Asana is an incredibly capable option for tracking and organizing team projects. The to-do list functionality, calendar views, and simple reporting tools make it an attractive solution for teams looking to take some of the mental load off of the staff.
Its ease of access, price point, and intuitive design make it an easy pick for many overloaded workplaces. By using Asana to organize workflow, businesses are able to more accurately track, monitor, and adjust project plans. Asana may be a great solution in many cases, but that does not make it the perfect solution for every workplace.
Why Asana may not be right for your business
Asana is an incredibly versatile tool, but it does center its design around the familiar to-do list. Tasks are simple to create, and they can be nested underneath each other to create a tree of sub-tasks. This simple structure works well for straightforward projects and simple lists of intuitive tasks that simply need a home, but it falls short for organizations routinely dealing with a certain degree of complexity.
Asana can quickly become a tangled web of interwoven assignments if a project manager relies on it for complicated projects. And large teams that need individual boards for their own sub-projects will find themselves mired in checklist clutter that can cause confusion and frustration. Asana has a few additional views and plugins that may mitigate these issues, but in many cases, it’s simply more effective to seek out a separate solution.
If you’re at that point or just looking for comparative options, we’ve curated a list of alternatives for a place to start.
ClickUp is best for team collaboration.
monday.com is best for cross-team functionality.
Jira is best for developers.
Wrike is best for digital media and marketing teams.
Trello is best for quick and easy setup.
ProofHub is best for clean simplicity.
Basecamp is best for keeping everything in one place.
Smartsheet is best for tracking many projects at once.
Airtable is best for small teams or individuals.
Top Asana alternatives
| Software | Free Trial | Starting price (paid plans) | |
| ClickUp | 30 days | $7.00/member/mo. | Try ClickUp |
| monday.com | 14 days | $9.00/seat/mo. | Try monday.com |
| Jira | 7 days | $7.75/user/mo. | Try Jira |
| Wrike | 14 days | $9.80/user/mo. | Try Wrike |
| Trello | 14 days | $5.00/user/mo. | Try Trello |
| ProofHub | 14 days | $89.00/mo. | Try ProofHub |
| Basecamp | 30 days | $99.00/mo. | Try Basecamp |
| Smartsheet | 30 days | $9.00/user/mo. | Try Smartsheet |
| Airtable | 14 days | $10.00/seat/mo. | Try Airtable |
ClickUp: Best for team collaboration
ClickUp is a feature-rich project management tool designed to be flexible for any team across an organization, including managers, designers, and developers. Like Asana, ClickUp is organized around tasks and to-do lists that you can view in multiple ways without losing hierarchy or clarity.
Why choose ClickUp over Asana?
ClickUp provides a few unique customization features. The ClickUp Toolbar, for instance, allows for bulk changes on tasks to better accommodate rapidly shifting environments. Custom statuses and a strong tagging system that are also customizable give project managers the tools they need to communicate their exact needs on a wide scale with very few actions on their end.
Furthermore, ClickUp’s smart search and free data import feature make it easy to transition to this tool from others, and detail-oriented project managers can quickly double-check the import once it’s complete.
monday.com: Best for cross-team functionality
monday.com is similar to Asana in structure and usability. The difference is in the details and the increased functionality. monday.com uses a bulletin board as its most basic unit of task assignment.
These boards are highly customizable and display statuses, timelines, and assignments all in one area. monday.com also features a wide variety of views to cater to different needs.
Also Read: Asana vs. monday.com
Why choose monday.com over Asana?
Because monday.com and Asana share several design features and philosophies, it may initially seem difficult to choose between the two. But teams that feel themselves constantly pushing against the boundaries of Asana’s feature set will feel freer with the more robust monday.com.
These overlaps between monday.com and Asana also make it easy to draw a sort of progression path between the two. If a mid-size project team has started with Asana and yearns for more, then monday.com is an easy choice.
Jira: Best for developers
If you have iterative projects or tasks, Jira provides a strong agile project management solution with Scrum and kanban views.
While it can be used for teams from all types of industries, and for all kinds of tasks, it’s a favorite for developers specifically. It has security features for data protection, bug tracking, and useful reporting options to see where projects lie.
Why choose Jira over Asana?
Asana is built to work for a wide variety of teams, but Jira is most tailored to DevOps, streamlining the complex, iterative process. So if your company or team does quite a bit of development work, we recommend Jira as a more fitting option.
And because Jira offers some integrations across project management software, including Asana, you could use Jira for your dev teams while using another project management tool for other teams in a powerhouse combo.
Wrike: Best for digital marketing
Wrike uses a combination of task-based to-do lists within projects and interactive Gantt charts to help teams stay organized. The Gantt charts in particular give it the extra edge if you have a lot on your plate, since they show a clear project path from a bird’s eye view. Plus, the charts are simple to set up, so you can get right to your project without much fuss.
