During these times of rapid changes, one thing is certain: businesses cannot function efficiently without project management software. While everyone has their preferred application for managing their projects, we cannot deny that Asana and Monday are the biggest names in project management. We will compare Asana Vs Monday in this article to learn which one is the best fit for your business. Keep reading!
Both Asana and Monday are feature-packed with similar functionalities making it daunting to differentiate them. However, like most other project management apps, they come with perks and disadvantages that you can focus on to get a clearer picture of the two.
You may have done your research on these two applications, but if you’re still doubtful about what to go with, we can help you rest your case. We’ll do an Asana vs Monday comparison by looking at what each has to offer and how it best suits your organization in 2022.
What’s Asana?
Asana is a cloud-based application built to help distributed teams to organize their work, track progress, and focus on the core goals, tasks, and projects. It’s a Software as a Service (SaaS) designed to enhance collaboration and teamwork.
It allows people working on a project to collaborate, communicate, and share their knowledge, files while adhering to deadlines to achieve a common goal. It’s ideal for projects that aren’t complex.
Asana first started in 2008 as an internal tool at Facebook, developed by the former co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and software developer Justin Rosenstein. It then was availed for public use in 2021 after being under beta development for four years.
This tool has grown today to become one of the most popular project management software for both non-technical and technical backgrounds. Its popularity is, however, much higher amongst non-tech teams like sales and marketing.
What is Monday.com?
Monday is an open, highly customizable cloud application for managing workflow, built to help organizations and teams increase productivity in every aspect of their work. Like Asana, it’s also a SaaS that focuses on assisting organizations in managing their projects and workflows better.
This PM tool traces its origin to Wix.com in 2010, where it was used internally to manage projects. In 2012, the tool branched out of the Israeli company to become daPulse, which it later rebranded to Monday.com in 2017.
Monday stands out for its visually appealing interface that makes every task management easier and more attractive to the user. This PM tool lets you create the true Kanban-style boards consisting of columns and rows. The rows, often on the left, represent tasks or Pulse. The right side has columns holding all aspects of a project, including the due date, task status, assignee, and more.
Due to this and many other excellent features, it has become a prominent project management tool in the market.
Asana Vs Monday.com: What’s The Difference Between Them?
Many more small businesses, freelancers, and solopreneurs are embracing project management. Asana continues to gain popularity among this class of users. It’s an excellent PM software suitable for small to medium-sized enterprises.
What makes it stand out is its style of using cloud-based solutions to help businesses manage their tasks, projects, and staff. Plus, it has a plethora of collaboration tools very resourceful for managing portfolios, remote teams, documents, workflows, and tasks.
Additionally, Asana excels at visualizing the progress of tasks in different views like calendars, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and lists. With over 100 integrations, you’ll reduce the time wasted switching between applications. Although Asana has much more detailed features, you’ll find it valuable. These are the main reasons why most entrepreneurs and businesses prefer it. If pricing is an issue, Asana offers a 4 tier pricing plan with the option of free use but with limited support.
When it comes to Monday, the list of features it provides is almost limitless, making it gain popularity among small and large businesses. That’s why its gain of the market share has risen exponentially. When using this project management tool, you’ll notice that switching between views is highly minimized. It simplifies the users’ work by availing detailed, picture views of project statuses.
Monday has capitalized on views by ensuring task progress is viewable on a single interface. You’ll get to view tasks in Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and timelines. Like Asana, Monday offers four different paid plans with an option for a free trial.
Let’s have a side by side summary of Asana vs Monday.com comparison.
| Asana | Monday |
| Allows commenting on projects, tasks, team | Allows commenting on tasks only |
| More advanced permission levels for teams and pages are available | Allows basic permission level setting. |
| 30 days free trial available to first-time users | Allows only a 7-day free trial to first-time users |
| Free file storage is available. | It doesn’t offer free file storage |
| Views are available in lists, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, timelines. | It offers views in traditional designs, including Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and timelines. |
| Gantt charts need prior customizations and integrations to show the native charts | Gantt charts are the traditional design that doesn’t need any customization or integration |
| The user interface is clean at first but gets cluttered as projects increase | The user interface is cleaner and organized even as projects increase. |
Asana vs Monday: The key features
If you’re to look at Asana vs Monday, you’d probably not notice the key differences between them. But you can if you make a comparison on the main features important for any project management. We can save you time sampling these PM tools by disclosing their differences in the key features.
Workflow Management
Asana categorizes its workflows by “views,” which offer different ways of visualizing the project progress. The tool lets you see these views as Kanban boards, lists, calendars, ad Gantt charts. With the task dependencies, you can effectively manage yourself when handling bigger projects. The drag-and-drop features also simplify moving tasks around.
Monday operates in a somewhat similar fashion but lets you view different tasks (Pulse) visualizations without constantly switching between browser tabs or pages. This PM tool always displays a list of Pulses, each a small progress bar. Also, it visualizes your choice in the overlying fold section. With this feature, you can view everything in a single place, which turns out invaluable to project managers handling so many plates.
