Asana vs monday – Project Management Head-to-Head

After our last round of project management software testing, we concluded that monday.com is a better choice than Asana – despite both offering a free plan, stellar range of workflow creation features, integrations, security, and project templates.

monday.com is easier to customize and a far more future-proof choice than Asana because of recent, transformative investment into monday.com's features and tools. monday.com comes at a lower price than Asana, too. On top of this, monday.com offers better collaboration and task management tools across all its plans than Asana and is more usable too – something that is crucial when it comes to getting yourself up and running.

However, you're unlikely to be disappointed with Asana because there are still some instances where it has an edge over monday.com – for example, Asana is the best for building automations and streamlining workflows. Read on for our take on how they compare across core feature categories. 

In this guide, you'll find:

• Asana vs monday.com: Head to Head
• Asana vs monday.com: Features
• Asana Costs vs monday.com Costs
• How do Asana and monday.com Compare to Other Providers?
• About our Research
• Verdict: monday.com is Better Than Asana
• Frequently Asked Questions

Asana vs monday.com: Head-to-Head

Both Asana and monday.com are project management tools designed to help teams keep track of their current tasks while efficiently communicating with each other. In our last round of testing, monday.com scored 4.7/5, while Asana scored 4.5/5. 

Their interfaces are similar, offering a central dashboard with multi-use rows that are easily customized using drag-and-drop editing functionality. Greater customization and useful developer abilities are only available as part of higher-priced plans for both services.

Key takeaways

• Both Asana and monday.com have great free plans. monday.com's free plan only has a ‘seat' (user) limit of two, meaning it's only really suitable for individuals or duos. Asana, on the other hand, allows for a minimum of 15 users on its free plans.
• monday.com's biggest strength is its customizability. If you're looking for customizability – and the freedom that comes with it – in your project management software, then look no further than monday.com; it's significantly more customizable than Asana.
• monday.com is cheaper than Asana. monday.com has two paid plans (Basic and Standard) cheaper than Asana's cheapest paid plan (Premium). It also has a cheaper option for larger businesses, with monday.com's Pro plan coming in at almost $9 per user, per month cheaper.

Who are monday.com and Asana best for?

• monday.com is best for teams that need to customize their projects.
• monday.com is best for teams that need to integrate with other apps.
• monday.com is best for teams that need communication functionality.
• Asana is best for teams that want a clear, straightforward interface.
• Asana is best for teams looking to compile post-project feedback.

Asana vs monday.com: Features Comparison

Both Asana and monday.com offer a healthy range of features needed to keep a team operating at peak efficiency. Overall, Asana scores 4.3/5 for features – putting it up there among the best project management software for this criteria. However, monday.com scores 4.4/5, second only to ClickUp (4.5/5), our top-rated provider for features as well as overall (4.8/5).

• Best for Task Management: monday.com
• Best for Project & Workflow Creation: tie
• Best for Usability: monday.com
• Best for Collaboration: monday.com
• Best for Integrations: Asana
• Best for Value: monday.com

Best for task management: monday.com

For task management, both Asana and monday.com score a high 4.4/5 and 4.5/5 respectively, but naturally, this makes monday.com the better option for pure task management. 

As you can tell by the scores, however, it was pretty close. 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”.

Asana has other task management features to ensure the critical path of your projects is respected. “You can make tasks dependent on other tasks being completed, so you’ll be unable to tick them off before the first one is complete,” explains Katie, an SEO Campaigns Executive whose team started using Asana recently. She also commented on how easy it is to assign tasks, and how useful the Gantt chart (pictured below) was for tracking project progress:

Conversely, in the monday.com 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 also be arranged in renamable pulse columns, allowing users to construct their own task flow.

Both monday.com and Asana have various different ways to visualize your tasks/task progress – including a Kanban board, Gantt chart, and spreadsheet-style view. What's more, Asana now joins monday in offering time tracking – and as of March 2023, you'll be able to add estimated and actual time fields to templates and sub-tasks!

Best for project and workflow creation: Asana

Both providers score 4.3/5 for project and workflow creation, but if we had to pick a winner, we'd go with Asana. Why? Well, for starters, Asana offers preset and custom project templates on all plans including its free plan, whereas monday.com doesn't provide these on its very limited free plan.

On top of this, we found Asana to have the best automation builder among the 14 project management tools we tested – it was extremely simple and easy to streamline workflows than Asana.

That being said, monday.com will let you build custom automations from the Standard plan ($10 per user, per month) upwards, whereas Asana only offers custom automations on its Business ($24.99 per user, per month) and Enterprise plans. What's more, in February of this year, monday.com made it much, much easier to adjust custom automation recipes, and now you can remove conditions and triggers seamlessly.

While both form builders are useful and customizable, Asana's (pictured below) is a bit easier to use because it opts for the classic drag-and-drop interface that you'll find in things like email template builders or online graphic design sites.

Best for usability: monday.com

Both services are relatively easy to use, although our we found monday.com slightly more usable (4.1/5) than Asana (3.9/5). Asana can be quite difficult to use when there's not a dedicated feature available to perform some specific tasks, whereas there are slightly more workarounds in monday.com to deal with this circumstance.

Both services offer an easy-to-use dashboard that lets users access each tool they'll need within a few clicks. The monday.com dashboard can be edited with a simple drag-and-drop function as well, but users have reported some lack of responsiveness during daily use.

