Asana vs monday – Project Management Head-to-Head

When it comes to project management software, monday is a better choice than Asana – despite both offering a free plan, stellar range of features, integrations, security, and project templates.  monday is a far more future-proof choice than Asana too thanks to recent, transformative investment into monday's features and tools. monday comes at a lower price than Asana, too.

On top of this, monday offers better support across all its plans than Asana – something that is crucial when it comes to good business software. You're 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 take on how they compare across core feature categories – in this guide, you'll find:

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

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

Key Takeaways

• Both Asana and monday have great free plans. monday's free plan only has a ‘seat' (user) limit of two, however, 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 tiers).
• monday'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. It's significantly more customizable than Asana and almost all its other competitors.
• monday is cheaper than Asana. monday'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'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 and Asana best for?

• monday is best for teams that need to customize their projects.
• monday is best for teams that need to integrate with other apps.
• monday is best for teams that need communication functionality.
• monday 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: Features

Both Asana and monday offer a healthy range of features needed to keep a team operating at peak efficiency. But that doesn't mean they have exactly the same abilities. Just below, we'll list each provider's features before discussing and comparing them in detail further on in this section.

Asana Features Summary:

Basic Plan:

• Unlimited Tasks, Projects, Messages & file storage
• Collaboration with up to 15 teammates
• List & Board view projects + Calendar view
• Project Overview & Project Brief
• iOS & Android mobile apps
• Time Tracking w/ 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 & Lock Custom Fields
• Forms branching & customization
• Portfolios, Workloads & Goals
• Proofing & Approvals
• Advanced Integrations

Enterprise Plan:

• Everything in the Business plan
• Priority support
• SAML + user provisioning & deprovisioning
• Custom Branding
• Data export, deletion
• Attachment controls

monday features summary:

monday's Individual plan (which is free) includes Unlimited boards & docs, 200+ project templates & 20+ column types for up to 2 team members. You can use monday on iOS and Android too, thanks to its apps for both platforms. Paid plan features are as follows:

Basic Plan:

Pro Plan:

• Everything in the Standard Plan
• 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 & analytics
• Multi-level permissions
• Tailored onboarding
• Premium support
• Create a dashboard that combines up to 50 boards

Asana vs monday: 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.

Asana vs monday: Team Management and Communication

Of the two, monday only just comes out on top when comparing their collaboration support. It offers a calendar, task commenting, an online whiteboard, and document editing.

Asana neglects to include document editing or an online whiteboard, but does come with a project message board, which can serve as a kind of hub for project-related discussions. Like monday, it also comes with a calendar and task commenting. Asana has slightly fewer features than monday, but it could go either way depending on personal preference.

Asana vs monday: 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.

Asana vs monday: 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.

Asana vs monday: 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.

Asana vs monday: 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 is a bit easier to use, as it opts for the classic drag and drop interface that you'd find in things like email template builders or online graphic design sites.

Interactive Sessions

monday 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 go somewhere like Miro.

Spreadsheet Functionality

monday 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: 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 $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

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.

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

Individual Tier

While you might expect a free plan to be a bit barebones, monday's free plan is actually somewhat beefy. Unlimited projects, 2 users, and 500mb 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

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.

4. Asana vs monday: 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. 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. User Experience

Both services are relatively easy 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.

Overall, both services are very easy for newcomers and veterans alike, as they both avoid unnecessary submenus, and make more complex project details into a customizable option, rather than a necessity.

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.

6. Choosing the Right Project Management Software

When choosing the right project management software, there's 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 the team you'll primarily be working on projects with 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 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.

8. Asana vs Monday.com: FAQ