If you are looking for softwares for project management, you might have come across Asana. The ease of use and simple interface make it one of the most popular software. Although, if you are unsure about it, here is a review of Asana to get a clear idea.
Asana project management has a lot of features, but getting started and onboarding your team takes only a few minutes. It’s a great top pick for businesses that want a lot of customization. When compared to other project management software, it’s easy to see why it ranks so high. The automation capabilities of Asana outperform those of its competitors. Even better, the low cost is adaptable enough to fit your business model rather than the other way around. If you’re not sure if it’s time to spend, you don’t need to as Asana’s free plan is unrivaled.
However, don’t mistake it for a full-fledged project management platform. It lacks resource management capabilities, budgeting and spending tracking, and other features you’d expect from such an app.
Asana is one of the greatest tools for managing tasks, workflows, and, projects. It recently provided more structure and templates for teams who need help setting up and using the app. Asana keeps track of who is responsible for which task and all associated information, such as all required steps, due dates, and so on. One of its distinguishing features is its flexibility, which allows you to choose what type of work to track and how to use it. This arrangement differs from standard project management software, which is designed for project-based work and can only be utilized in a limited number of ways. It excels at task management, with an easy and configurable user interface that makes it simple to collaborate in groups of any size.
Pros
Cons
Everyone can benefit from Asana’s offerings. They have an excellent free lifetime plan. All of the bundles are reasonable in price.
However, for most modest projects, this is more than plenty. Projects, messages, teams, log activity, and file storage are all unlimited for basic users. Smaller remote or distributed teams can use Asana’s Basic plan without paying anything. However, if you want more features, you might consider upgrading to Premium or Business.
In comparison to similar alternatives on the market today, Asana’s cost makes the program incredibly appealing. The per-user rates are comparable to the industry standard. However, Asana comes with more features out of the box than other options. It’s also a huge plus that Asana is compatible with agile project management. If you’re not sure, you can join up for the Basic plan and try it out for free. There’s no risk, and if you find it too restrictive, you can always upgrade. Those who wish to jump right into a paid subscription can sign up for a free trial and enjoy Asana for 30 days for free.
In the early days of Asana, the free Basic account offered you access to almost all of the app’s features. Timeline view, dashboards, custom fields, forms, rules, and milestones are now unavailable in the free account. Start dates, task dependencies, milestones, progress views, and sophisticated search and reporting are also unavailable to free accounts. Although with the free account, you can get a fair idea of how Asana operates at its core. If you’re thinking about paying for Asana, try out the free version for a few weeks with a small test group first. It remains worthwhile.
If your team has more than 15 members, you’ll need to sign up for Asana Premium. Many organisations prefer the Premium plan for the additional features and benefits, even if they have fewer than 15 employees on their team. The timeline view is one of the most important features of Asana Premium. This is a big-picture tool that ensures deadlines are met and projects are completed on time. It allows you to keep track of dependencies and identify how certain activities and deadlines link. This makes it considerably easier for project managers to anticipate problems and establish solutions before a conflict throws the project off track.
You’ll also get reporting tools and dashboards for rapid insights with Premium. Analyzing real-time charts and other helpful information can help project managers identify essential project data. Another important element is status reporting. Users can give brief updates instead of attending time-consuming status meetings. These reports can be modified with charts to highlight key points and can be updated in minutes. You’ll also get unlimited free visitors, private projects, private teams, milestones, forms, and an advanced admin console if you upgrade to Asana Premium. Overall, this feature-packed package provides excellent value. The deal starts at $10.99 per user per month. Asana Premium contains everything that the free account does, plus all of the features that are unavailable in the free tier. Administrative controls, priority assistance, and the option to create private teams and projects are all included with premium accounts.
This plan is for businesses that require more advanced functionality. For mid-size teams and businesses managing several projects across departments, the package is the best solution. The ability to create strategic goals at a company level is one of the best features of Asana Business. Managers may link goals to specific projects, ensuring that everything stays on track. You also get a tool for managing project portfolios. You can use it to keep track of all of your team’s goals and projects in one place. The project name, status, percentage of project completion, due dates, and priority level are all displayed in the portfolio view.
