Asana Review, Pricing, Features with Pros and Cons

Navigating the labyrinth of project management tools can be daunting, but if you’ve ever wondered why Asana consistently ranks as a top choice for teams and organizations, you’re in for a treat.

This comprehensive guide dives deep into the platform’s features, usability, and unique offerings, demystifying its popularity and helping you decide if it’s the right fit for your project needs.

From task management and team collaboration to AI-powered insights and robust security protocols, discover what sets Asana apart in the crowded landscape of project management solutions. Elevate your project management game to new heights with Asana.

Read further to learn more about Asana, in our review we will detail its features, pros and cons with our rating, and a conclusion about why you should use it.

Click on “open” if you want to see exactly what we will talk about in the rest of this article.

Asana is a flexible and user-friendly platform designed for cross-functional work across various teams and organizations. It aims to streamline efficiency by connecting tasks, deadlines, and team members in one unified space.

The software offers features like list views for task organization, timelines for mapping out work over time, and boards to define each stage of work.

It also provides automation options for workflows, real-time reporting, and over 200+ integrations with other popular work tools. Asana is engineered to manage complex work easily, helping teams to focus on revenue-driving activities and align their efforts with company goals.

Asana specifications

Explore Asana’s flexible pricing options tailored to fit every team’s needs, from solo users to enterprise-level organizations.

With plans ranging from free to $30.49 per user per month, Asana offers a spectrum of features designed to enhance your project management experience.

Whether you’re looking for basic task management or advanced AI-powered insights, there’s a plan that’s just right for you!

Asana pricing plans

Basic Plan

• For individuals or small teams
• Unlimited tasks, projects, and messages
• Unlimited activity log and file storage (100MB per file)
• Collaborate with up to 15 teammates
• List, board, and calendar view projects
• Assignee and due dates
• iOS and Android mobile apps
• Time tracking with integrations
• 100+ free integrations with other apps

Premium Plan

• Cost: $10.99 per user, per month (billed annually); $13.49 (billed monthly)
• Everything in Basic, plus:
• Timeline and Workflow Builder
• Asana Intelligence
• Unlimited Dashboards
• Reporting across unlimited projects
• Advanced search and custom fields
• Unlimited free guests
• Forms and rules
• Start dates and times
• Task templates and milestones
• Admin console and private teams & projects

Business Plan

• Cost: $24.99 per user, per month (billed annually); $30.49 (billed monthly)
• Everything in Premium, plus:
• Portfolios and Goals
• Workload and custom rules builder
• Forms branching & customization
• Approvals and proofing
• Lock custom fields and advanced reporting
• Time tracking and advanced integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Tableau, Power BI

Enterprise Plan

• For larger companies needing more security and flexibility
• Contact sales for pricing
• Everything in Business, plus:
• Unlimited free guests and SAML provisioning
• Unlimited Dashboards for reporting
• Workflow bundles and Asana Audit Suite
• Enterprise Key Management (EKM)
• Expedited user set up with SCIM
• Custom automations for IT and Security Service Accounts
• Dedicated 24/7 customer support

Note: Asana also offers a 50% discount for nonprofits.

The features of Asana encompass a wide range of functionalities designed to streamline project management, enhance team collaboration, and optimize workflow.

From task assignment and time tracking to AI-powered insights and robust security protocols, Asana offers a comprehensive toolkit to meet the diverse needs of teams and organizations.

Whether you’re a project manager overseeing multiple tasks, an executive focused on strategic goals, or an admin concerned with data security, Asana’s features provide the flexibility and control you need to achieve your objectives efficiently and effectively.

Project Management

Asana serves as a comprehensive platform for managing projects from start to finish. It offers a centralized space where you can track who is responsible for what task and by when. This ensures that everyone is aligned and aware of their responsibilities.

The platform also allows you to set milestones, create dependencies between tasks, and even set up automated reminders for deadlines. This holistic approach to project management makes it easier to keep projects on track and ensures that everyone knows their role in achieving the project’s objectives.

