Asana Review 2022: Tool for managing team projects and tasks
Good team and task management are essential in every business. Without it, competitors will overtake your position, costing you money. There are several ways to accomplish this. We will examine one of them today. Asana is a great project management tool with a variety of tools that can help you manage projects, tasks, and teams more effectively. We will examine this platform’s features, costs, and other aspects in this article. Additionally, you can discover answers to questions like: What benefits does Asana offer me? Does Asana work for my company? and a lot more. You’ll be able to form your own opinion after reading this article at Asana. So let’s get going.
Table of contents
Introduction: What is Asana?
Asana is a great task management tool for teams to use. You can manage tasks, teams, and projects better with Asana. Although it might seem confusing at first, its flexibility and extensive capabilities make the time and effort required to learn it well worth it. It only takes a few minutes to get started and onboard your team despite having a ton of features.
Asana Pricing
Let’s start with platform pricing. Three different plans with various prices are available through Asana.
Basic
Basic plan is the first one. It is most appropriate for people or groups that are just getting started with project management. With this plan, you receive the following features:
- Unlimited tasks
- Unlimited projects
- Unlimited messages
- Unlimited activity log
- Unlimited file storage (100MB per file)
- Collaborate with up to 15 teammates
- List view projects
- Board view projects
- Calendar view
- Assignee and due dates
- Project Overview
- Project Brief
- iOS and Android mobile apps
- Time tracking with integrations
- 100+ free integrations with your favorite apps
Premium
Next one is premium. The premium plan is best suited for teams that need to confidently create project plans. In addition to having all the necessary feature sets, it also includes:
- Timeline
- Workflow BuilderNEW
- Unlimited Dashboards
- Reporting across unlimited projects
- Advanced search
- Custom fields
- Unlimited free guests
- Forms
- Rules
- Start dates and times
- Task Templates
- Milestones
- Admin Console
- Private teams & projects
Business
This plan name is self-explanatory. This strategy is ideal for larger organizations and teams that must coordinate work across initiatives. Additional features include:
- Portfolios
- Goals
- Workload
- Custom rules builder
- Forms branching & customization
- Approvals
- Proofing
- Lock custom fields
- Advanced integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Tableau, Power BI
Enterprise
Your business can use the complete set of work management tools offered by Asana with Asana Enterprise. Add sophisticated security features and strong admin and data controls. This plans is the best for large businesses with complicated projects and tasks.
Asana Features
Asana offers you a good selection of features that are helpful in a variety of management areas. Let’s list every feature of the platforms and give a brief description to it.
Project management
Features that are aimed at managing your projects from beginning to end can be found here. You will always be aware of who is doing what, by when, with all of your projects in Asana.
- Projects. Create shared projects for your initiatives, meetings, and programs by grouping your work into lists or Kanban boards.
- Tasks. With the help of this feature, you can divide up the work into manageable chunks for you and your team to make task management easier.
- Subtasks. With this, you can divide a task into smaller components or outline additional steps needed to finish a larger task.
- Milestones. To track and share progress on your project, visualize key checkpoints.
- Task assignees. Give tasks a distinct owner so that everyone is aware of who is in charge.
- Sections. To follow workflows, separate types of work, and maintain organization, group tasks into sections in any project.
- Custom Fields. Beyond just tracking tasks, use Asana to track anything. Because field names, types, and values are all programmable, you can make fields for any data that is crucial to your workflow.
- Due dates and times. Make sure to include the day and time of a deadline so that, regardless of time zone, everyone is working to the same schedule.
- Start dates. Set start dates for your tasks to prevent last-minute franticness.
- Attachments. You can attach files to any task or conversation from your computer, Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive. You can view files for specific tasks or the entire project.
- Forms. Create a formal submission procedure for work requests using simple forms.
- Rules. Use rules to automate crucial steps in your processes so that teams don’t overlook them.
- Likes. Thank you, rate this task with a thumbs up, or select it with a like.