The workload management tool is another great feature. Managers can determine which team members have spare time and which are overburdened with work. This is extremely beneficial in terms of resource planning and, as a result, efficiency. Advanced integrations with Tableau, Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, and Microsoft Power BI are available through Asana Business. If your company uses any of those tools, you’ll most likely need the Business bundle. Overall, this costs $24.99 and is reasonable for larger groups as long as you’re using the advanced capabilities.
Asana Business is for companies that “need to manage work across several initiatives.” Consider huge corporations. Portfolios, Goals, Workload, Proofing, connectors with some otherwise limited apps, and a custom rules builder, often known as automation, are all included in this service tier. Routine tasks are automated, so no one has to remember to complete them.
Asana Enterprise is built for larger businesses and scalable project management. You can use Asana for more than just project management with an Enterprise subscription. You’ll also get access to comprehensive work management tools. Configurable member settings, sophisticated admin controls, SAML authentication, and increased data control are just a few examples. This includes enterprise-grade security, privacy controls, and data governance. GDPR, PCI DSS, CCPA, and other regulations are all met. Custom branding and priority support will be available to enterprise users.
Considering all of this, Asana is a great choice for small to midsize teams. For the vast majority of enterprises, these features will likely be overkill. You’re not gaining any further project management benefits at this level. User provisioning, security, and enterprise-grade work management are all important. If you’re interested in an Enterprise solution, you need to contact the Asana sales team for a tailored estimate.
Asana has a lot to offer, particularly when it comes to task management. The platform places a premium on collaboration and productivity, with project management tools taking a second seat. Asana stands apart from other project management apps because of its versatility. It can be used to manage ongoing work as well as long-term projects, as well as to organize teams, and assign responsibilities among employees. The multiple integrations just add to the platform’s adaptability to your company’s needs. This level of functionality comes with a wide range of difficulties and a steep learning curve.
Asana has a history of releasing substantial new features at least once each year. The option to create an integrated video message, updates to My Tasks, a desktop app with Dark mode, and smart calendar integration are among the most recent additions. You may even record a talking head video of yourself while explaining and showing anything in Asana using the new Video Messaging function. You can then share the video with others on your team, potentially eliminating the need for meetings. Furthermore, you may also make an audio transcript from a video to make the content more accessible. With My Tasks, you get greater choice over how you view and work with your tasks.
You can see all of your tasks in a Kanban board view, a list view, or a calendar view. You can also add automation. For instance, when someone on your team unblocks a task that you’ve been waiting to start, you’ll receive an automatic notification. When you want to focus solely on Asana, the Asana desktop client for macOS and Windows allows you to close your web browser. Dark Mode is also available in the new desktop apps. Other recent updates include a new interaction with Clockwise. This allows you to combine your tasks with your calendar so that you may schedule things without leaving Asana.
Asana’s platform is merely intended to aid managers in allocating projects and keeping staff on track with their responsibilities. Tasks can be displayed in a list format or on a kanban board, depending on the preferences of the users. A task can have subtasks, attachments, due dates, assigned team members, and other custom fields. Comment threads are useful as they allow everyone involved in a task to communicate with each other through Asana. Everything is archived when a task is marked as completed. As a result, each project has a searchable work history, which comes in handy for employee reviews and billing.
Many of the intricate project tracking tools that real project management software would provide are not available in Asana. The platform does, however, include a few features for managing long-term projects. The timeline view is basically a Gantt chart that all project team members may see and change in real-time. Because it’s simple to move things about, assign due dates, and examine sub-tasks, it works well with the platform’s present task controls. The portfolio view is the company’s second project management feature. Managers can use this screen to check which projects they’re in charge of, track progress and task modifications, and set priority levels to assist balance their workload.
