Asana vs Monday is a review of two of the biggest names in project management tools online right now.
If you’re looking for a powerful project management tool, you’ve probably already noticed that there are about a zillion options out there.
But not every productivity tool is created equal, and Asana vs Monday are two of the platforms that rise above the rest.
These project management tools have a lot in common: they’re both cloud-based tools that let you organize your tasks and projects, collaborate with your team and project managers, and integrate with the rest of your tech stack. But they also have a few important differences that might make one of them a better fit for you and your team.
Below, I’ll give you an introduction to the features and benefits of Asana vs Monday, what makes each stand out, and how to decide which tool is best for your needs.
Let’s get started!
Asana vs Monday: Meet Asana
Asana was founded by two engineers at Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, who wanted to build a tool to help teams coordinate and do their jobs more easily. They named their tool Asana, the Sanskrit word that refers to a seated pose in yoga, in order to evoke the feeling of being centered despite distractions.
The tool itself is extremely popular, with more than two million users and a #1 ranking by G2. Teams use Asana for marketing, operations, sales, product development, and more.
People who love productivity, typically love Asana. It’s a collaborative task management tool that’s flexible enough to be customized to fit the way your team works.
Project and Task Management
The primary use for Asana is to help your team manage projects and tasks. You can create and assign tasks, assign team members, set deadlines, and organize your tasks by whichever criteria works for you.
Asana’s task management dashboard is very easy to use and has a nice, streamlined look. It also lets you easily switch between views, which include:
Overview
Get a bird’s-eye view of the project, who’s working on it, and the relevant goals and resources attached to it.
List
See a list of your project’s tasks, which you can break into sections if you like.
Board
See your tasks divided into columns. This view is great for those who like the Kanban method! For instance, your section names might be “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done.” But feel free to get creative and pick section names that fit the way you think about your tasks.
Timeline
See a linear layout of your tasks arranged by their due dates.
Calendar
See your tasks in a traditional calendar view.
Workflow
This useful page lets you set up and automate your standard workflow for this project. You can designate a form or manual source for new tasks, then pick settings for new tasks like who they’ll be assigned to, which section they’ll be in, and more. Then you can set up automations as tasks move through your workflow.
Dashboard
This page is another overview page that shows this project’s productivity stats. You can customize this page by choosing which widgets are displayed, and where.
Messages
Keep track of all the project-level comments and updates in one place.
Files
Access all the documents your team might need, along with related messages about the project. This lets you stay organized and ensure that everyone collaborating on your project can see all the right information.
Clicking on each task expands it so you can see details like the due date, a description, and related subtasks. Team members can also attach documents and mention each other using “@” for quick collaboration.
Each task comes with fields to keep you organized, including a task’s name, assignee, due date, the project it’s related to, and relevant tags. And if you have a paid subscription, you can also create custom fields to match your business’s unique workflows.
Team Workload
Asana offers a workload functionality (which you can access from the Portfolios tab) that lets you monitor your team’s capacity.
This handy feature gives you a snapshot of each team member’s current workload across all projects. You can use this information to make sure no one is overloaded, and you can even reassign or reschedule tasks within the workload view!
Personal Dashboard
If you’re a big fan of having a customizable “home base” as part of your project management tool, Asana doesn’t disappoint.
You can set up your Home page to display your top priorities, projects, and upcoming/overdue tasks at a glance. You can even choose the background color and embed a “private notepad” widget to capture your thoughts and brainstorm ideas.
Here’s a sample dashboard I created for Jane Doe:
Automation
One powerful feature in Asana is that you can streamline your team’s workflow, and help ensure things don’t slip through the cracks, by creating custom rules. You’ll need a paid plan to make full use of this feature, but it might be worth it.
Useful rules include automatically assigning new tasks when they’re created, sending a Slack message when a task is completed, and moving a task to a new section when its due date is coming up.
Integrations
The ability to integrate with the rest of your tech stack is another area where Asana really shines.
