Asana : Full Review, Testing, and Presentation (2024)

What is Asana?

Asana quickly grew in popularity as acloud-based project and task management tool, making methods previously intended for large-scale initiatives available to everyone.

But by the way, what is behind this name that is now well known in the world of teamwork?

• Origin and founders: Asana was founded in 2008 by two of the masterminds behind Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein. Their vision was to create software to improve collaboration and productivity within teams.
• Accessibility: Asana has democratized professional techniques by making them accessible to everyone, thanks to its cloud platform.
• Simplicity: An application known for its ease of use, Asana has won a wide audience, from start-ups to large corporations.
• Features: In addition to its simplicity, Asana offers a rich set of features to help effectively organize your project and each member of your teams
• Pricing: Asana offers a pricing structure that fits any budget, making it a viable choice for businesses of all sizes.

Asana is not just a project management software. It is a solution designed to simplify the coordination of your projects, regardless of their size, while offering a balance between robust functionalities and ease of use.

Who are Asana users?

Asana is used by a wide variety of businesses, from small teams to large organizations.

• Small teams and businesses: Asana is great for teams of under 15 people with its free plan. It offers a range of project management features, including unlimited projects, tasks, and comments, as well as basic workflows and community support.
• Larger teams: For teams of more than 15 people, Asana offers a Premium plan with additional features like timeline views, automated workflows, and standard reports. A 30-day free trial is also offered.
• Large teams and complex project management: The Asana Business Plan is designed for larger teams with more complex project management needs. It includes advanced features like advanced reports, portfolios, goals, and resource management.

Features

Asana, a robust and well-loved project management tool, makes it easy for individuals and teams to organize, track, and manage tasks.

From project planning to real-time collaboration, Asana offers a variety of features to help make your work processes more efficient and productive. Let's take a closer look.

1. Team management

Asana is characterized by its intuitive and flexible approach to task management.

Its capabilities allow team leaders to:

• Assign each member of teams in any company to specific tasks.
• Dividing tasks into sub-tasks for better organization.
• Create team tasks for optimal collaboration.
• Track progress and control deadlines.
• Use all of Asana's other capabilities effectively for your business

On top of that, the Asana platform offers resource management for their teams, such as the Portfolios feature, which allows you to monitor team workload and change task assignments without changing your view.

2. Project Management

Asana makes it easy to manage a variety of projects. Whether you're planning strategic initiatives or planning for the next sprint, the Asana platform simplifies the process by allowing you to:

• Easily move from one project to another.
• Have an overview of the percentage of progress of each project.
• Examine each project from multiple perspectives using bar charts, timelines, and charts.
• Map dependencies in the project timeline.

It should be noted that the Asana platform does not offer internal time tracking functionality, but integrates seamlessly with external software like Harvest.

3. Risk and Problem Management

Asana doesn't offer a specific tracking tool for tracking issues, but it does offer alternatives like the Timeline board, where you can separate difficult tasks and set up automations and notifications.

4. Reporting

Asana is great at reporting in its app, with calendar views, important messages, and project progress and collaborators all rolled into one.

Additionally, it offers reporting options for daily needs, including charts and other graphical methods for tracking tasks.

5. Financial Management

The Asana platform does not offer internal financial management functionality but integrates seamlessly with external software like Power Bi for more robust financial management.

6. Collaboration and Communication

Communication is key in any project, and Asana makes collaboration between collaborators a seamless experience with:

• Comments can be added at any level.
• Customizable access permissions for client projects.
• A single tab that lists all files uploaded as part of the project.

7. To-Do Lists, Sub-Tasks, and Dependencies

Asana offers a range of tools for more organized and accurate project management, with the use of task lists and subtasks, as well as dependency management.

• To-Do Lists and Sub-Tasks : Asana allows you to create detailed task lists for each project, with the option to add subtasks to each task. This makes it easy to manage complex projects by providing a hierarchical structure for optimal organization.
• Dependency Management : This feature allows tasks to be linked together to indicate dependency, which provides a clear view of the order in which tasks should be completed and helps prevent delays.

In short, Asana's to-do lists and subtasks, and dependency management, allow for more fluid and structured project management, ensuring accurate and effective tracking of each task.

8. Markers and Annotations

Asana boosts effective teamwork by using effective collaboration and organization tools, such as tags and tags, and comments and annotations.

