeline. Tasks are individual elements of a project, which can be cards on a board, events on a calendar, items on a spreadsheet, and so on.
You can populate tasks with a variety of information via different columns, and tasks can also have subtasks, both of which you can mark as complete as you finish them. So, for example, if you’re a writer at Tech Magazine, you can join the TM organization, editorial workspace, and reviews project, which could house your review tasks. You can set up each task to have a due date, priority, status, and writer columns, while subtasks can cover each step of the review process, such as writing, editing, publishing, and more.
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If you reuse the same tasks, such as for standardized reviews, you can create task templates within the Workflow tab of a project. You can customize templates the same way you customize tasks, but when you click Add Task within a project, you can select a template instead of creating a blank new task. Most organizations do the same work across different projects and for different clients, so task templates can save significant amounts of time in the long term.
Asana has time-tracking, too. Simply add a time-tracking column to your project to track both your estimated and actual time on each task in that project. To start a timer, just click the ‘Actual Time’ field and then ‘Start Timer’ to begin. Alternatively, you can manually fill in how much time a task took to complete. This is fairly basic functionality, but it works fine. You might want to consider a dedicated service if you need deeper, more robust tracking.
Apart from its work management features, Asana supports form creation and image proofing. Like other work management apps' form creation features, Asana’s can be handy for making simple forms, such as a basic invoice, but it falls short of dedicated services, such as Jotform, for more complicated tasks. Similarly, Asana’s image proofing is convenient, but basic: Simply open an image you upload to Asana and click the Add Feedback button. I appreciate how feedback automatically turns into its own subtask. However, Asana doesn’t offer much in the way of collaborative media creation, so you need to look to other services for that functionality.
Progress Tracking: Monitor Big and Small Goals
If you want to track the progress of a project, you can open up its dashboard view within the top toolbar. Like in ClickUp or Monday.com, dashboards are customizable with a variety of widgets. You can choose from a long list of different chart types or simply add links, images, and text. So, for example, if you want to see the number of completed tasks in your dashboard, it's possible to add a number-style chart widget with the chart data value set to task. It’s a straightforward system that makes tracking progress easy, and I appreciate how you can add filters to each widget to customize what they display, such as tasks a certain person completed.
Zooming out, if you want to track the progress of multiple projects at once, Asana has portfolios. Portfolios get dedicated dashboards, just like projects, but they can also include a variety of other views, such as a list (a spreadsheet), messages, notes, progress (status updates), and workload (task count). The portfolio interface is very similar to the project interface, so it’s easy to understand how to navigate it.
(Credit: Asana/PCMag)It's also possible to set up goals and milestones in Asana. Milestones exist directly in projects and appear like tasks (complete with dedicated subtasks). They track progress toward specific checkpoints in a project. For example, you can set up a milestone to track the design stages of a new product. Goals are bigger milestones. For example, completing the design of the new product mentioned could be a goal, since it’s a much bigger checkpoint than a milestone. Of course, it doesn't signal the completion of the entire project, since you still need to manufacture and test the product. You can measure goal progress automatically, based on the completion of milestones or tasks in attached projects, or manually.
Communication and Collaboration: Simple and Effective
Asana gives you several ways to interact with coworkers. Most directly, you can send messages either to people, projects, or teams. Simply click on the plus icon at the bottom-left of your screen, then message, and write one like you would an email. Messages can contain all manner of formatting elements, from different headers to tables and more, alongside attachments, emoji, and mentions.
Alternatively, you can comment on tasks just by clicking on them and filling out the comment field. Finally, you can attach messages to projects directly by opening the messages tab within a particular project. Whether you want to contact an individual or a larger group (especially in the context of specific work), Asana has good options.
As is often the case with work management software, though, Asana’s communication features aren’t a replacement for a dedicated service, such as Slack. These features work as expected, but if you run a business that employs more than a few people, you need a more robust communication solution.
Integrations and Automations: Robust and Powerful
Asana supports a long list of integrations that enable you to use it with all your favorite apps. These run the gamut from form builders to Google apps, Jira Cloud to Microsoft Teams, and much more. Here's the full list of integrations.
Adding an integration is as simple as selecting one in the list and then clicking install. For example, I connected Google Drive in just a few seconds, which allowed me to interact with a Google Drive field in tasks for the effortless attachment of files. Although Asana’s integrations are robust, I still recommend checking to see if it supports the apps you or your company needs.
Outside of integrations, Asana also allows you to set up a bevy of automations called rules. If you’ve ever used IFTTT or Zapier, these are easy to understand. If you haven’t, think of automations as “If this, then that” statements you can customize to your heart’s content. Within Asana, a rule has three components: when, check if, and do this. For example, I created a rule with my ‘when’ set to due date is approaching, my ‘check if’ set to status is in progress, and my ‘do this’ to set priority to high. This sets my unfinished tasks nearing deadlines to high priority automatically.
You can make rules within portfolios or projects by choosing the rules tab from the Customize menu at the top right of the interface. You get a lot of latitude with rules, but you can also choose from a wide variety of customizable premade ones. Rules also support Asana’s integrations, so you can automate processes that rely on third-party apps. For example, I successfully created a rule that automatically emails me when a task is set to high priority.
AI: Tons of Functionality, But Will It Matter to You?
Asana has tons of AI features, which you get access to with any paid plan. Like with other work management apps, using AI features usually requires AI credits. Credit costs vary depending on the type of action. And, as mentioned above, you can buy more credits via optional add-ons. That said, based on my testing, the included AI credit allotments seem fairly generous, so you might not need to pay extra.
(Credit: Asana/PCMag)But what can you actually do with AI in Asana? First off, you can talk to Asana’s AI assistant by clicking its icon at the top right of the interface. You can ask the AI assistant questions, even those about your personal projects and tasks, or direct it to do certain things, such as create a task. This functionality worked most of the time, though, in testing, the assistant sometimes told me it couldn't do things that it actually could. I prefer doing things myself, so I know how to do them again in the future, but you might not.
For the full overview of the available AI functionality, check out Asana’s documentation. In short, you can leverage AI in goals, fields, project status updates, rules, summaries, and task creation. For example, I described the rule I created above, which automatically sets tasks nearing their deadlines to high priority, to Asana AI, and it created the relevant ‘when,’ ‘check if,’ and ‘do this’ items. This functionality goes a long way toward making automations approachable. I also used Asana AI to recommend fields for my project, but the AI didn't give me any helpful suggestions in this case.
Considering how many different ways you can use Asana AI, I recommend reading through Asana’s documentation to see if its features are relevant to your work processes. For example, if you’re already familiar with work management app automation, you likely won’t need to rely on AI to create automations for you. But if you are new to this type of software, you might love this option.
Security: Is Your Data Safe With Asana?
Asana’s privacy policy is fairly standard, but the company collects significant amounts of information. This includes all the content of your workspace alongside account information and service usage information, such as device information, log files, location information, and metadata. However, Asana also notes that users, not Asana, determine their own policies on storing, modifying, deleting, and retaining workspace content.
According to Asana, it can view and use workspace content as necessary to “maintain, provide, and improve the service” as well as for other purposes, such as addressing technical issues or complying with legal requests. As you might expect, if you use integrations with Asana, those third parties will have access to the data you send to them. For the security-conscious, you can enable multi-factor authentication for Asana.
How good is Asana at protecting the data it collects? Well, that’s hit or miss. For example, in recent memory, Asana experienced a user data leak courtesy of its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects to AI services like ChatGPT. Data leaks aren’t unique to Asana, of course, but you should be careful about the information you share with it.