The app has over 250 integrations, including:
- Slack
- Gmail
- Outlook
- Zoom
- Microsoft Teams
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- OneDrive
- Adobe Create Cloud
- Jira
- Salesforce
- Zendesk
- Miro
And if you don’t see your preferred app on the list, Asana also lets you connect to Zapier and Automate.io to integrate with your favorite tools that may not (yet) be direct integration options.
Asana vs Monday: Meet Monday.com
Monday was founded in 2012 by Roy Mann and Eran Zinman, who wanted to create a customizable team management tool to help global teams get more done on their own terms.
As of the latest reports, Monday has over 152,000 customers, and TrustRadius chose it as the project management software with the best customer relationships, feature set, and value for price in 2022.
Monday started out as a productivity tool, but it’s become a work operating system (Work OS) that not only lets teams stay organized, but also build custom apps without knowing anything about coding.
Monday also has a marketplace with apps that you can pick and choose to suit your needs.
Project and Task Management
Monday’s project management functionality is similar to Asana’s. The platform lets you create boards for different projects or workflows. And like Asana, Monday’s boards come with different views, including:
Table
A simple list view of your tasks or items.
Dashboard
Pick widgets to get a bird’s-eye view of your project, from productivity stats, to numbers, to a simple to-do list.
Gantt Charts
This view is like the Timeline view in Asana. See your tasks linearly based on their due dates.
Kanban board
Drag and drop tasks to different columns based on their status.
Cards
This page shows your tasks in a gallery view.
Form
Create a fillable form with shareable links to let others easily add items to your pipeline.
Files gallery
See all the relevant files for your project in one places.
Charts
This page is a collection of widgets that help visualize your progress. I picked a few of my favorite widgets below, which include a progress bar, a status chart, and an income tracker.
Monday also offers a Llama Farm widget as a fun way to gamify your productivity. Every time you change a task’s status, the corresponding llama changes color. The goal is to turn all of your llamas green!
Each view is also customizable to your preferences. Filter and sort your view, choose which columns are hidden and visible, and even change item heights.
Also like Asana, Monday’s individual tasks come with quite a few fields that let you add information and organize and track tasks by whatever system works for you. The basic fields include the task’s name, assignee, status, and date. You can also create custom fields for more advanced functionality:
One of my favorite custom fields is sub items, which lets you split a task into manageable chunks, track their status, and even assign them to different team members. Monday even lets you summarize the status of sub items on the main item’s line, so you can see the overall status of a task without having to click into it.
Conditional coloring is another useful feature Monday offers. Easily make items pop when they meet a condition, such as when its deadline is approaching or when it’s assigned to you.
Workload View
Like Asana, Monday also offers a workload feature that lets you prevent burnout by setting capacity restrictions for team members.
The workload feature is highly customizable. Use it to limit team member’s assignments based on hours or effort. Or, get creative; maybe you want to limit how many miles your vehicles drive per week. It’s all in how you set up your boards and columns!
Personal Dashboard
Compared to Asana, Monday’s personal dashboard isn’t quite as customizable, but it’s still useful for individual users to keep track of items assigned to them.
The navigation panel on the left lets you toggle between your workspaces and boards, notifications, messaging inbox, and the “My Work” page. This last page pulls all the items assigned to you across all of your workspaces and boards, then sorts them by due date so you can see upcoming tasks at a glance.
Automation
To help streamline your team’s workflow, Monday offers an even more robust automation feature than Asana does.
For instance, you can set up a rule that when an item is created, it’s automatically assigned to the creator. Or you can choose to notify someone when a status changes or when a due date arrives.
You’ll get 250 actions per month on the Standard plan and 25,000 per month on the Pro plan. And Monday estimates how many automations you’ll use based on the ones you have enabled, which means you’re less likely to run out of actions before the month is over.
