Asana vs monday – Project Management Head-to-Head

After our last round of project management software testing, we concluded that monday.com (4.7/5) is a better choice than Asana (4.5/5) – despite both offering a free plan, stellar range of workflow creation features, integrations, security, and project templates.

monday.com is easier to customize 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 – 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:

1. Asana vs monday.com Comparison
2. Asana's Features vs monday's Features
3. Asana Cost vs monday.com Cost
4. Which has the Best Security?
5. User Experience Head-to-Head
6. Choosing the Right Project Management Software
7. About our Research
8. Verdict: Which is Better?
9. FAQ

1. Asana vs monday.com – Project Management Software Comparison

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. The 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. Both monday.com and Asana offer task dependencies, which guide users to complete one task prior to another.

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 (however, most of Asana's best features are locked away in the paid-for 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 and almost all its other competitors.
• monday.com is cheaper than Asana. monday.com's plans are cheaper overall – it 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 – which is a lot of money if you have a big team!

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.
• monday.com is best for teams that may need regular tech support.
• Asana is best for teams that want a clear, straightforward interface.
• Asana is best for teams looking to compile post-project feedback.

2. Asana vs monday.com – Features

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)

The close scores don't necessarily mean Asana and monday.com have exactly the same abilities. Just below, we'll list each provider's features before discussing and comparing them in detail.

monday.com features summary:

monday.com's Individual plan (which is free) includes Unlimited boards and docs, 200+ project templates, and 20+ column types for up to two team members. You can also use monday.com on iOS and Android, thanks to its apps for both platforms. Paid plan features are as follows:

Basic Plan:

• Everything in the Individual plan
• Unlimited free viewers
• Unlimited items
• 5GB file storage
• Prioritized support
• Create a dashboard based on one board

Standard Plan:

• Everything in the Basic plan
• Timeline and& Gantt chart views
• Calendar view
• Guest access
• Automations (250 actions pm)
• Integrations (250 actions pm)
• Create a dashboard that combines up to five boards

Pro Plan:

• Everything in the Standard pPlan
• Private boards and docs
• Chart view
• Time tracking
• Formula column
• Dependency column
• Automations (25,000 actions pm)
• Integrations (25,000 actions pm)
• Create a dashboard that combines up to 10 boards

Enterprise Plan:

• Everything in the Pro plan
• Enterprise-scale automations
  Enterprise-scale integrations
• Enterprise-grade security
• Advanced reporting and analytics
• Multi-level permissions
• Tailored onboarding
• Premium support
• Create a dashboard that combines up to 50 boards

All things considered, monday.com's Individual plan is for exactly who it says on the tin. The user limit of two means it's only really suitable for freelancers.

The Basic plan is best for small teams who just need a program to manage their team's tasks – the Standard plan is for small or medium-sized businesses that need more collaborative functions and want to centralize their working day around a single app.

With its custom automation function, the Pro plan is for any team looking to streamline the mundane parts of their day and let their team get on with more important tasks, while the Enterprise plan has the kind of advanced reporting, premium support, and security assurances large businesses typically need.

Overall, monday.com scored 4.7/5 on our project management user tests – if it sounds like it's the provider for you, download a free monday.com trial today.

Asana features summary:

Basic plan:

• Unlimited tasks, projects, messages and file storage
• Collaboration with up to 15 teammates
• List and board view projects, and Calendar view
• Project overview and project brief
• iOS and Android mobile apps
• Time tracking with integrations

Premium plan:

• Everything in the Basic plan
• Private Teams & Projects
• Unlim. dashboards, reporting & free guests
• Advanced Search & Admin Console
• Forms, Custom Fields & Rules
• Task Templates, Milestones & Timeline

Business plan:

• Everything in the Premium plan
• Custom rules builder and lock custom fields
• Forms branching and customization
• Portfolios, workloads, and goals
• Proofing and approvals
• Advanced integrations

Enterprise plan:

• Everything in the Business plan
• Priority support
• SAML, and user provisioning and de-provisioning
• Custom branding
• Data export, deletion
• Attachment controls

Asana's Basic plan is really only suitable for individuals or very small teams getting started with project management, largely due to that 15-person user limit and lack of data tools.

The Premium plan will be a better option for teams of more than 15 who need advanced project management features for organizing and collaborating. The Business plan will be better for multiple teams within one mid-sized company, and the enterprise plan is geared toward large businesses that need advanced security and control features.

Find out how Asana stacks up against other competitors on the market with our project management comparison tool.

Asana vs monday.com: Task management

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.

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.

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. However, moday.com has time tracking, whereas Asana doesn't offer this on any of its plans.

Asana vs monday.com: Team management and communication

Of the two, monday.com only just comes out on top when comparing their collaboration support, 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.

Indeed, Asana neglects to include document editing or an online whiteboard, but it does come with a project message board, which can serve as a kind of hub for project-related discussions.

There are, however, lots of other useful features included in Asana's packages. “We mainly use it for tracking tasks,” says SEO Campaign Executive and Asana user, Katie. “But there are sections for goals, reporting, and portfolios that we haven’t scratched the surface of yet!”

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.

Asana vs monday.com: 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.com, this feature is available starting with the Pro tier.

For Asana, there's no native time tracking. However, it is 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.com can muster – although this distinction drops away for anyone getting monday.com's Pro tier or higher.

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

Asana vs monday.com: Templates

Asana's templates – a set of pre-fabricated solutions for managing specific projects – are available in 10 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.com 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.com tosses in a few unique options.

Asana vs monday.com: 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.

Other features

Form Builder

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.

Interactive sessions

monday.com accommodates interactive sessions with its interactive whiteboard, where multiple users can remotely interact and share their ideas. Asana doesn't have this, meaning that if Asana users want to engage in a brainstorming session, they might have to use another platform, such as  Miro.