Managers can use Asana’s task management functionality to see how responsibilities are distributed among team members. The workload can be assessed by task count, hours worked, points, or any other custom value to quickly analyze which employees have too much work and which have too little. Managers can also spread work using a drag-and-drop interface. An enlarged schedule allows you to plan ahead of time and solve workload difficulties before they become a problem for meeting deadlines. Live chat, time tracking, and document editing are just a few of the features that Asana lacks. It does, however, achieve a wide range of features through app integrations.
Harvest for time tracking, Slack and Microsoft Teams for team communication, and Zapier for advanced integrations all work well with Asana. The software is compatible with most cloud storage sites, Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, and over 1,000 other platforms.
Decision-makers must first figure out how to implement and use Asana before distributing it to the rest of the company. Asana is very intuitive, but each team must give some attention to the processes or work they want to track with Asana and how they will do so. Project Templates can help some teams, but it usually takes some trial and error to get them right. You can join different Workspaces and Organizations when you establish an Asana account. An Asana account that unites everyone with the same email domain is known as an Organization. A workspace is a group of people who collaborate on a project.
For instance, you may join your company’s Organization and be assigned to Workspaces depending on your department, committees you’ve served on, and so on. You and your team members establish Projects in a Workspace. There you log and track work, have discussions with coworkers, and more. You can start with Asana’s templates, create your own template, or start from scratch. The user interface is straightforward, intuitive, and appealing. Other project management tools might be overwhelming with drop-down menus and options. In contrast, Asana keeps things simple and open-ended.
Managers should take some time to figure out which dashboard widgets and menu items are best for their team. You can utilize Asana’s free plan to evaluate which structure works best by testing the app with a small group. Asana also offers a variety of project templates to help your team get started. Marketing, IT, and product design are among the commercial uses for which templates are accessible. When you initially start using Asana, these templates can help you get your team up and running, and you can add to them later.
Asana is available on the web, as a Mac and Windows desktop app, and as an Android and iOS app. The interface is efficient and responsive, with just enough colour and flair to keep it engaging and useful without appearing cluttered. It also features certain surprises, such as celebratory animations that come on screen from time to time. Although, you can turn these extra effects off if you don’t like them. In the settings section of Asana, you’ll find a list of keyboard shortcuts called Hacks. Hacks provide additional functionality and individuality. After enabling the associated hack, for example, press TAB+B for some feline fun.
Add basic account information, regulate notifications, alter display options and the visual effects, and configure integrations with other applications like Harvest, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Figma, and others under your profile settings. You can accomplish practically anything on the mobile apps that you can do in the web app. Although depending on the volume of work and comments your team does, a full-sized screen may be preferable. It is, nonetheless, feasible to be productive while using a phone. It’s convenient to be able to use Asana from any place with an Internet connection. Moreover, mobile apps feature a lot of offline functionality. When you work offline in the mobile apps, grey clouds indicate that the material hasn’t yet been synchronized. So none of your collaborators can view it until your device reconnects and syncs.
Asana is simple to use. The left tab displays your list of Projects, Workspaces, Reports, and other items that are always accessible and can be collapsed to free up space. The Overview, a List of tasks, Board view (a kanban board), Calendar, Messages, and Files tabs are across the top of the main window. They allow you to switch between different perspectives. Depending on how your team sets up and uses Asana, these options may vary. You can change your view at any moment, and you can filter and order task lists by criteria like due date or assignee. When you click on a task, a secondary window appears to the right with all of the task’s details.
Tasks are at the heart of every project (or any group of work, even if it’s ongoing). Subtasks, as well as an assignee, due date, recurring due date, attachments, comments, tags, and followers, can all be found in each task. Followers are notified if the task is modified. Rich text formatting, editing after posting, and @ mentions are all features that make comments extremely valuable. A workflow is made up of a single job and all of its subtasks and customizations. Asana allows you to allocate each step to the proper person and add the associated due date at the appropriate time. However, it would be nice if Asana allowed you to transform a task and all of its subtasks into a template. This way you could use it by default when creating new tasks in that Project.
