Asana vs Monday.com: Which project management tool takes the crown?
We pit two top-flight project management tools - Asana and Monday.com - against one another to help you choose between them
Asana and Monday.com are among the two most popular project management tools on the market today, with both featuring prominently in our roundup of the best project management software. However, when you compare Asana vs Monday.com, you’ll quickly see that their differences, subtle as they are, can bring quite significant changes to user experience.
Asana vs Monday.com: Features
Nowhere is this as clear as when you look at the feature set offered by Monday.com and Asana. At the most basic level, the two services offer the same features: both use lists as the backbone for their task management, for example. They both also have a kanban board that supports the list, and a decent calendar that helps you track tasks through time.
However, look a little closer and differences start to appear even at this early stage. As we describe in our Monday.com review, it’s a pretty free-form affair, allowing you to move things around the lists at will, create new sublists, make new criteria and turn them into columns – the works. We really like it a lot.
Asana’s list is also quite flexible, although not to the same degree. However, where Asana trumps Monday.com is that its different views work better together. For example, in our Asana review we praise how well tasks translate to the kanban board, something Monday.com doesn’t quite manage to the same degree. Also, the level of detail on the board itself is a lot higher, which is important for project managers who need a bird’s eye view.
Asana also trumps Monday.com by offering more, and better, advanced features. Monday.com is no slouch in this department, though: its dashboard, which offers an overview of what’s happening on as many as ten boards, is pretty nifty. Nevertheless, we’d pick Asana if we ever had to manage a truly huge company with diverse teams.
Asana vs Monday.com: Ease of use
When it comes to usability, there’s no clear winner. Asana seems to be the originator of a lot of developments we’ve seen in the project management space, while Monday.com seems to have adopted the best of them.
One thing we like about both services is how very colourful they are. Not only is this great for raising the spirits – imagine looking at a grey blob all day – but it’s also great for delivering at-a-glance information. For example, you can colour-code tasks for the specific team member to which they’re assigned, or even assign a colour per task type. This means that with one look at a list or board you’ll know who or what is due today, without having to sift through the nitty-gritty.
Moving tasks around and subdividing them is also easy and convenient. For example, in both Monday.com and Asana you can create sublists to divide tasks and then have those sublists show up as kanban columns. It seems like an obvious convenience – but, surprisingly, not every competitor offers such functionality.
Still, if we had to declare a winner, Asana has the edge. Although Monday.com makes it easier to fit views to your needs, Asana is much better at presenting information. Also, it integrates far more easily with third-party software (email, for example, and the like), which means that if you need to link up with other programs – and you likely will – Asana is the better choice, just.
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Asana vs Monday.com: Price
Comparing Asana and Monday.com’s pricing is a tricky affair, since their plans – Asana offers three, Monday.com five – don’t match up. As such, choosing the right plan for you is very likely to depend on your company’s needs. That said, we can still provide a few pointers on what to look out for.
First up, if you’re looking for the best free project management software, Asana is it. Monday.com does offer a free plan, but it isn’t very good and is only for up to three people; Asana lets up to 15 team members use all kinds of interesting features. It’s really very solid.
Neither would we recommend Monday.com’s next plan, Basic. It’s exactly that, offering just a few features for £84 per user per year. You can get better usability for free elsewhere, so we see no need to bother with it.
Monday.com’s Standard plan is next, and this one more or less lines up with Asana’s Pro plan. This is where things get interesting, since Monday.com offers a solid package of features that will likely meet the needs of most small to medium-sized businesses for £108 per user per year. Asana offers that and even more in its Pro plan, but at £132 per user per year, it costs a whole lot more.
For businesses looking to cut costs, it’s a careful balancing act; Asana’s Pro plan may offer a bit too much utility for you. As nifty as some of its features may appear, you may not need a workflow builder or the availability to integrate forms. In that case, it’s probably wiser to pick Monday.com for its slimmed-down feature set – and slimmed-down price.
However, for the more advanced plans, the scale swings back in Asana’s favour. Despite being significantly more expensive at £300 per user per year, Asana’s Business plan is a veritable powerhouse of features. Monday.com’s Pro plan is cheaper at £168 per user per year, but has nowhere near the oomph – especially since many of its features are included in Asana’s lower tier.
Again, making the final decision will be tough. Overall, though, we feel that despite its high price, Asana offers the most value for money.
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Asana vs Monday.com: Final verdict
Without a doubt, Monday.com is a solid project management tool; but Asana has it outclassed in most ways. Although you could argue the benefits of Monday.com’s Standard plan, in most other instances it just doesn’t quite get the job done in the same way as Asana. However, the best way to figure out which is the best software for you is to take advantage of both products’ free trials. All of Asana’s plans offer the first 30 days for free, while Monday.com has a 14-day trial.