Also Read: Wrike vs. Asana
Why choose Wrike over Asana?
While the task tracking and Gantt chart creation is a massive draw to Wrike, it’s only a small slice of what Wrike offers. Wrike also has request forms and templates to drastically reduce labor on either end of the planning process. And it provides interactive features like a live activity stream for at-a-glance updates with click-and-slide task adjustments, so you can quickly make adjustments to plans mid-development.
Trello: Best for quick setups
Trello may not have a portfolio management system like Basecamp. But it does feature simple board creation, and its focus on kanban task management makes it simple to peek at the board and get rich information with a swift onceover.
Why choose Trello over Asana?
Trello makes project hierarchy a very clear and precise matter. Because everything is organized into boards, lists, and cards, splitting up projects is quick and easy, and expectations are more immediately clear.
Trello cards also feature a comment system that confines conversation to the relevant task, minimizing the risk of miscommunication and reducing information overload.
ProofHub: Best for simplicity
ProofHub is a by-the-book project management tool. Traditional project managers who have been through the Project Management Institute’s certification process will find a toolset that matches their education. ProofHub also offers further functionalities, like time tracking and productivity analysis, for a well-rounded solution.
Why choose ProofHub over Asana?
ProofHub is simply much more advanced than software solutions like Trello or Asana. Medium to large enterprises will find that ProofHub covers more of their needs than something as lightweight as Asana. By covering HR needs like billable hour tracking, ProofHub becomes a central place for multiple business needs.
ProofHub also handles more complex project structures, and it provides project templates that make planning and assigning project tasks easy for first time users and veterans alike. Plus, administration can use ProofHub’s custom roles and progress monitoring features, Gantt charts, and graphical reports for budgetary and timeline needs.
Basecamp: Best for keeping everything in one place
Basecamp, like Asana, is a software solution that’s easy to slot into a workplace with relatively little up-front time investment. Many of Basecamp’s assignment tracking tools are visual in nature, and onboarding staff to Basecamp is relatively quick.
Why choose Basecamp over Asana?
Basecamp is much better suited to handling a project portfolio. Asana does technically handle project portfolio views, but those tools are not built into the basic Asana experience.
Basecamp has a broader suite of features that are specifically tailored to the portfolio management experience, so managing several projects at a time is easier.
It also has a unique “campfires” feature that creates group chats across the workplace, meaning team members across projects can share live updates in conversation form—rather than relying on notes left behind on tasks that have been checked off.
Smartsheet: Best for tracking multiple projects
Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-focused project management solution that comes complete with automations, reporting, and activity logs. And like a spreadsheet, it has a robust list of custom formulas, conditional formatting, and other features—but it also has varying project views, forms, and templates.
Why choose Smartsheet over Asana?
Smartsheet and Asana may have quite a few shared capabilities, but if you’re juggling a lot of projects at once, we suggest trying Smartsheet instead. Its sheet formulas can be used across boards to simplify cross-project and cross-department collaboration, and the spreadsheet view fits plenty of information without much scrolling.
For complex projects, you can use layered sorting and filtering to better manage the mess of tasks, as well as create filtered views for different teams, team members, and purposes.
Airtable: Best for small teams or individuals
As a spreadsheet-formatted solution, Airtable can cram a lot of information into its default grid view. While it doesn’t do so well with adding subtasks, it can accommodate tons of information with a wide variety of field types. It’s also got an incredible filtering and grouping system so you can make sense of those many, many rows of tasks and details.
Why choose Airtable over Asana?
Airtable and Asana have somewhat similar grid setups, and they share quite a few field capabilities. But one thing Airtable holds over Asana is its robust free plan. Sure, you’re limited to just five board editors or creators, but you can have unlimited commenters if you need folks to weigh in occasionally.
And you can do a lot with Airtable’s free plan, such as creating columns upon columns of various fields with custom colors. You can group by any field and even create subgroups for better organization, and you can create several custom views that pull from the main board. There are some limitations, but compared to other free project management options, Airtable has a lot to offer.
So if you’re working with not a lot of budget for a smaller team, Airtable could be the answer you’re looking for.
Methodology
To give you the most valuable list of project management solutions possible, we dug through user reviews and lists upon lists of popular Asana alternatives. Drawing from those same user reviews and exploring software offerings side by side, we compared features and capabilities for a more complete look of how these alternatives stand up to the already well-trusted Asana.
Top-tier team tracking
Asana is a tough product to find an alternative for if it has already found its home in your business. It’s straightforward and works exactly the way it needs to for easy project tracking. Despite that, you can quickly outgrow its limitations with more complex projects, a wider project portfolio, or a rapidly growing team.
Hopefully, you’ve found what you need in this list. But if not, hop over to our list of the Best Project Management Software for additional solutions.
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