Although you can design a custom template at the project level, this is not an option. In any case, there is a simple workaround. You need to build the template you want and mark it as such in the task name, then make sure everyone copies it when they need it. There is a button that allows you to duplicate a task, so this becomes easy.
You can attach comments and other data to tasks to assist you to understand what’s going on so you don’t have to talk to your coworkers separately. Everything you need to know is right there. As tasks and subtasks are finished, the task’s history and all of the events that occurred become associated with the task. As a result, every work action has a purpose. Asana is great for providing a larger perspective on each team member’s tasks, in addition to keeping track of minutia. You can look at all the tasks allocated to a certain person to see how much work they have on their plate if you have the appropriate rights.
It’s not the quantitative information that some project management software provides. This is based on the number of hours per week a person is assigned to work and the estimated number of hours of work they’ve allotted to them.
Asana project management has an outstanding advanced search feature. When searching for a term at the top level, you can specify whether you’re looking for a task or a conversation. Assigned to, In Projects, and Followed By are some of the other default fields. You can also define whether a task contains an attachment, whether it is done, and when it is due. You may add filters for custom data, people, tags, dependencies, and even subtasks to drill down even further. If these tools don’t find what you’re looking for, they probably didn’t exist in the first place. Any of these complicated searches can be saved as interactive Reports in Asana, which are accessible from the left-hand menu.
These reports are updated as new things match the search keywords, and you can change the search terms at any time. This function might be quite useful for managers who want to figure out who is the most productive. It’s a good approach to tracking individual improvement over time, even for individuals.
Tags make tasks easier to find, and the sophisticated search option is excellent. Interactive checkboxes allow you to cross off tasks as you finish them and untick them just as simple if you or another Asana member make a mistake. You can add detail to a job that’s important to you and your team with custom fields. This includes the task’s priority (low, medium, high) or progress state (pending, in progress, awaiting approval). Asana’s ability to construct dependencies between tasks is another useful feature. If you have two tasks A and B, and task B can only begin after job A is completed, you can use dependence to indicate the relationship between them.
Lines between jobs represent dependencies, which you can adjust at any time. Gantt charts are very useful for seeing how a delay in one work or an extended absence of a team member affects task completion target dates down the road. Asana also allows you to divide tasks into sections in the view. While Asana is versatile and feature-rich, it is not well-suited to graphic-intensive tasks.
You can set cover pictures for each task in a column in Asana’s Board view. However, you won’t receive markup tools or other proofing tools to edit, review, and view changes to graphics files. It helps to have a full set of tools for that job right inside your work management system for teams whose work revolves around graphics and other visuals.
Asana project management uses at least the TLS 1.1 protocol to encrypt connections to its site, and its data is stored in “secure SSAE 16 verified data centers via Amazon in the US.” Asana also has a bug reward program for reporting service vulnerabilities. SOC 2 Type I and Type II audits have been completed by Asana, which implies an independent third party has certified the company’s security and ability to keep them up. You can check Asana’s status via an online dashboard. At the user level, Asana allows you to keep some information private while still collaborating with others. You can keep projects and tasks private to just you or to a selected group of people.
You can also restrict access to projects so that individuals can just comment on them and not modify them, as well as give members comment-only permissions. It’s critical for teams using Asana as an open platform to have a discourse about the rules of engagement. This is to ensure that everyone agrees to use the software in the same way, not to rewrite each other’s work, and so on. At the enterprise level, Asana offers extra security features such as the ability to restrict who can add guests and regulate which apps are available across the integration.
If you run into any issues, Asana project management has a wealth of online resources. The platform offers video courses and webinars, as well as various case examples and a developer’s guide, through Asana Academy. In the community forum, you can also ask other Asana users questions. It is tough to contact Asana’s customer service team directly. You need to call a salesperson and request to be transferred to a customer support representative.
