Asana vs. monday: Which Is Better for Your Business?

monday vs. Asana Compared

Here’s a comparison of the headline points for both monday and Asana.

Who Do We Recommend monday For?

monday is an excellent choice for companies that want to boost performance across their marketing, sales and customer service teams via one powerful software platform. Its comprehensive set of tools allows teams to track, manage and nurture customers at all stages of the sales pipeline. The sheer range of customization and workflow automation options will save companies time and money, as well as improve lead generation, increase conversion rates and keep customers happy. 

In addition, this highly capable CRM platform, which is part of a wider work operating system, can help firms improve their general internal organization and efficiency. Read our complete review of monday Sales CRM to find out more about what the platform offers.

monday’s reports dashboard visualizes your data in multiple ways. Source: monday

Who Do We Recommend Asana For?

If you want an advanced project management system to ideate, initiate and manage complex internal projects, Asana is ideal. Companies around the world use it for product development and strategic planning projects. It’s also great for managing employee onboarding and planning and executing events and conferences.

Asana is also flexible enough to use as a standard CRM system, thanks to its automated and customizable CRM workflows. So your sales teams can use Asana to track and manage overall campaigns as well as individual leads. Marketing teams can plan and execute campaigns, especially on social media, and customer service teams can resolve issues more smoothly.

Asana stands out for its flexibility and customization options, superb internal collaboration and communications tools, and in-depth analytics and reporting, making this software ideal for managing important projects and organizing day-to-day tasks.

This view shows a website project management reporting screen in Asana. Source: Asana

Asana vs. monday Comparison

We’ve compared monday and Asana on five different sets of features so you can see which software is more suitable for your business.

Project Management and Workflow Automation Tools

Both Asana and monday allow you to set up multiple customized workflows to help a project or process run more smoothly.

monday:

• Easy task creation: monday lets you manage everything from basic day-to-day tasks to complex projects with customizable planning sheets, budgeting tools and cost calculators. You can modify the built-in templates to define project or process milestones, and assign tasks at each stage to individual team members. You can save and reuse the workflows that get the best results.
• Clear visualizations: We were impressed that teams can see all tasks in one place, with a choice of clear visualizations ranging from Gantt charts to specialized boards. We liked how this makes it easy for everyone to see what they need to be doing and lets them compare their own performance against their key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Improved workflows: monday excels at automating repetitive tasks, tracking time for more accurate billing and prompting staff into action through on-screen reminders. At each stage of a project or process, you can set automations based on a trigger to simplify and streamline task dependencies, like how to manage live leads and update prospect records. A wide range of customizable template workflows come preloaded into the platform.

Asana:

• Easy project setup: We really like how easy it is to set up new projects and workflows in Asana and break them down into manageable milestones. You can assign specific tasks, with deadlines if necessary, to individual team members for completion.
• Task management features: It’s easy to change, reassign or drop task steps in a project or workflow if required. Managers will also appreciate the Gantt chart, timeline, list and board visualizations when tracking the progress of a task to see where workflow bottlenecks occur. We like the time-tracking feature that shows how long it takes different team members to perform the same task.
• Workflow management and automation: We love the seamless, no-code environment in Asana; it makes it much easier to set up workflow automations. There’s a generous set of templates you can customize to get you started. We were impressed by how easily you can extend automations into other apps you use. For example, you can build triggers to create an event in Google Calendar or send a message via Slack when a certain action is taken.

Winner: Asana

Asana wins because its drag-and-drop tool is far more intuitive than monday’s, which requires an understanding of formulas. Asana also excels at managing more complex tasks and workflows.

monday shows a clear breakdown of your team’s upcoming tasks. Source: monday

Collaboration and Communication Tools

monday is equally impressive at facilitating internal and external communication, whereas Asana is set up for internal communication only.

monday:

• Omnichannel communications: We were impressed by the range of external communication platforms, including email (Gmail, Outlook or SMTP/IPOP), phone, SMS, MMS, private messaging apps (like WhatsApp) and social media.
• Integrated marketing platform: You can run email, social media, paid advertising and other types of campaigns from within monday. We loved the superb PhoneBurner telemarketing app that comes with its own autodialer and the Twilio SMS marketing tool, in particular.
• Enhanced collaboration: The customizable collaboration spaces make it easy for team managers and team members to share information on the platform or through apps such as Slack. We really like the Workdocs document editing and development feature and the Whiteboard brainstorming and ideation widget, which lets you seek input from third parties.

Asana:

• Centralized internal communication: Colleagues can easily share real-time updates on a project or workflow on the excellent timeline views. We like how you can make information easier for you and your colleagues to find by tagging documents with extra data.
• Excellent meeting management: We were impressed by Asana’s meetings feature, which allows managers to gather opinions from everyone on their team. Participants can create and share detailed items for discussion prior to a meeting so everyone has the information they need before the meeting starts. On a meeting call, participants can make notes, and managers can assign actionable tasks to colleagues. There are five handy meeting agenda templates to download and augment for free.
• Collaborative decision-making: Managers and their teams can collaborate continuously to shape a project’s direction or refine workflows even after their initial meeting. Team members can use the Goals and Milestones template that governs a workflow or project to discuss how to adjust existing plans and deadlines if the scope changes.

Winner: monday

monday wins easily for its breadth of communication choices and how well it supports collaboration between teams. You can even bring third-parties into the process with monday, including partners and customers. 