Tasks

Tasks are the building blocks of projects in Asana. You can break down work into smaller, manageable tasks, each with a clear owner and due date. This makes it easier to track progress and meet deadlines.

Tasks can also be further broken down into subtasks, and you can attach files, comments, and tags to each task. This level of detail ensures that everyone has the information they need to complete their tasks effectively.

Projects

Projects in Asana serve as the overarching structure that holds tasks. By organizing tasks within projects, you create a shared hub for team collaboration. This feature helps in tackling work together and keeping everyone on the same page.

Projects can be categorized, and you can use templates to quickly set up new projects based on best practices. This saves time and ensures consistency across projects.

Project Views

Asana offers multiple ways to view your projects, including lists, calendars, timelines, Gantt charts, or Kanban boards. Each view serves a specific purpose.

For example, the timeline view is excellent for understanding the sequence of tasks and identifying bottlenecks, while the Kanban board is useful for agile workflows. This flexibility allows you to organize work in a way that best suits your team’s needs and workflow.

Custom Fields

Custom fields in Asana allow you to add additional information to tasks in the form of labels. These labels enable you to sort, filter, and automatically generate reports on work.

This feature adds an extra layer of organization to your projects, making it easier to track specific types of tasks or workflows. You can create custom fields for things like priority levels, cost estimates, or any other metric that is important to your project.

Boards

Boards in Asana help you visualize work in a card-like format, similar to sticky notes on a board. Each card represents a task, and you can move these cards through columns that represent different stages of a workflow.

This feature enhances the transparency of your work processes and is particularly useful for agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban.

List

The List view in Asana captures every task in a project or process in one place. It serves as a to-do list, helping you to keep track of tasks and check them off as they are completed.

You can sort tasks by various criteria, such as due date or priority, making it easier to focus on what needs to be done next.

Timeline

The Timeline feature in Asana allows you to map out project plans on a visual timeline. This shows the relationship between tasks and helps in keeping work on track, even when plans change.

The timeline can be adjusted dynamically, allowing for real-time updates and shifts in the project schedule.

Calendar

The Calendar view in Asana lets you see all your tasks and projects on a calendar layout. This makes it easier to identify scheduling conflicts, overlaps, and gaps.

You can drag and drop tasks to reschedule them and even sync the Asana calendar with external calendars like Google Calendar.

Gantt Chart

The Gantt chart view provides a high-level overview of your project, showing tasks, durations, and dependencies in a horizontal timeline.

This helps you spot potential roadblocks, understand the sequence of tasks, and plan accordingly. It’s an essential tool for complex projects that require careful planning and coordination.

Status Updates

Status updates in Asana allow you to quickly inform your team about the progress of a project. You can craft these updates with time-saving automations and even include key performance indicators (KPIs). This keeps everyone informed and aligned, reducing the need for frequent check-in meetings.

Time Tracking

Asana’s time tracking feature enables you to measure the time spent on individual tasks and overall projects. This data can be invaluable for understanding work patterns, estimating future tasks, and ensuring that the team is not overburdened. It aids in better time management and budgeting.

My Tasks

The My Tasks feature aggregates all your assignments in one place, providing a personalized view of your workload. You can sort these tasks by due date, project, or priority, helping you to prioritize and decide what needs to be tackled next.

Inbox

Asana’s Inbox is designed to keep you focused by providing automatic updates about work that matters to you. It filters out irrelevant information and allows you to quickly respond to comments, updates, and mentions, keeping your attention where it’s needed most.

Mobile and Desktop Apps

Asana offers both mobile and desktop applications, ensuring that you can manage your tasks and projects whether you’re at the office or on the go.

The apps are designed for quick navigation and offer most of the features available on the web platform, allowing for seamless transition between devices.

Home

The Home feature in Asana provides a dashboard-like overview of your tasks, goals, projects, and more. It’s designed to give you a quick snapshot of your work, helping you to jump right into your most pressing tasks and projects.

