Asana vs monday – project management head-to-head

When compared against Asana, monday is the better choice of project management software. While both offer a stellar range of features, integrations, and project templates, monday offers better support and security across all its plans – two elements that are crucial when it comes to good business software.

For the value-conscious, monday comes at a lower price than Asana, too. While Asana does have a free tier, this is unlikely to be sufficient for anyone but individual users or the smallest teams. By the time you've got out your wallet, we'd recommend spending money with monday rather than Asana.

Still, you'll unlikely to be disappointed with the feature-rich Asana, and there are some circumstances where it has an edge on monday. Read on for our look at how they compare across core feature categories, price plans, and user experience.

In this guide:

• Asana vs monday Comparison
• Asana's Features vs monday's Features
• Asana Cost vs monday Cost
• Which has the best Security?
• User Experience head-to-head
• Verdict
• FAQ

Asana vs monday: Project Management Software Comparison

Both Asana and monday are project management tools designed to help teams keep track of their current tasks while efficiently communicating with each other. The interfaces are similar, offering a central dashboard with multi-use rows that can be easily customized using drag-and-drop editing functionality. Greater customization and useful developer abilities are available only as part of higher priced plans for both services.

Asana offers task dependencies, which guide users to complete one task prior to another – it's an ability that monday is not designed to support, which will make Asana the more attractive option to any project managers that see this as an essential feature. Both offer security and support, although monday offers two-factor authentication and 24/7 support – neither of which are available from Asana.

Asana vs monday: Features

Both services offer a healthy range of the features needed to keep a team operating at peak efficiency. But that doesn't mean they have exactly the same abilities.

Task Management

Asana lets users track projects in real time, with a Portfolio feature that groups ongoing projects by category, completion level, or priority, with any overdue tasks clearly visible. Each project gets a status indicator, with ranks including “on track,” “at risk,” or “off track.” Projects are broken down into tasks, with some tasks dependent on the completion of other tasks first.

In the monday interface, task management happens through “pulses.” A pulse is versatile; It can house the checklist for an entire project, or simply hold a text file. Each one comes with its own activity log, comments section, FAQ section, and file attachment functionality. Pulses can be arranged in renamable pulse columns, allowing users to construct their own task flow.

Team Management and Communication

Team organization and two-way communication tools are a huge element of project management for any business with a team larger than five or six workers. Everyone needs to be able to know how their coworkers can help them at any given time, while keeping time-consuming meetings to a minimum.

Asana and monday both save their best team tools for their mid-range plans and above. Asana's Business plan adds team project portfolios, and a Workload view that breaks down each user's ongoing tasks. monday's Pro Tier adds a formula column, a chart view, and the ability to make boards private, all of which enable more granular sub-groups within teams.

Time Tracking

Both services offer time tracking, a useful advanced tool that lets users record the time spent on a specific task or project. For monday, this feature is available starting with the Pro Tier.

For Asana, it's available as an entire category of third-party integration. At the time of writing, Asana supports 24 different time tracking apps, which are available across all paid plans. Time tracking is one area where Asana's integrations offer greater access to features than monday can muster – although this distinction drops away for anyone getting monday's Pro Tier or higher.

Click for a closer look at a project in Asana

Portfolio Management

Portfolio management refers to the top-level process of managing projects with the goal of balancing short-term gains against long-term goals. Both services offer their own version of this organizational tool.

For Asana, it's baked into the basic plans as the “Portfolios” feature. This lets users categorize all their Asana projects, viewing them by priority, burn-up chart, or any other custom field the user would like to create. Portfolios are split into two sections – those created by the user, and those most recently visited by the user.

For monday, portfolio management is available as a template that lets users track and maintain information related to their portfolio. They'll be able to view their overall profitability and health at a glance, with additional details – such as the total investments from every active company in their portfolio – available with a few clicks. It's also easily updateable, thanks to a quick copy-and-paste action from any pre-existing lists, spreadsheets, and databases.

Click for a closer look at monday's portfolio management template

Templates

Asana's templates – a set of pre-fabricated solutions for managing specific projects – are available in ten categories, including Marketing, Operations, Design, and Product. With them, users can gain a roadmap for tasks like onboarding new employees, or tracking the right customer accounts.

The templates available from monday also fulfill a broad range of goals. As mentioned earlier, while one flexible template handles portfolio management, other popular templates include a daily task tracker, a project tracker, a social media plan, a freelance manager, event planning steps, and production tracking. Even more specific needs can be managed through the right template as well: There's even one to help surgeons schedule their daily routine.

The two services offer a similar selection, though Asana divides its own templates into easily searchable categories, while monday tosses in a few unique options.

Integrations

Asana offers users access to a large number of third party apps and integrations, grouped in categories such as Communication, Connectors, Development, Importers, and File Sharing. These apps make it easy to build a custom workflow, centered in Asana, which ties in useful business software like Microsoft Teams, Jira Cloud, Slack, Gmail, Chrome, Outlook, OneDrive, TSheets, and more. Google and Microsoft even get their own categories.

The integrations available from monday.com include popular picks like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, Google Calendar, Excel, Google Drive, Gmail, LinkedIn, OneDrive, and more. They are uniquely customizable, which sets them apart from Asana's: Every supported integration's features can be activated a la carte, using plain language rather than coding knowledge. As a result, users can pick the exact functionality they need. They can set a Slack notification to trigger in a specific Slack channel when a new pulse is created, or a Gmail notification that creates a new pulse when an email is received.

Asana vs monday: Cost

Asana offers three paid plans, starting at $10.99 per user per month, plus one free plan.