Spreadsheet functionality

monday.com has the edge when it comes to spreadsheets. The main advantage is the addition of formula columns, where users can enable automatic calculations.

3. Asana vs monday.com – Cost

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 $9 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).

There's also a free plan available, but it's quite limited. For example, Asana scores 5/5 for data visualization, 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.

All paid plans support unlimited users but, 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 (Free)

First, there's Asana Basic, the free plan that is 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, which is a nice addition.

Asana Premium ($10.99 per user, per month)

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. 

This plan is the first plan suitable for data-intensive projects too, as the Basic plan has no data features that helped Asana to its 5/5 score for data visualization.

Asana Business (24.99 per user, per month)

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.

This is the first Asana plan with custom automation options and a chance to use the software's rule-based automation builder to your full advantage. The automation builder offered by Asana helped the provider achieve a test-high 4.3/5 score for workflow creation.

However, as Business plans go, this is quite expensive – ClickUp's first Business plan is just $12 per user, per month, for comparison. Asana only achieved a 3.9/5 for pricing on our last round of testing – five competing providers were adjudged to offer more value for their prices.

Asana Enterprise (Contact sales for pricing)

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

Beyond the free plan, 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.

By the end of last year, more than 152,000 companies and customers had signed up to one of these plans. See our full guide to monday.com pricing plans for more detail, or read on for an overview below:

Individual tier (free)

While you might expect a free plan to be a bit barebones, monday.com's free plan is actually somewhat beefy. Unlimited projects, two users, and 500 MB of storage means that a small business could operate on this for a while. In fact, outside of guest permissions and limits, it's almost identical to the lowest-paid tier, the Basic tier.

Basic tier ($8 per user, per month)

The $8 per user, per month Basic Tier offers unlimited boards, one dashboard, over 200 templates, over 20 types of columns, a mobile app on iOS and Android, 5GB of storage, and unlimited view-only access to whomever 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. Like Asana, monday.com scores 4.3/5 for workflow creation, the joint-highest score out of 14 providers we tested – but features that helped it achieve that score, like its automation builder aren't available on the basic tier.

Standard tier ($10 per user, per month)

The $10 per user, per month Standard tier adds a timeline view, Gantt chart 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 the needs of most businesses.

That being said, considering the customizability options and monday.com's market-leading 4.5/5 customer score, all businesses looking for a central place to manage their projects efficiently will find this tier useful.

Pro tier ($16 per user, per month)

The Pro tier, which costs $16 per user, per month, 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 (custom pricing)

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.com

Asana isn't poorly priced, but monday.com successfully beats it out 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 $9 a month 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.

However, if pricing is your priority, check out ClickUp. Not only did it 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. It’s first paid plan, the Unlimited Plan, is available for just $5 per user, per month. It actually has a lot more features than comparable plans offered by Asana and monday.com.

What's more, you can even get ClickUp for just $4 per user, per month with the code TECHCO20 – the same price as Zoho Projects' first paid plan (Zoho was our best value provider, scoring 4.7/5 for pricing.

4. Asana vs monday.com – 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.com, 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.com, the privacy features available across the Pro and Enterprise plans 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. Luckily, you'd get it across all of monday's plans, as well as Asana's.

Since 2FA is one of the most crucial security features a platform can have, it's nice knowing it won't play into your decision when picking between these two competitors.

5. Asana vs monday.com – User Experience

Both services are relatively easy to use, although our research team 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.

Asana requires some configuration of apps and integrations to get a system that serves your team's specific needs, while monday.com'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 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 services 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.

Support and training

Both Asana and monday.com scored 2.8/5 for customer support, placing them joint sixth out of the 14 providers we tested. Both services reserve their top-priority support for their respective Enterprise plans (including a dedicated customer success manager in monday.com's case), but offer decent enough support options across all other plans as well.

monday.com offers email support, a knowledge base, and a community forum, and Asana offers the same sort of support. If you contact Asana's sales team, you'll be able to obtain onboarding assistance if you're using the Premium, Business, or Enterprise plan, whereas this is only available on monday.com's Enterprise plan.

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

6. Choosing the Right Project Management Software

When choosing the right project management software, there are a number of different factors you have to consider, or else you'll end up paying big bucks for software that doesn't really help your business in a tangible way. It's really important to identify your key decision-making factors beforehand.

One of the most important factors is the size of your team – if you have a team of 10, for instance, then most of the free tiers – and some of the paid plans – offered by project management software providers aren't going to satisfy your needs.

The size of your team is important – as well as what type of team you are – but the specific features offered by project management solutions must also play a role.

The second is the type of team you're working with. If you're a team of freelancers collaborating on a central project, for example, you're going to find certain features more useful than you would if you're a company looking for a PM software solution for 1,000 employees. As a team of freelancers you might, for instance, find a piece of software that orientates its budgeting system around hours worked much more useful than if you were a business of full-time, salaried staff.

The third is going to be the features offered. This will not only depend on the features you need, but the features you have already. For example, if your team is already set up with an internal comms channel, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, then a highly functional messaging system isn't going to be on the top of your list – especially when so many PM software solutions integrate seamlessly with messaging apps (like the ones mentioned above).

Still not feeling confident about managing your next project? Follow these project management tips and discover our expert advice.

7. About our Research

Here at Tech.co, we perform our own research on all the tools, software, and services we write articles about. We have a dedicated insights team that creates research frameworks that take into account the key pain points experienced by businesses, performs extensive user testing on all the products we review, and then discuss their findings with our expert writers.

The writers subsequently use this data to ensure all of our guides are accurate, up-to-date, and reliable, whether it's CRM systems, website builders, or project management software.

At Tech.co, 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, our insights team focuses 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.

8. Asana vs monday.com: FAQ