Goals and Reporting

Asana’s Goals and Reporting features serve as the strategic layer of your work management, linking the day-to-day tasks and projects to the company’s broader objectives. You can set both short-term and long-term goals, align them with specific projects or tasks, and even assign owners to each goal.

This ensures that everyone is aligned with the company’s strategic objectives. The real-time data tracking allows for immediate insight into how well goals are being met, enabling quick adjustments as needed.

You can also break down goals into key results, making it easier to measure success in a quantifiable way. This feature is particularly useful for implementing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) or similar goal-setting frameworks within your organization.

Portfolios

Portfolios in Asana act as your mission control center for overseeing multiple projects. This feature allows you to create a portfolio of related projects and view their status, priority, and progress all in one place.

You can customize the portfolio view to include key metrics that are most relevant to your team or organization. This makes it easier to spot trends, identify bottlenecks, and allocate resources more effectively.

Portfolios are particularly useful for managers and executives who need a high-level view of work across teams or departments. They facilitate cross-team collaboration by providing a unified view of how different projects contribute to organizational goals.

Reporting Dashboards

Asana’s Reporting Dashboards are designed to give you a comprehensive understanding of your team’s work. These dashboards allow you to visualize the state of your team’s work with real-time charts, graphs, and insights.

You can customize these dashboards to show the metrics that matter most to you, such as task completion rates, project timelines, or workload distribution. This feature enables you to dig deep into the data, offering options to filter by date range, team members, or custom fields.

The insights gained from these dashboards can be invaluable for making data-driven decisions, optimizing workflows, and demonstrating the team’s impact to stakeholders. Whether you’re looking to improve efficiency, balance workloads, or simply celebrate wins, the Reporting Dashboards provide the analytical tools you need.

Workflows and Automation

Forms

Asana’s Forms feature is designed to standardize the intake process for work requests, ensuring that your team has all the necessary information from the get-go. Instead of sifting through emails or chat messages to gather requirements, you can create custom forms that capture all the essential details.

These forms can be embedded in websites or shared via a link, making it easy for clients, stakeholders, or team members to submit requests. Once a form is submitted, a new task is automatically created in Asana, populated with the information from the form.

You can even set up rules to automatically assign these tasks to the right team members based on the form responses. This streamlines the intake process, reduces the chance of missing critical information, and speeds up project initiation.

Rules

The Rules feature in Asana allows you to automate routine tasks and processes, helping your team get more done, faster. You can create custom rules that trigger specific actions based on changes to tasks or projects.

For example, you can set up a rule to automatically move a task to a specific column on a board when its status changes to “Complete,” or to assign a task to a team member when it’s moved to a particular stage.

This automation eliminates the need for manual updates and ensures that tasks flow smoothly through your processes. Rules can be as simple or as complex as you need, allowing you to automate everything from basic task assignments to complex, multi-step workflows.

Bundles

Bundles in Asana offer a way to easily create, apply, and update standardized processes across multiple projects. Instead of setting up each project from scratch, you can create a bundle that includes a set of predefined tasks, rules, and templates.

This bundle can then be applied to new projects with a single click, ensuring that each project starts with the same set of best practices.

This is particularly useful for organizations that manage similar projects on a regular basis, as it ensures consistency and saves time on project setup. Bundles can be updated as your processes evolve, and these updates can be automatically applied to all projects that use the bundle.

Templates

Templates in Asana help you standardize your team’s best practices by providing ready-made guides for projects and tasks. These templates can include a predefined set of tasks, subtasks, deadlines, and even assignees.

They serve as a starting point for new projects, ensuring that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you start something new. Templates can be customized to suit the specific needs of each project, but they provide a solid foundation that reflects your team’s optimal way of working.

They are particularly useful for repetitive projects or tasks that have a similar structure each time, such as onboarding new employees or launching marketing campaigns. By using templates, you ensure that each project starts with a proven framework, reducing setup time and increasing the likelihood of success.

Resource management

Workload

The Workload feature in Asana provides a visual representation of each team member’s tasks and responsibilities, giving you an immediate sense of how busy or available each person is. This feature is particularly useful for managers and team leads who need to allocate resources effectively.

