In these trying times of quick change, one thing remains sure: people love project management software. They grip adamantly to their program of choice. Building software that is simultaneously easy and highly functional is a delicate balancing act. Many simple software choices leave lots of features behind, while other, more complicated tools need endless hours of training and support to understand.
Both project management software are easy, convenient, and full of useful functionality, but it looks like one might have more to offer after comparing the two. To help you manage your daily tasks, deadlines, and projects, TechNinjaPro has the luxury of revolving to project management tools rather than post-it notes or endless email threads.
The demand for project management software is high, with giants like Microsoft and Basecamp often dominating the chat. But there are two other big players worth considering for their simplicity of use, task management features, and third-party integrations. It is time to come together for an objective and discuss two of the leading project management software on the market: Monday.com vs. Asana.
Here is how they stack up.
Quick Overview of Asana Project Management Tool
Asana is a project management software founded in 2009 by former Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein as an internal software. It was out to the public for commercial use in 2012 after being kept in private beta for four years.
Asana has grown into a leading name in the project management sector in the modern world, catering to a broad user base from both development and non-development backgrounds. Yet, this software is more prevalent among non-technical departments such as Sales, Marketing, etc.
This tool has adopted a task-oriented approach to project management where everything is centered around projects and jobs. This means for each project or job you create, you can add tasks & subtasks, assign them to teammates, including descriptions, tags, comments, and custom fields. Asana’s highly competitive advantage is its team association and communication abilities. What other advantages do you get by selecting this tool? And what are the disadvantages? Let’s have a look.
Advantages of Asana
- The user interface in Asana is intuitive and makes the whole work experience fun.
- You can easily modify this tool to suit your requirements.
- It supports multiple views: board, list, calendar, timeline, progress, and forms to help visualize your projects and monitor progress.
- The workload aspect in Asana provides you an overview of what your whole team is working on. It allows you to view what work is assigned to whom and also the workload of each teammate.
- Selecting Asana provides you access to a great deal of crowd favorite third-party applications to help streamline your workflows.
Disadvantages of Asana
- Asana is functionality-packed, but its drawback is that it can get overwhelming and distracting for a newbie.
- Due to its wide range of functionalities and complex design, the learning curve is pretty sharp, making onboarding a nightmare.
- Asana lacks the agile capabilities to apply other popular frameworks such as scrum.
- It does not support viewing tasks and subtasks in a single, nestled view.
- It does not permit you to add multiple assignees to a single task.
Quick Overview of Monday.com
Monday.com was created in 2010 to be used internally in an Israeli company called Wix.com. It became a separate company in 2012 called daPulse. But later, in 2017, daPulse was rebranded as monday.com. Now, Monday.com has developed itself as a visually attractive task management tool in the project management tools market.
Monday.com is loaded with features and caters to both non-technical and technical teams. However, it is favored by non-technical departments pertaining to sales, customer success, etc.
Advantages of Monday.com
- com’s user interface is also intuitive, colorful, and attractive on the whole.
- It provides a broad range of features from managing work items and tracking the overall progress of projects or tasks to CRM that makes multi-department collaboration stress-free.
- com allows you to assign multiple members to the same work item.
- com enables you to integrate with various third-party applications to perform various activities, from CRM to bug-tracking and more.
Disadvantages of Monday.com
- com’s GUI is complicated, making the learning curve extremely sharp.
- It does not support full-fledged agile capabilities such as Sprints for a scrum that you can find in like Zepel.
- In Monday.com, all the features and aspects related to managing tasks are not present in one place, thus leading to confusion.
- It enables you to add task dependencies via a separate column to keep track of and not in the item card itself.
- The pricing plan is not pocket-friendly, and it does not include a free scheme like its competitors.
A complete comparison of Asana vs. Monday
What are the common features of Asana and Monday.com?
Monday.com and Asana provide multiple ways to streamline your projects, from starting your work with templates to centralizing team communication. But the two applications provide different experiences in terms of the user interface, work visualization, and enterprise-level features. The best application will depend on the complexity of your project and how many people you are collaborating with.
TechNinjaPro will be comparing the five features to help you make your choice
1. User Interface
Both project management tools make adding new tasks to projects easy, but Asana provides a more intuitive experience. Asana’s side navigation is easy and to the point, with responsive icons and labels to help lead you to the right area from your inbox to reports. If you ever get lost, the home screen is where you will get your most important tasks with upcoming deadlines and recent projects.