Although Asana isn’t a full-fledged project management solution, it does have the majority of the tools and connectors you’ll need to stay on track with your projects. Zoho Projects offers a more extensive set of tools at the same price. Zoho Projects has time tracking, Gantt charts, and workload management, but it isn’t as user-friendly or configurable as Asana. If you merely need a task management system and prefer kanban cards to a list view, Trello is worth a look. Trello’s price is equivalent to Asana’s, and it’s perhaps easier to use because it’s less open-ended.
Out of all the project management tools, Asana has the best free plan. The free plans of most other software are so limited that they’re unusable for small firms. Asana, however, isn’t stingy with its free plan. It includes unlimited teams, projects, communications, activity logs, file storage, different project views, and more. You can stay on the free plan indefinitely if you have less than 15 users and just handle basic projects. You can even interface with your favorite time tracking tools for free.
Users can view and manage projects and tasks on Asana in a variety of ways, including Kanban boards, lists, calendars, portfolios, workloads, and timelines. Other software just provide one or two views, so it’s fantastic to see that Asana provides all of your options. Each team member may handle tasks in the most efficient manner for them. Thus, allowing them to be as productive as possible. Switching between views also provides project managers with a big-picture view of the project’s status. You may also develop real-time project dashboards that are configurable. You can edit them to see the most critical facts at a glance as you see fit.
Asana project management makes it simple to automate procedures, repetitive tasks, and workflows that span many business applications. The graphical workflow builder makes setting up custom rules, triggers, and actions easier than ever. You may use it to create simple workflows that span dozens of people, tools, and tasks. It can even include due dates, assigning a task to the next person in the flow, checking a box, or informing your team in Slack when a project is completed. Automating procedures ensures that things are done correctly while also removing time-consuming duties to free up time for more critical responsibilities.
Most project management systems don’t have enough collaboration features. Asana, however, is one of the few tools that can serve as a single source for file sharing, including PDFs, JPGs, and Google Docs, as well as team and group communication and more. Users can assign tasks to team members, create task dependencies, assign priorities, set due dates, amend due dates, and talk. Teams may plan around each other’s schedules and stay up to date on any new adjustments or developments without having to email back and forth with a calendar view. Asana also manages all project conversations and to-do lists. The software also interfaces with email apps and third-party messaging platforms, depending on your team’s preferred method of communication.
If you believe in agile project management, Asana is adaptable enough to accommodate it. You receive everything you need to match how you operate rather than the other way around. This includes sprint planning, issue tracking, product launches, work requests, roadmaps, feedback, and task iteration monitoring. Asana is fantastic whether you like Kanban, Agile, Scrum, or something in between. To assist you, it has prepared a glossary to help you match Asana’s concepts to conventional Agile terminology, as well as a comprehensive guide to help you set up your Agile projects within the platform.
Asana can be customized to fit a variety of management techniques, business sizes, and industries. It’s also a fantastic option for marketing, sales, product development, operations, human resources, IT, finance, and more. Because it’s adaptable enough for hundreds of distinct use cases, it’s a terrific tool if you plan to use it across many departments and enable cross-departmental communication. It’s versatile enough to work for just about everyone. This includes event planners handling thousands of people marketing teams managing dozens of campaigns across several channels and sales teams tracking leads through the pipeline.
Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Zapier, Tableau, Zoom, Salesforce, and more third-party programs interact with Asana. These connections can greatly enhance Asana’s capabilities. Remember that some advanced connectors, such as Salesforce and Tableau, aren’t included in all plans.
Asana’s intelligent design and adaptability make it a formidable task-management program for a variety of team-based and personal projects. It also deserves praise for its broad feature set and range of workflow perspectives. Asana is a fantastic collaboration tool that assists teams in managing a wide range of tasks. Its versatility and extensive potential are well worth the work it takes to get started, even if it is initially complicated. It is a flexible project and task management solution. Although it lacks time tracking, live chat, and document editing, the enormous number of app connections ensures that you can add them later. Meanwhile, Asana offers a highly customized platform for assigning and tracking tasks, as well as ensuring that team members’ workloads are well-balanced.
Which program do you use for project management? Tell us in the comments section below.
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