_Most people’s story about looking for _Asana alternatives:

Mouse Button Click

1,2,3,4,5 seconds pass… still nothing.

Your MacBook Pro freezes. Unresponsive. It’s overheating, fans running at full blast.

You’re starting to worry.

“Can the motherboard endure all this heat?” — you’re asking yourself while slowly getting pissed off and exasperated.

How the heck a single external link to an Asana task can cause you so much trouble?

Tension rising your nerves… you are trying to contain your composure and find a logical solution to your problem…

Yet, the only logical thing right now for you would be to smash your screen and just forget about this high-tense situation.

Luckily, your MacBook Pro comes back on track out of the blue. The task in the Asana app has loaded and opened successfully. Everything is running smoothly except for your mind.

You’re still frustrated and mind-boggled by the protracted unresponsiveness of Asana.

With a mind filled with anger and a flushed face, you head over to Hacker News. You find the latest news about Asana. Click on the forum thread and start typing… fingers running through the keyboard at the cat’s speed. You don’t give a damn about the grammar or lexical structure of your statements. You just can’t contain your emotions. Without conducting any grammatical or lexical reviews, you ferociously hit “Comment,” nearly breaking your left mouse button.

You don’t care… whether an Asana employee will notice your horrible experience and try to fix the problem. You are already Googling your way through some of the top Asana alternatives out there, searching for an app that won’t overcome you with so much anger that you’d have no other choice except to lean against the closed door of your office and silently scream.

In this article, I’ve compiled a list of some of the best Asana alternatives to help you avoid such boiling situations. I’ll start by breaking down Asana’s features, pros, and cons and then transition to Asana’s worthy competitors.

Without further ado:

Asana

Some people love Asana because of its simple UI, tons of great features, and effective project management. Others detest it (OK, not detest… but they don’t like it) due to its unresponsive nature. Nevertheless, Asana is great for both professional and personal use. When the Asana app was released in 2008 by Dustin Moskovitz, one of Facebook co-founders… Asana took the project management market by storm.

Since then it has been growing big time, raising more than $200 million in funds and most lately being valued at $1.5B. There are talks about Asana going public, but time will show.

OK, so what makes Asana’s project management stand out?

First, its simplistic and intuitive interface is just outstanding. It’s a real pleasure navigating your way through Asana’s UI while managing your tasks.

Second, the array of wide-ranging features Asana brings to the table is second to none. Asana offers something for everyone… and that maybe one of its biggest problems.

The thing with such successful companies is that they initially focus on a narrow segment in their market (which is awesome). The startup has a vision that perfectly aligns with that particular market segment. Users are over the moon, and the company is growing.

Yet, once the company signs up for the unicorn club (reaches a valuation of over $1B), it begins a huge expansion by adding new features that existing users may not want. That’s because the once-a-startup company is now trying to please a much broader market to bring more users (and revenue) on board.

However, what happens is that the existing users start despising newly-added features as they add no extra value to them. And the newly signed-up customers don’t feel genuinely delighted as those extra features are made to please a big market instead of narrowing down on a specific group of customers. “One can’t hold two watermelons in one hand.” — as the Balkans say.

And people fear that Asana may turn into such a company.

Disappointing unicorn and startup stories aside, let’s see how deep your pocket needs to be to meet Asana’s expectations.

Asana pricing plans can vary based on your needs. You can get the forever-free Asana version and have unlimited tasks and projects + free Asana templates.

The Asana Premium Plan with tons of extra premium features starts at $13.49 per user per month. And the Business Plan starts at $30.49 per user per month.

Asana also boasts customizable pricing plans for enterprise companies. All in all, Asana can be quite costly for larger companies, but it offers some fantastic features.

Here are some of the best Asana features:

• Asana dashboards.
• Asana kanban board software.
• Asana resource management.
• To-do lists.
• Asana timeline with a gantt-chart like view.
• Calendar.
• Projects.
• Tasks.
• Subtasks.
• Asana recurring tasks.
• Asana reminders.
• Asana milestones.
• Task assignees.
• Sections.
• Asana custom fields.
• Due date and times.
• Attachments.
• Asana project templates.
• Forms.
• Rules.
• Likes.
• Approvals.
• Sync tasks across projects.
• Asana task dependencies.
• Custom templates.
• Copy projects.
• Permissions.
• Asana collaboration features — task comments, chat, conversations.
• Followers.
• Asana training and tutorial videos.
• Asana status updates.
• Asana reports.
• Asana time tracking.
• Asana desktop app for Windows.
• There is an Asana app for Mac available too.
• Asana mobile — iOS app and Android app.
• Integrations with Trello & GitHub & Google Drive.
• Asana also boasts an email integration.
• And more.

What’s fascinating about Asana being a project management tool is that you can effortlessly create tasks within your beautifully-designed Asana dashboard. You can even use the drag-and-drop feature to effortlessly structure your assignments across your board. And thus allow your teammates to understand what you are working on within a glance. Copying and pasting line issues from a spreadsheet, text file, or chat feels like a breeze. You can easily edit your projects with multi-select.

Moreover, Asana boasts Trello-like boards that will bring valuable insights into your team’s progress. You’ll know at a glance the next steps that need to be taken.

Why some teams love Asana is because of the transparency it can bring into their Asana workflows. You can make sure that nobody feels overwhelmed or burned out by reducing their flow of tasks whenever needed.

And finally, a lot of people prefer Asana over other tools because of its granular and robust way of managing your projects. You can create projects, tasks, subtasks, sections, and expand even further without any hassle whatsoever.

Yet, there are some downsides to Asana that are worth mentioning as well.

The biggest downside of Asana so far is its slow and unresponsive UX. As described at the beginning of this article, you can wait for up to 30 seconds to open Asana tasks from external links.

Loading times in Asana are as well poorly handled. All this unresponsiveness can exasperate people, especially if you are in a hurry to meet deadlines. And not only that, but it can also diminish your productivity as your anger and fury take over your rational thinking.

Another concern is the pricing plans. Even though Asana offers a free plan for up to 15 users, the paid plans have a hefty price tag, especially with extra valuable features like Gantt charts.

Although Asana empowers your team with in-task comments and convos, once the task is archived or marked as complete, it’s tough to find those convos further down the line because of Asana’s poor search engine.

Unlike Trello, Asana doesn’t allow you to switch between the board and the list view. Whatever you pick, it’s irrevocable.

And finally, Asana tends to overload your lists with tons of tasks. That means your list can get super lengthy. And structuring tasks becomes a laborious burden that decreases your productivity as well.

Here are some slighter dislikes that customers have submitted about Asana:

• “Disconnecting/reconnecting” notifications can disable the entire app for a couple of seconds.
• Adding files or emails from Outlook by using the drag-and-drop features isn’t possible.
• Sometimes you can’t preview attachments unless you reload the page.
• Cross-referencing two tickets is quite hard unless you clone the tab and open the separate tasks in both tabs.
• There’s no markdown support. You’ll have to remember bulky sets of unique hotkeys for message formatting.
• Some customers complain that Asana’s paid support and training aren’t that worth it.
• Custom fields seem to be accessible across teams in your company. However, there isn’t any easy way to move them across projects.

And finally, a couple of Asana app reviews from existing customers:

“It’s_ quite easy to use and it has helped me a lot to keep track of my daily tasks. But I hope it could provide more features like insights and trends in the free version._”

“There’s_ one thing in particular that I’ve found to be frustrating with Asana. Their customer service has been extremely hard to reach at times._”

“Asana has been a huge asset for our team. We can break client work down and keep it all orderly in one place with great updates.”

#scrum #jira #asana #tools 2020 #devops