Task Management
Asana lets you create tasks with deadlines, assign them to your team participants, and make them codependent with other tasks. By clicking a task, you can reveal more details about it, including the @ mention and comment section, document, or file attachment for collaboration.
The home section will display the tasks with due deadlines after login. Navigation of the My Tasks menu allows you to view a whole list of the tasks you’re assigned.
Monday does the same thing, but tasks are called “Pulses.” These are different from the Asana tasks in that their representation is not necessarily by cards, even though you can do so if you want.
Monday allows you more flexibility; you can create a Pulse, assign a member, update its status, keep it dependent, and see an overview of the time remaining to completion with a mini progress bar.
Portfolio Management
If you’ve been hunting for a project management tool that incorporates portfolio management without luck, you’ll be impressed by these two.
Asana has a portfolio management feature that works similarly to a standard project management tool for projects rather than individual tasks. You can exit your daily workspace and see a bigger picture of all the projects on board, so you don’t lose focus on any of them.
A similar feature on Monday is known as Groups. Every time you create a Pulse, Monday allows you to place it under a Group. Here Groups aren’t tasks nor projects. With such an open-ended approach, you can turn them into whatever makes your work easier.
Asana vs Monday: Comparison Beyond the Features
At times, you may want to compare these two excellent PM tools beyond the features each can provide. You may consider how easy it is to integrate with your tech stack, how secure it is, and how much it costs.
Security
Every company is alert when the issue of digital security comes into the picture. Hence, it’s essential to consider how Asana and Monday protect your valuable data.
Both PM tools score high points when adhering to security standards and protocols like EU-US Privacy Shield, SOC 1,2, & 3 Compliance, and GDPR. Highly regulated fields like finance and healthcare will also look into extra security features like HIPAA and SOC 3.
Monday takes the point home under security consideration. While both PM tools have two-factor authentication(2FA) to all their subscription plans, but Monday supports SSO with apps like One login and Okta. Asana supports SSO via Google only.
A 2FA feature is an excellent security inclusion on both of these PM tools. It ensures that only you and authorized persons can log in and make changes to your account.
Integration Capabilities
Asana supports integration with more than a hundred other apps, including Slack, Dropbox, Mailchimp, and GitHub. Apart from its Application Programming Interface (API), this PM tool also supports integration with Zapier. Asana scoops the point on this one.
On the other hand, Monday has an API and supports 40 integrations, including Google Drive, Slack, Jira, Zapier, Mailchimp, and Shopify. As such, Monday’s integration capability may suit you if running a small business setup. However, if dealing on a larger scale, you may have to use their API to share data.
Cost and Pricing Plan
Depending on your organization size or the number of users, you can access Asana and Monday through a sliding pricing plan. While both provide free plans, Asana tends to cost a bit higher than Monday.
You’re limited to only fifteen people collaborations while on a free Asana plan. This version also allows you to track your tasks and display them on a Kanban board or list. Asana’s free plan denies you access to some features like less priority on support and advanced security. But as a freelancer, or when running a small organization, the free plan is all you can ever need for basic projects.
Monday also offers a free plan, but only for individual use. Accessing advanced features requires an upgrade. However, the free version gives you unlimited boards, 200+ templates, and 20 types of columns. Collaboration is limited to only two team members, hence ideal for small teams.
Asana Vs Monday.com: Which One Takes The Day?
Possibly, you don’t need the heavy-duty horsepower of an advanced PM tool like BaseCamp or JIRA. Maybe your team is small, and your tasks are plain simple such that you instead need more of a task management than a project management tool.
It’s important to note that Asana and Monday aren’t fully-fledged project management software but are more of workflow management tools. That’s because they equally lack the fundamental project management hallmarks like an actual Gannt chart or time tracking features. But integrating time tracker app like clockify or hubstaff, you can track time in Asana.
However, if you work with a small team handling simple tasks like sales, marketing, advertising, and such, both Asana and Monday are excellent tools. Even then, certain aspects of such tasks can get very complex, such as sales.
Going all the way indicates that either of these tools can perfectly handle your project management needs. So, which one would you go for? Both Asana and Monday can work as great alternatives to each other. But if you base your choice more on the subscription plans, Asana subscription plans stand out as better. Otherwise, it all depends on what you are after.
Conclusion
While we’ve analyzed the significant differences in our Asana vs Monday comparison, the ball is in your court to determine which one best suits your needs.
It’s clear that both PM tools offer varying methods of getting the work done, but both have the same core features with equally impressive results. With the trial options, you can always experiment on each to find out which relates more to how you handle your projects.
If you’re still uncertain of which one to consider, you can request a personalized recommendation from Platinum partners to prepare for your project management. Also, you can learn Trello Vs Asana comparisons if you are interested.