- Approvals. Make sure everyone is aware of the work that needs to be approved, when it needs to be approved, and how it needs to be approved by streamlining and clarifying your approvals process.
- Project Overview. Give teams context and clarity about their work in one location. Share important information, status updates, and more.
- Project Brief. In Asana, use this open text editor to draft briefs. Describe the project’s scope, history, and other specifics.
- Sync tasks across projects. Maintain the same task across numerous projects to observe how it performs in various situations without duplicating efforts.
- Dependencies. The tasks that are waiting on others are clearly identified by their dependencies.
- Custom Templates. Make your own project templates so that your team can get to work right away.
- Copy projects. Stop wasting time by having your team’s standard processes recreated.
Views and reporting
With the help of reporting capabilities, this feature enables you to quickly understand the status of your work and see what’s happening throughout your entire organization.
- My tasks. Your area for setting priorities and organizing daily tasks and project work.
- Timeline. Examine how your project’s components fit together, and maintain progress as circumstances change.
- Workload. Get a real-time picture of team members’ workloads across all projects, and rebalance tasks to keep projects moving forward.
- Portfolios. You can keep initiatives on track and give your team updates by keeping track of the status of all your projects in real time.
- Goals. Create company goals in Asana so you can track progress in real time and connect them to the work that supports them.
- Inbox. Receive notifications automatically about the tasks, conversations, and projects that are important to you.
- Dashboards. Obtain project data in real time in one location. Create your own charts to see where the work might be stuck or off course.
- Calendar view. To get a clear understanding of when work is due, look at any list of tasks on a Calendar.
- Files view. In a gallery view of the entire project’s attachments, you can quickly locate the project files you require.
- Advanced search. Run reports based on the specific criteria that your team considers to be most important. To view work across projects, assignees, custom fields, and more, save your reports.
- Teammate view. View the tasks that have been assigned to team members to understand their workloads. Everything shared with you or made available to the public by your Organization will be visible to you.
- Project export. In order to manipulate your own data, export to CSV and JSON.
Admin controls
You can set up and manage teams and team settings using these features to make sure that everyone has access to the proper information.
- Teams. Create teams based on departments, job duties, project involvement, or any other criteria that makes sense for your company.
- Guests. Work together in Asana with suppliers, subcontractors, and partners.
- Permissions and privacy controls. You can restrict access to any project, set up secret teams for sensitive work, or make teams and projects public so that everyone in your organization can access them.
- Comment-only projects. Make your projects comment-only to secure them and share information with your team without worrying about unauthorized changes.
- Team management. Establish administrators for the organization who have the authority to manage members’ settings, add, remove, and manage members. SAML and our Admin API provide additional controls for enterprise customers.
- Data security. You can quickly export or delete data from Asana, and your data will be backed up on a different server. Enterprise clients can anticipate an uptime guarantee of 99.9%.
Communication
- Task comments. To ensure that everyone stays connected, comment directly on a task to make clear what needs to be done and @-mention teammates or other tasks or projects.
- Followers. Add coworkers as followers so they can stay updated on task progress and receive pertinent notifications.
- Status. This function simplifies data from Asana into charts and other highlights, making it simple to depict progress visually.
- Messaging. Send private messages to teams, projects, and people in Asana.
- Project conversations. To keep the momentum going, talk about a project’s development.
- Team conversations. Make a place where team announcements and discussions can take place.
Asana Top Features
Workflow Builder
Workflow builder allows you to design more efficient workflows. Asana is a visual platform for connecting teams, organizing work, and streamlining projects all in one location. You receive the following features:
- Make intake more systematic. Forms in Asana may be used to collect ideas, source requirements, and arrange requests that need cross-team collaboration.
- Tasks can be automated. Reduce manual effort by establishing Rules that trigger automatic activities such as task assignment, status updates, and more.
- Integrate tools. Automatic sync with your favorite tools, such as Slack and Google Drive, provides quick data and updates across teams.