Workload allows you to view tasks assigned to each team member alongside their deadlines, making it easier to spot who is overburdened and who has capacity for more work.

You can also set capacity limits based on various metrics like hours per day or tasks per week, providing a more nuanced understanding of each team member’s availability.

If you notice an imbalance, you can easily reassign tasks directly from the Workload view. This ensures that work is evenly distributed, reducing the risk of burnout and improving overall team efficiency.

Time Tracking

Time tracking in Asana enables you to measure the amount of time spent on individual tasks and overall projects. This feature is crucial for teams that need to bill clients by the hour or for those looking to improve their time management skills.

You can start and stop timers directly within tasks, or manually enter time spent after the fact. This data is then aggregated, allowing you to view time spent on a per-task, per-project, or even per-team-member basis.

The insights gained from this feature can be invaluable for future project planning, helping you to create more accurate estimates and budgets. It also allows team members to be more mindful of how they spend their time, encouraging a more focused and efficient work style.

Whether you’re looking to improve productivity, assess the profitability of client projects, or simply gain a better understanding of your team’s work habits, time tracking provides the data you need to make informed decisions.

Asana Intelligence

Asana Intelligence is a suite of AI-powered features designed to enhance the platform’s capabilities, driving greater clarity, impact, and scalability for all levels of an organization. This AI layer acts like an intelligent assistant that not only automates routine tasks but also provides actionable insights.

It’s particularly beneficial for executives and department heads who need to make data-driven decisions quickly. Asana Intelligence can analyze large sets of data to identify trends, suggest optimizations, and even predict future outcomes, making it a powerful tool for strategic planning.

Smart Status

Smart Status automates the process of creating status updates for your projects. Instead of manually collating information, the feature uses AI to quickly identify risks, open questions, and roadblocks that could impede progress.

It then generates a comprehensive status update that can be shared with the team or stakeholders. This feature is particularly useful for keeping large, complex projects on track, as it ensures that potential issues are identified and addressed before they become critical.

Smart Fields

Smart Fields are auto-generated custom fields that help in organizing projects to support cross-functional collaboration. These fields can automatically categorize tasks based on various parameters like department, priority, or project phase.

This feature is particularly useful for large organizations where multiple departments may be working on interconnected tasks.

Smart Fields ensure that everyone has the context they need to work effectively, without having to sift through irrelevant information. They can also be used in conjunction with Asana’s reporting features to generate more targeted insights.

Smart Summaries

Smart Summaries use AI to extract key action items and highlights from conversations and meetings within Asana. This eliminates the need for follow-up meetings to discuss what was covered, saving time and reducing meeting fatigue.

The feature scans through comments, notes, and discussions to identify what needs to be done next, who should do it, and by when. These summaries can be shared with team members or stakeholders, ensuring that everyone is aligned and aware of the next steps.

Smart Editor

The Smart Editor feature in Asana uses AI to help you write clearer, more compelling responses that strike the right tone. Whether you’re crafting a project update, responding to a client, or providing feedback to a team member, the Smart Editor offers real-time suggestions to improve your writing.

It can suggest more effective wording, correct grammatical errors, and even recommend a tone that is appropriate for the context. This ensures that your communications are not only accurate but also resonate with your audience.

Smart Answers

Smart Answers allows you to interact with Asana using natural language queries. You can ask questions like “What are the overdue tasks for Project X?” or “Who is responsible for Task Y?” and get immediate, accurate answers.

This feature uses AI to understand the context of your questions and provide insights that are directly relevant to your projects. It’s like having a personal assistant that knows everything about your work, ready to provide the information you need to make informed decisions.

Admin and Security

Asana’s Admin and Security features provide a robust set of tools for managing your organization’s use of the platform, ensuring that the right people have the right access to information.

This suite of features is crucial for maintaining data integrity, compliance, and overall system security. It allows administrators to control various aspects of the platform, from team settings to data security protocols.