• Markers and labels : Asana offers customization options for organizing tasks. These tools help filter and sort tasks, while also showing the status or priority of a task.
• Comments and Annotations : To promote transparent communication within the team, each task in Asana can be commented or annotated, allowing discussions to be followed up and additional details, files, or links that are relevant to a task added.

These capabilities built into Asana promote better organization and seamless collaboration, ensuring shared understanding between all team members.

9. Mobile app

Asana has a mobile application to manage your projects anytime and anywhere.

• The mobile application offers all the capabilities of the website on your phone.
• You can manage your tasks, add comments, and track the progress of your projects wherever you are.
• The application is synchronized with the website, ensuring that your work is always up to date.

The Asana mobile app gives you the freedom to stay productive, even when you're on the go.

10. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Asana integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI) into its arsenal to automate tasks and optimize teamwork with its Asana Work Graph feature.

• Goal-based resource management with the Work Graph: Adjust your team's resources based on past and future capabilities to meet the changing needs of your business and avoid burnout.
• Identify issues, unresolved questions, and obstacles using Asana AI to navigate success more effectively.
• Self-Optimized Processes: Create automated processes that are optimized for specific goals with Asana.
• Writing Assistant: Write clearer, more compelling answers with the Asana Writing Assistant.
• Instant summaries: Manage information better with Asana's ability to extract important actions and key elements from meetings, tasks, and feedback.
• Project updates: Asana answers any questions you may have about projects, helping to reduce the number of meetings.
• Work Organization: Start projects with your and collaborators with personalized recommendations, automatically generated fields, and smart rules using Asana.

The Asana Work Graph goes beyond simple automation by incorporating AI into its platform.

Whether you're a small team or a big business, Asana, with its AI, can improve the work of your team.

11. Proposed models

Asana offers a variety of predefined templates to help with project management.

These models, adapted to various needs, range from project planning to team management/and collaborators.

Project planning

• Product Launch: A template for planning and monitoring a product launch, including product development, deadlines, team responsibilities, etc.
• Marketing Campaign Management: A model that organizes marketing campaign details, marketing team responsibilities, marketing deadlines, and priorities.
• Event Planning: A template for tracking the schedule, tasks, responsibilities, and dependencies associated with each event.

Team Management

• Management of Objectives and Key Results (OKR): Model for defining, monitoring and achieving OkrS.
• Work Request Tracking: A template that allows managers to track the progress of work requests, assign tasks, and manage deadlines.

Asana offers a variety of detailed templates to meet the diverse needs of your organization, making it easy to start and manage projects with a predefined structure tailored to each situation and team.

Integrations

Asana integrates seamlessly with others for control to increase flexibility and efficiency.

• Asana integrates with communication software like Slack and Microsoft Teams for your employees.
• File storage services like Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox are also supported.
• These integrations allow your team to work in a more efficient and coordinated way.

Ultimately, Asana integrations give you the control to create a unified and efficient work environment.

Security and Confidentiality

Asana takes privacy and security seriously, trust is at the core of their strategies and processes, but every remote user needs to understand the implications of business practices and collaborators.

Confidentiality

• Asana subscribers benefit from a robust privacy process, with minimal data collection primarily aimed at improving the service.
• Free users have more data collected, including mobile data, emails, and general metadata, but that data isn't sold or shared

Security

• Asana follows a series of security best practices, including regular audits, holding SOC 2 Type I and II certificates, and encrypting data in transit.
• However, it should be noted that Asana stores data on Amazon servers, which may be a concern for some users.

Privacy Protection

• Asana is committed to sharing information only with third parties authorized by the user, such as their emails.
• Users have the right to delete or remove information at any time.
• Enterprise customers have the option to choose where their data is stored.

Asana offers a strong impact and guarantees for everyone when it comes to security and privacy, while leaving it up to each user to decide what level of data sharing is acceptable for them, like their emails.

Customer Support

Asana customer support is performing poorly.

On the one hand, they stand out for their responsiveness to commercial and technical problems. On the other hand, they leave much to be desired in controlling how to help users become familiar with the tool.

• Responsiveness to business and technical issues: If you have a question about corporate pricing, for example, Asana can provide a response within an hour.
• Great documentation: Asana offers comprehensive, well-organized documentation that's accessible on both their website and the web client.
• Asana Academy: For more comprehensive training, Asana offers a series of courses that cover all the capabilities of the tool.
• Developer resources: Asana also has resources for more technical users, and even offers case studies for those who prefer to learn by example.
• Limited help getting started with the software: If you're looking for help to better understand and use Asana, staff may not be as responsive as expected.
• Asana Forums: Another support platform is the Asana forums, powered by Asana users and staff. Most topics are answered, which indicates that help is available if needed.