Within a project, there is a big blue button that allows you to add tasks or click into the body of the project or task to add content. The top navigation rapidly shows you other features like project views, switching, starting a conversation, or building a form. If you are using Asana for the first time, there is one thing that is not immediately insightful. Within a project or task in the default list view, you will see an overview of all the jobs. You need to tick on a task to open a side window that displays all the task details.
Monday.com’s interface is harder to master. The tool’s default screen shows your inbox, boards, and dashboard. The side navigation displays icons, which are not easy to understand. Once you open a board, it is easy to know how to add new tasks, details, or columns or switch views, but that is where the simplicity ends. The interface is minimum to its detriment. There are around five icons in the upper right corner, so you have to keep floating or click on icons to remember what they do.
2. Templates
Both Asana and Monday.com offer templates, but Monday.com’s templates are robust with real-life content examples. Asana provides dozens of templates to help you get started quicker. By default, Asana displays various templates related to the market you selected when you formed an account. You can clasp between other template types or search for templates you or your team created. When you choose to use a template, there will be a ReadMe section with instructions for using it and brief example content within the template as a starting point.
Monday.com also provides templates grouped by market, but unlike Asana, its templates do not just include a few entries of example content. A project template in Asana displays three total example tasks or jobs with no owner, description, or due date. On the other hand, a project plan template in monday.com shows seven tasks, with three tasks wholly filled in for owners, development status, approval, design status, timeline, and progress. This gets the template to life, helping you instantly know Monday.com’s features.
3. Task Management
Asana Provides fast and streamlined task creation. Monday.com is clunkier but shows you more details. Asana has made task management easy, building multiple ways to create new tasks and track their status. Rather than go into each project plan whenever you need to add a corresponding job, a come-up window appears to enter the job name and description and choose the project from a drop list. Asana adds that task to whichever project you want. To view all tasks, Asana makes three types of reports: list all the tasks you have made, tasks you have assigned to others, and recently completed tasks.
However, to add new tasks to Monday.com, you have to find the appropriate project, open it, fill in up to seven pieces of information. Asana needs a lower level of detail for each task to create a new task in Asana in under ten seconds.
4. Team Management
Asana provides more advanced team management features. Asana’s most robust team management features only apply to organizations that connect employees from the same company using the same email domain. Within a company, colleagues can divide into teams to collaborate on projects and jobs. Each team also has its own team sheet, a central location where you can see all your team’s tasks, a shared team calendar, and conversations.
You can collaborate with people outside your team or company. These guests have restricted permissions and can only see what is clearly shared with them. If you have a paid business account, these guests do not contribute to the overall membership count.
With Monday.com, team management is handled at the primary level. You can either invite a team member who can edit boards or create new ones or a viewer with read-only permissions at the account stage. Like in Asana, you can collaborate with vendors or customers outside of your team. There is not a dedicated page for team activity nor particular organizational elements for team boards.
5. Communication
Asana enables you to leave comments at the task, project, and team levels, whereas Monday.com only lets you comment on tasks. It facilitates communication between your team in various ways throughout the tool. You can comment directly on a job or start a conversation in a committed window within a project. If you have a team sheet, you can also host all-team discussions and post announcements.
There is also an image proofing element catered toward artistic roles like designers. When a team member uploads an image within a task or job, you can tick any part of the image and leave a detailed opinion. Your inbox keeps a record of all the communication, alerting you when someone from your team mentions you in a comment or interacts with your comment, among other things.
On the other hand, Monday.com provides one way to communicate with your team at the task level. When you tick any job in a project, a new window opens on the right where you can leave comments or updates. These comments or updates are the primary way to communicate with other team members on Monday.com. An inbox within the Monday.com tool displays all communication on the boards you are subscribed to, even if you are not mentioned in a comment or assigned to an item.
Monday.com vs. Asana: Which Tool Should You Use?
Monday.com and Asana are robust project management tools to help you organize your work and communicate with your team. If you are working on a complex project with multiple internal and external collaborators, Asana is the clear winner. Its team management features centralize all data in one place, and advanced features like portfolios and workload allow you to allocate resources accurately.
Monday.com is a solid option for smaller projects or to-do lists, where you are either working alone or with one to two other people. Monday.com’s boards are perfect for displaying a lot of detail at a glance in various ways.