These features are particularly useful for large organizations or those that handle sensitive information, as they provide an extra layer of protection against unauthorized access and data breaches.

Admin Console

The Admin Console is the centralized hub for managing all organizational settings in Asana. From here, you can add or remove users, manage billing, set up integrations, and configure security settings such as two-factor authentication.

The console also provides analytics and reporting tools that give you insights into how your organization is using Asana.

This includes data on user activity, project completion rates, and more. The Admin Console is designed to be user-friendly, making it easy even for those without technical expertise to manage complex organizational settings.

Audit Suite

Asana’s Audit Suite provides a set of APIs that support integrations aimed at keeping your organization secure and compliant. This feature allows you to monitor user activity, track changes to tasks and projects, and even set up alerts for suspicious behavior.

The Audit Suite can integrate with third-party security information and event management (SIEM) systems, providing a comprehensive view of your organization’s security posture. This is crucial for organizations that need to comply with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA, as it provides the tools needed to monitor and report on data access and usage.

Data Security

Data Security in Asana gives you full control over your data, allowing you to export or delete it as needed. This feature supports various data formats, making it easier to migrate to another system or create backups.

You can also set up automated data exports at regular intervals, ensuring that you always have up-to-date backups.

In addition to export options, Asana provides robust encryption protocols to protect your data both in transit and at rest. This ensures that your sensitive information is secure from unauthorized access.

Permissions and Privacy Controls

Asana’s Permissions and Privacy Controls allow you to fine-tune access to projects and teams. You can create private projects for sensitive work, limit access to certain tasks, or even set up hidden teams that are invisible to the rest of the organization.

Conversely, you can make projects or teams public so that anyone in the organization can join without an invitation. These controls provide a flexible way to manage access, ensuring that team members have the information they need while keeping sensitive data secure.

Team Management

Team Management features in Asana allow you to designate admins who have the authority to manage member settings and enforce security protocols like password complexity. For enterprise customers, additional controls are available through SAML and Asana’s Admin API.

These advanced features allow for automated user provisioning and deprovisioning, as well as the ability to enforce organization-wide security policies. This ensures that only authorized individuals have access to your Asana workspace, reducing the risk of data breaches.

Guest Management

Guest Management in Asana enables you to collaborate with external parties like vendors, contractors, and partners in a secure environment. Guests have limited access, only able to see the projects and tasks to which they have been invited.

This ensures that external collaborators can contribute to projects without compromising internal data. You can also set expiration dates for guest access, ensuring that they only have access for the duration of the project or task.

This feature makes Asana a versatile tool for cross-organizational collaboration, allowing you to extend your workspace beyond the boundaries of your company while maintaining security.

Asana stands out as a comprehensive project management tool designed for cross-functional work. It excels in task management, offering a user-friendly interface that most people can pick up within minutes.

The software is highly collaborative, allowing team members to stay updated on task changes and comments.

Asana also offers expansive integration capabilities, connecting seamlessly with popular apps like Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. This makes it a one-stop solution for managing complex work across teams.

Pros

• User-Friendly Interface: Asana’s intuitive design ensures a smooth user experience, making it easy to navigate.
• Expansive Integration: The software integrates well with other project management apps, filling any gaps in its own features.
• Collaboration-Focused: Asana is designed for team collaboration, providing real-time updates on task changes and allowing for comments.
• Efficient Task Management: The platform offers an organized and efficient way to manage tasks, with features for prioritizing and real-time updates.

Cons

• No Time Tracking: Asana lacks built-in time tracking features, which are common in other project management tools.
• Requires Some Experience: While user-friendly, Asana does require some familiarity with project management software for effective use.
• Overwhelming Features: The software offers a plethora of features related to tasks, which can make simple tasks seem complex.
• Limited Task Assignment: Only one user can be assigned to a task at a time, which can be limiting for collaborative projects.

Asana Review, Pricing, Features with Pros and Cons

• 1Overview
• 2Pricing
• 3Features
• 4Conclusion
• 5FAQ

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