- Templatize workflows. Save and share best practices workflows in the Template Library so that others in your organization can get started on similar projects quickly.
Goals
You will be able to connect your company’s goals with the work that will support them using this functionality. Progress may be shown to keep teams on target. And teams may work wisely to get the job done. Goals provide you with benefits such as:
- Align your company. People operate in circles when there are no defined aims. Setting corporate objectives in Asana maintains them at the forefront of everyone’s minds, helping teams to decrease friction and advance in the same direction.
- Improve team performance. Teams with defined objectives make better judgments. They prioritize initiatives that complement the company’s vision and work harder to provide demonstrable outcomes.
- Motivate individuals to take action. Asana allows team members to see how their work contributes to the company’s goals. They recognize the value of their strengths and skills and, as a result, are more committed to doing their best work.
Timelines
Timeline allows you to create project plans that will help you stay on track and meet your deadlines. This feature provides the following advantages:
- Create a project plan. Examine how tasks and deadlines are related so you may discover issues and resolve dependency conflicts before you begin.
- Share your strategy with everyone. Showcase your team’s work and gain support for your strategy so that everyone is on the same page.
- Change plans as work demands. Even if work changes and deadlines shift, you can easily adjust your plan to keep your project on track.
Asana Integrations
Asana offers solid integration capabilities. You can connect Asana to other tools you use to track all of your work in one place and save time. You could connect Asana with such platforms as:
- Dropbox
- Google Drive
- Slack
- GitHub
- Instagantt
- Harvest
Asana Alternatives
Let’s look at several Asana alternatives. These platforms may differ slightly, but the basic concept remains the same.
Monday.com
Monday.com is a simple, visual project management application that can be used by an entire team. To begin using the tool, just create an account, select a template, and populate the template with tasks and projects. The basic edition costs roughly $8 per month per person and includes unlimited board views and free watchers on your project, making it one of our favorite Asana alternatives.
Trello
Trello is another popular option for organizations seeking for a fresh take on project management, and it is one of the best Asana alternatives. Trello is a web-based application that allows users to manage projects in a more flexible and collaborative manner. Managers may create Kanban-style workflows and individual projects, which is a task visualization approach including a three-step process. For smaller teams, this is one of our favorite Asana alternatives.
Basecamp
Basecamp is one of the older programs on the list, but it’s still one of the best Asana competitors. Basecamp’s main selling point is that it is a completely web-based project management system. This implies that your team members may contribute to any area of the project they are accountable for as long as they have access to a web browser. It’s also intended expressly for service organizations, allowing them to provide clients access to project details to reduce wasteful back-and-forth.
Asana Pros & Cons
Pros
- Free Plan with Many Features
- Various Project Views
- Automation of Process Management
- Collaboration within a Team
- Support for Agile and Scrum
- Versatility
- Effective Integrations
- Intelligent Design
Cons
- Mobile App is Limited
- Tasks Cannot Be Assigned to Multiple Users
- Email Disorganization
Final Words
If you’re looking for project management software, Asana is a great option. It is simple to use and has a Kanban-style user interface. All of this contributes to an excellent user experience. Asana also includes all of the essential capabilities for task, team, and project management. So, Asana is a wonderful collaboration tool that assists teams in managing a variety of activities, and we encourage that you give it a try.
FAQ
What is Asana?
Asana is an outstanding collaboration tool that assists teams in managing a wide range of activities. Although it may be complicated at first, its flexibility and broad potential are well worth the work required to get started.
What is the purpose of Asana?
Asana’s web and mobile apps assist you in staying on track, organizing projects, and meeting deadlines. Track project progress, individual tasks, sprint planning, integration with other tools, and successful launch Asana boards help you visualize project progress as your team moves tasks from do to done.
What is Asana not good for?
Asana is a great tool for keeping track of projects, tasks, and assignees. It does not, however, provide a time monitoring function. Users must discover alternative time tracking applications and combine them with Asana in order to monitor time.