Overall, both Asana and monday.com are very easy for newcomers and veterans alike because they both avoid unnecessary submenus and make more complex project details into a customizable option, rather than a necessity. They both make efforts to improve their apps too, with monday.com releasing a new font for 2023 that's more modern and slightly clearer than the one it was using last year.

As you can see from the picture below, however, Asana's user interface is already tidy and uncluttered:

Best for collaboration: monday.com

Of the two, monday.com only just comes out on top for collaboration with a score of 3.8/5. By contrast, Asana scores 3.3/5. monday.com offers a calendar, task commenting, and document editing, as well as an online whiteboard, which not many other providers (including Asana) offer.

Instead, Asana provides a project message board, which can serve as a kind of hub for project-related discussions. Like monday.com, Asana also comes with a calendar and task comments and task comments (pictured below). Asana has slightly fewer features than monday.com on the whole, but it could go either way depending on personal preference.

Best for integrations: Asana

Asana offers users access to a large number of third-party apps and integrations, such as Microsoft Teams, Jira Cloud, Slack, Gmail, Chrome, Outlook, OneDrive, TSheets, and more. Google and Microsoft even get their own categories, and in March of 2023, Asana also added Freshdesk, Mailchimp, and Intercom integrations too!

The integrations available from monday.com include popular picks like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, Google Calendar, Excel, Google Drive, Gmail, LinkedIn, OneDrive, and more. As of January, moday.com also integrates with Jira.

Best value: monday.com

monday.com successfully beats out Asana on value in multiple ways. monday.com 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 paying for features they don't want.

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

Asana Costs vs monday.com Costs

Asana offers three paid plans, starting at $10.99 per user, per month, plus one free plan. In contrast, monday.com offers a free tier along with 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 pricing). There's also a free plan available, but it's quite limited.

As we just mentioned, Asana's free plan (Asana Basic) is nowhere near as useful as its paid tiers. Asana scores 5/5 for data visualization, for instance, but none of the features that helps the provider achieve that score are available on the free plan. In fact, there are several better free project management plans available.

Like Asana, monday.com's data visualization tools are also limited on the free plan, but they're super-easy to use and the provider is updating them all the time. Since March of this year, monday.com users have been able to dock widgets, which removes clutter around vital pieces of data stored and displayed on dashboards. This makes it much easier to focus on specific information in isolation.

Asana Premium ($10.99 per user, per month) adds features including a timeline, task dependencies, milestones, custom fields, custom templates, advanced search, and training materials.

Asana Business ($24.99 per user, per month) comes with everything in Premium, plus team project portfolios and a Workload view to see each user's tasks at a glance, among other features. This is the first Asana plan with custom automation via Asana's intuitive automation builder, which helped the provider achieve a test-high 4.3/5 score for workflow creation.

Asana Enterprise includes 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.

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

monday.com pricing plans

monday.com has a free plan, plus four paid plans. It's the Standard Projects plan that really sticks out as a good value package, with an excellent range of features and a cheaper price tag ($10 per user, per month) than Asana's comparable Premium plan ($10.99 per user, per month).

monday.coms Basic tier ($8 per user per month) is an upgrade on the Individual plan and has no user limit as well as 5GB of storage, but for $8 per user, per month, you'd maybe expect a few more features. There's no automation, milestone function, or even a Gantt chart.

The Standard tier ($10 per user, per month) includes the Gantt chart omitted from the Basic Projects plan is included, plus automations (250 per month), a calendar view, and guest access. Storage is increased by 20GB too,

The Pro tier costs $16 per user, per month, and includes a formula column, private boards, time tracking, and a chart view, as well as more automations and integrations (25,000 per month for each, up from 250). 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 integration

Check out our full guide to monday.com pricing plans for more detail.

How do Asana and monday.com compare to other providers?

Asana and monday.com aren't the only project management tools worth checking out before you part ways with your money.

If pricing is your priority, we'd recommend ClickUp. Not only did ClickUp get a better overall score (4.8/5) than both monday.com (4.7/5) and Asana (4.5/5), but it's also a lot cheaper than both. The first paid plan (Unlimited Plan) is available for just $5 per user, per month, and has more features than comparable plans offered by Asana and monday.com.

If you'd like a smooth transition away from spreadsheet planning to a fully-fledged project management program, then we'd recommend Smartsheet (4.6/5).

We found Smartsheet to be the most usable provider we tested, with a dedicated feature for what felt like every common project management task. Smartsheet now offers a free plan to compete with the likes of Asana and monday.com, but the Smartsheet Pro plan costs just $7 per user, per month, which is cheaper than monday.com and Asana's first paid plans.

Check out the table below for a rundown of monday.com and Asana's closest competitors:

About our Research

Here at Tech.co, we perform our own research on all the tools, software, and services we write articles about. We create research frameworks that take into account the key pain points experienced by businesses, perform extensive user testing on all the products we review, and then discuss our findings together before publishing them in articles like this one. 

We're open about the fact we have commercial partnerships with some of the software and service providers we talk about. However, this never affects our editorial independence or opinions on products, which are solely driven by conclusions drawn from our product-led research.

When testing the top 14 project management software solutions on the market, we focused on Usability, Pricing, Features, Customer Support, and Customer Score. Sub-categories of features assessed and scores include data visualization tools, collaborative functions, as well task management, and workflow creation features.

Asana vs monday.com: FAQ