Despite areas for improvement, Asana customer support offers numerous channels to help users take full advantage of the tool.

Fast response to business and technical requests, rich documentation, Asana Academy, and active forums are all resources that value Asana customer service.

Supported Project Management Methodologies

Asana is a flexible project management tool that adapts to a variety of project management methodologies, from Waterfall to Agile.

It offers a powerful solution to facilitate team collaboration in work, by providing tools to create, assign, and track tasks and goals in the context of any project style.

• Waterfall and Agile methodologies: Asana can be effectively used for projects organized using Waterfall and Agile methodologies. Its innate flexibility, centered on the assignment of tasks, allows its seamless integration into projects of a varied and complex nature.
• Kanban board: The “Timeline Table” tab can easily be transformed into a Kanban board. This makes it possible to visualize and monitor the progress of various tasks in a public way, thus optimizing the Agile approach.
• Scrum Workflow: The dashboard/update system can be seamlessly integrated into a Scrum workflow. It is able to accurately detail the most recent sprint, making it easier to manage Agile projects.
• Gantt chart: The “Calendar” tab allows you to map dependencies, thus turning it into a tool similar to a Gantt chart. It is a valuable element for Waterfall project management.

Asana is a versatile tool that offers the ability to merge traditional project management activities or methods into a modern work environment for your collaborators.

Its ability to support a variety of methodologies ensures unparalleled flexibility, making project management a simplified and efficient process to achieve your goals.

Pricing

Asana offers a variety of pricing plans to meet the needs of various types of businesses:

1. Asana Basic: Free, suitable for small teams or individual projects that require basic organization. Includes the ability to add up to 15 users, basic task management, and limited team collaboration.
2. Asana Premium: Costs $13.49/user per month, offering advanced capabilities such as task start and end dates, advanced reports, analytics tools, and priority support.
3. Asana Business: Costs $30.49/user per month, aimed at large businesses that require large-scale project management. It includes workload management, portfolio timeline previews, and task approvals.
4. Asana Enterprise: The award requires contact with Asana, offering enterprise-wide project management solutions with advanced security and control capabilities.

Each paid plan offers a 30-day free trial to test the service before committing.

Alternatives

Consult our selection of best project management tools to discover popular alternatives to Asana:

1. Monday.com

An innovative project management tool that promotes the effective integration of sales and project operations.

Features

• Effective collaboration: Enables teams to communicate and collaborate on a single platform.
• Task Management: Organize your tasks into lists, timelines, and tables for better visibility.
• Automation: Automate repetitive tasks to improve the efficiency of your team's activities.
• Reports: Has powerful reporting tools to track and measure the performance of your team.
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Pricing

• Basic: $8 per user/month, billed annually
• Standard: $10 per user/month, billed annually
• Pro: $16 per user/month, billed annually

A powerful solution for businesses looking to sync sales and project management activities.

SEE MORE : Try now Monday.com for Free

2. ClickUp

A project management platform that adapts to a multitude of business needs.

Features

• Task Management: Track tasks, projects, and goals on a single platform.
• Collaboration: Collaborate in real time with your team.
• Automation: Automate your work processes and activities to save time.
• Integrations: Integrates with your favorite tools for a unified workflow.

Pricing

• Free license: Free for an unlimited number of users
• Unlimited license: $5 per user/month, billed annually
• Business license: $9 per user/month, annual billing

An intuitive and affordable tool that can be adapted to almost any business.

SEE MORE : Try now Clickupfor Free

3. Trello

A user-friendly and affordable project management platform for a quick start.

Features

• Task Management: Track tasks and projects on visually appealing boards.
• Collaboration: Work collaboratively with your team in real time.
• Automation (Butler): Automate routine tasks and activities to improve productivity.
• Integrations: Integrate Trello with your favorite tools for a smooth workflow.

Pricing

• Free: Free for basic use
• Business Class: $10 per user/month, billed annually
• Enterprise: Price on request, depends on the number of users

Trello is a great option for anyone looking for a simple and cost-effective platform to manage their projects.

Final Verdict

Asana found a difficult balance, managing to offer almost all the tools you need for a modern and sophisticated project while being relatively easy to use for your business.

As we've seen throughout our Asana review, the result is a powerful tool for keeping your team and organization on task with lots of capabilities.

However, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Access to these powerful tools comes at a higher price than some other solutions.