In contrast, monday.com has no free plan, but offers four paid plans, starting at the slightly lower price point of $8 per user per month. Here's how the two compare.

Asana Pricing Plans

Asana's three paid plans are Premium ($10.99 per user per month), Business ($24.99 per user per month), and Enterprise (custom-priced on a case-by-case basis). All paid plans support unlimited users, though since they're priced per-user, you'll have to pay for each one.

See our full guide to Asana pricing for full detail, or read on for an overview of each plan.

Asana Basic

First, there's Asana Basic, the free plan capped at 15 users. As the name implies, it offers no features beyond the basics: List, board, and calendar views for tasks, complete with due dates and assignees. You do get the free version of Asana's mobile app on iOS and Android, though, which is nice.

Asana Premium

Asana Premium adds features including a timeline, task dependencies, milestones, custom fields, custom templates, advanced search and reporting, premium training materials, and private teams or projects. It's best for small teams, particularly thanks to milestones, and a timeline to keep users on track across a project.

Asana Business

Asana Business comes with everything in Premium, plus team project portfolios, a Workload view to see each user's tasks at a glance, forms, proofing, and custom field locking. It's best for large teams, as the added tools make managing sub-groups easier.

Asana Enterprise

Asana Enterprise, as you can guess, is best for enterprises. This is thanks to Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) for single sign-on, plus user provisioning/de-provisioning, which lets an operation's IT team dictate when and how users gain access to the service. Also included: A 99.9% uptime promise, and the tools to build custom apps and integrations.

monday.com Pricing Plans

The four paid monday.com plans are the Basic Tier ($8 per user per month), the Standard Tier ($10 per user per month), the Pro Tier ($16 per user per month), and the custom-priced Enterprise Tier.

See our full guide to monday pricing for more detail, or read on for an overview below:

Basic Tier

The $8 per user per month Basic Tier offers unlimited boards, one dashboard, over 200 templates, over 20 types of column, a mobile app on iOS and Android, 5GB of storage, and unlimited view-only access to whoever you'd like to invite. It's a limited plan, best for those dipping their toes into the service – you'll likely want to move on to the Standard option quickly, unless you have a small team of just a handful of users.

Standard Tier

The $10 per user per month Standard Tier adds a timeline view, Gantt view, guest access, five dashboards, and more integrations and automations (250 actions per month for each), as well as boosting the total storage to 20GB.

It's a good fit for medium-sized and larger teams, as it enables easy interaction between sub-groups of users, and likely offers the best value-to-money ratio for most business needs.

Pro Tier

The $16 per user per month Pro Tier adds a formula column, private boards, time tracking, and a chart view, as well as dramatically expanding automations and integrations (25,000 per month for each, up from 250). The new features make this plan a good choice for large teams that need a little more supervision and added functionality.

Enterprise Tier

The custom-priced Enterprise Tier adds a higher API rate limit, higher level support, audit logs, and a whopping 250,000 actions per month for both automations and integrations. It's best for truly massive companies that find themselves bumping up against the limits of the Pro Tier.

Best for Value: monday

Asana isn't poorly priced, but monday successfully beats it out on value in multiple ways. First, monday offers more plans than Asana does, with four paid plans to Asana's three. This makes it just a little easier for businesses to pick the plan that works for their needs, without overpaying for features they don't want.

Plus, when you break down the comparable plans, monday is slightly less expensive. Both services charge a set price per user per month, with monday's $8 and $10 plans undercutting the comparable $10.99 Asana plan. If you want a plan with more advanced features, monday is still priced better, with its $16 Pro Tier plan comparable to Asana's $24.99 Business plan.

Security

Both services offer the basics of security across all plans, while reserving the complex safeguards and privacy features for the advanced plans only. For monday, that means SOC 2 Type II compliance and two-factor authentication across all plans, while reserving single sign-on for the Enterprise plan only.

For Asana, users will get SOC 2 Type II compliance and Google SSO across all paid plans. However, SSO with SAML is reserved for its Enterprise tier, as are service accounts, cross regional backups, priority support, and data export and deletion.

Privacy Features

Asana saves its most advanced privacy features for its Enterprise tier, including attachment controls and block native integrations. All paid Asana plans get unlimited free guests, admin consoles, and premium Academy training.

For monday, the privacy features available across Pro and Enterprise include the ability to create private boards and Google authentication, with integration permissions available only from the Enterprise plan.

Best for Security: monday.com

Two-factor authentication is a big perk when it comes to decent online security, since it's a simple yet effective way to reduce phishing and fraud. You'll get it across all of monday's plans, but none of Asana's.

While Asana offers a range of security and privacy features comparable to monday's, the lack of two-factor authentication is an oversight that tips the balance squarely towards monday when it comes to the most secure project management software.

Click for a larger look at monday.com's user customization options in action

User Experience

Both services are relatively ease to use, though they both have their downsides.

Asana requires some configuration of apps and integrations to get a system that serves your team's specific needs, while monday's templates and integrations will need to be set up as well. Both services offer an easy-to-use dashboard that lets users access each tool they'll need with a few clicks. The monday dashboard can be edited with a simple drag-and-drop function, as well, though users have reported some lack of responsiveness during daily use.

Support and Training

Both services reserve their top-priority support for their respective Enterprise plans (including a dedicated customer success manager in monday's case), but offer decent enough support options across all other plans as well. There is one difference worth noting: Asana's phone and email support is during business hours only, while monday has 24/7 phone and email support hours across all plans.

Both services offer online knowledge bases. Asana also offers premium Academy training across all paid plans, while monday offers daily live webinars across all plans.

Asana vs Monday.com: FAQ