You can also set default values for your boards, which means you don’t have to waste time on repetitive manual entry for every added task. If most of your tasks are assigned to the same person or start on a particular status, easily set it as the default!
Integrations
Monday has fewer integrations than Asana (clocking in at just over 40), but most of the essentials are there, including Mailchimp, Jira, Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, HubSpot, and Toggl. You can also connect to Zapier and Integromat to integrate your favorite tools yourself.
Asana vs. Monday: Pricing
Both tools have similar pricing levels. They both offer “free forever” tiers that give basic functionality, though as I mentioned above, Asana’s free basic plan is more generous, with up to 15 users and unlimited storage.
Asana’s paid plans include:
- Premium ($10.99/user/month): Four project views, limited automations, reporting, and scaled security features
- Business ($24.99/user/month): Four project views plus portfolios and goals, advanced automations, advanced reporting, and personalized customer support options
- Enterprise (custom quote): Advanced administrative and security features for larger teams
And here’s a breakdown of Monday’s paid plans:
- Basic ($8/user/month): Unlimited viewers and items, 5 GB file storage, prioritised customer support, and a dashboard based on one board
- Standard ($10/user/month): Timeline, Gantt, and Calendar views available, guest access, 250 automations per month, 250 integration actions per month, and a dashboard combining up to five boards
- Pro ($16/user/month): Private boards and docs, Chart view available, time tracking, formula column, 25,000 monthly automations, 25,000 monthly integrations, and a dashboard combining up to 10 boards
- Enterprise (custom quote): Enterprise-scale automations, integrations, security, reporting, and permissions. Also comes with tailored onboarding and support, plus a dashboard combining up to 50 boards
The biggest difference between the two tools is that Asana’s free plan accommodates teams up to 15, while Monday’s only allows teams of two. So if you can’t afford to pay $40-50 per month for your team of five, you’ll probably want to go with Asana.
Asana vs Monday: The Bottom Line
Both Asana and Monday are excellent, highly-rated project management systems for team collaboration and productivity. If you want a platform that helps you stay organized and get things done, even with a remote team, either option can get the job done beautifully.
Both Asana and Monday have the same basic layout, with boards that have multiple views and customizations to match your team’s workflows. They both help you manage your team’s workload, set up a personal dashboard, automate repetitive tasks, and integrate with your tech stack.
But there are also areas where each tool stands out.
When all’s said and done, Asana is probably the better choice for those with a smaller budget. Its free subscription tier is more generous, with features Monday’s free plan doesn’t offer, like:
- File storage
- Unlimited projects, tasks, and comments
- Up to 15 members (compared to the 2-person maximum on Monday’s free plan)
- Time tracking
- 200+ free integrations
- Comments on tasks, team, and project views (compared to task-only commenting on Monday)
And if you need to limit access or permissions for your pages and/or team members, Asana offers more advanced levels than Monday does.
Asana is also a great choice for those who want a more straightforward app with less of a learning curve. If you aren’t the most tech-savvy and just want a functional tool for collaboration and project management, Asana offers all the functionality you need without the advanced features you may not want to bother with.
On the other hand, Monday stands out because it offers more advanced features and workflow management tools compared to Asana.
Monday goes beyond project management; it lets you build apps to fit your business’s workflows, like a collaborative whiteboard or funnels for sales and marketing. You can also make use of the native documents app that lets your team collaborate on shared docs without leaving Monday.
Monday also has a cleaner user interface than Asana. It offers more views to let you visualize your work in the way that makes the most sense to you; besides the normal lists, timelines, and boards, Monday also offers Gantt, chart, and map views.
If you’re looking for the right project management software that lets you build your own apps to fit your team’s needs, Monday may be the perfect choice for you to run your lifestyle business.
Asana vs Monday: Which Project Management Tool is Right For You?
Asana: More budget-friendly, less of a learning curve, more features available in the free plan.
Monday: More advanced features, cleaner userface, app-building feature.
So, Asana vs Monday, which project management tool will you pick?