Asana makes it easy to collaborate on complex projects. Source: Asana

Reporting and Analytics

Analyze how well your teams and projects are performing against KPIs and other important metrics.

monday:

• Comprehensive reporting: We were really impressed by the level of granularity in monday’s analytical reporting. You can measure not just how well your team performed tasks but also their eventual outcomes. monday also allows you to fine-tune your data analysis further by adding extra parameters and benchmarks to track progress over time on metrics such as deal conversions. Managers will love the Workload view for assigning tasks, and sales reps will appreciate the lead scoring system for prioritizing work.
• Excellent data visualizations: The visualizations make complex data analytics engaging and instantly understandable. You can choose from a range of options, including pivot tables, stacked charts, and Gantt and Kanban boards. The Pivot Boards are great for drilling down into specific data points, like “sales by product type” and “team member progress.” You can augment these further by analyzing metrics such as sums, medians and averages to look for more meaningful trends and insights.
• Great resource and task manager: The Overview widget gives managers a clear view of resources, including staff and schedules. You can see at a glance whether a project or individual workflow is at risk of falling behind so you can take corrective action where necessary to get the job done on time.

Asana:

• In-depth native analytics: We loved the attractive and customizable dashboards that allow managers and team members to see visual summaries of progress by status, assignee and more. Each project can be viewed from helicopter height to see performance against team and individual goals and milestones.
• External integrations: In some areas, Asana relies on third-party apps to analyze on deeper levels. Choose Screenful for advanced charting, predictive analytics and a wider range of KPIs. We also like how Tableau makes it easy to export data into spreadsheets, cloud storage and enhanced visualization tools.
• Custom visualizations: Asana shines at data visualization. It offers a range of charts (including line, doughnut and burn-up charts with your own styles and colors) and ways to interact with them (clickable data points for exact figures at a given time or stage). This information is especially valuable to managers who track project flow and workload distribution.

Winner: Asana

Asana is the clear winner for projects. Its portfolio management section makes it much easier to keep track of the current progress you’re making on multiple projects and workflows. The nearest feature to that in monday is Groups, but it doesn’t give as much detail as Asana. 

Apps and Integrations

You can add extra levels of functionality and new features to monday and Asana through third-party integrations and their APIs.

monday:

• Large app store: You can browse the sizable app store, which splits the 150 group apps into categories, or use the search bar to find them. There are many popular plugins, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, Mailchimp, HubSpot and Hootsuite.
• API integrations: The API documentation in monday is extensive, allowing you to add workflows, board views, menus and widgets that are specific to your company. We like how you can connect with the AI assistant via the API to create smart, custom processes.
• Make and Zapier: We were impressed by the number of Make and Zapier integrations with other apps. This makes it much quicker and easier for less-tech-savvy users to plug in new features.

Asana:

• Impressive app store: There are over 250 apps in the Asana store, including Slack, Vimeo and Adobe Creative Cloud. They’re sorted by collections (like apps for Enterprise companies and apps to connect with Microsoft and Google software) and by 12 categories, such as communications, security and compliance.
• API platform: Asana includes extensive API documentation, allowing you to create custom workflows. For example, you can sync active work across different apps and update data automatically following an action, event or trigger.
• Pre-built templates: Asana offers over 200 customizable dashboard templates that are easy to set up and amend. Choose from templates for Agile companies, employee engagement, software development and vendor management.

Winner: Asana

Asana wins this category thanks to its larger marketplace, which is handily sorted into categories and collections, as well as its better API documentation.

Pricing

Here’s a breakdown of the different subscription levels available on Asana and monday.com:

monday Pricing

monday offers three basic tiers and an enhanced Enterprise tier, each of which have a three user minimum:

monday is also advertising a “free forever” plan with basic features for up to two seats, which the company says is “coming soon” but was not available at the time of this review. The pricing in the table above is for annual payments up front. Monthly payment is possible, but you’ll pay around 18 percent more.

The prices shown above are for three users, so on the Basic plan, that works out to $10 per user per month. A quirk of the monday pricing is that you can’t really specify how many users you want; you have the choice of three seats, five seats and then increments of five more seats up to 30 seats. After that, it’s 40, 50, 100 or 200 seats.

Asana Pricing

Here are Asana’s three main tiers:

There are two additional tiers: Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Enterprise is for multidepartment firms, and Enterprise Plus is for companies that are subject to strict compliance regulations. The platform offers a free 30-day trial on its paid tiers.

Asana’s free plan on this project management platform is generous, but users will really only unlock the key features of the platform with the paid tiers. Asana users will appreciate the adoption of AI, which is new but impressive. We like how it’s included on all paid plans, including the Basic plan. 

Winner: Asana, with one exception …

If you just want a work management platform for better internal organization, Asana is a better value. If you want a full-service work operating system with deep CRM integrations, monday makes more business sense.

Asana vs. monday: Recap

Choose monday if …

• You want to improve organization and collaboration in your business, as well as boost the performance of your sales, marketing and customer service teams. 
• You need a certain degree of customization on your CRM to help improve general efficiency across your business.
• You’re looking for a CRM platform first but having a limited range of project management tools would also be useful.

Choose Asana if …

• You want to be better organized across your business but you want to keep using your other apps and software.
• You need a highly capable project management software solution for your company with more advanced features to track task progress.
• You’re looking for a flexible and scalable solution that can adapt to changing company needs and future growth.