Asana vs Monday: Choosing the Best Project Management Tool

High-quality project management software has been essential to managing software teams effectively and efficiently for decades. With software teams increasingly distributed and remote these same tools are now more important than ever. What is it then that makes a great project management tool? How can they fit into your teams, and which one should you choose to maximise your project’s chances of success?

When it comes to Asana vs Monday, we take a look at which solution will work to lead development teams to success. Analysing which can maintain productive projects in ever-changing working environments, we dive in to the details to see what makes each tool such a roaring success today.

Both Monday and Asana are two of the software industries leading choices when it comes to project management. Each one is capable of making a handy addition to improving your projects. Each is ideally suited to different kinds of teams, however. Choosing the one to optimise your organisation requires careful thought and consideration.

Our guide to choosing between Asana vs Monday breaks down the features and functionality that shine in both packages. Here, we analyse how well each choice might fit into your firm and think about the functionality that matters when it comes to improving your development teams.

What Is a Project Management Tool?

Project management should enable teams to plan, manage, and optimise the resources going into building their applications. The simpler, faster, and more straightforward this process can be the more likely it is to be adhered to and the more likely it’s going to be to make the difference.

To assist teams, capable project management solutions often feature a range of customisation options, automations, and secondary capabilities to improve adherence and boost productivity. Finding out which of these features matter most and which only add complexity to the project can be done by leaning on years of experience in the field.

Some of the core features we’d value and expect from capable project management tools should include:

• Task tracking and assignment. The core requirement of project management should be to assign tasks to team members and track progress towards their completion
• Team collaboration. Effective project management should be designed with cooperative efforts in mind. Discussion, documentation features, and messaging facilities should ideally be built-in to maximise their use
• Project visualisations. The most effective way to show off a project for stakeholders and teams is to present it in a visual and intuitive way. Leaning on Gant charts, Kanban boards, and reporting tools provides a high-level overview that abstracts away from the details
• Task hierarchy. A single story is made up of several small tasks. Parent and child relationships are essential to being able to organise tasks and reflect the real-world project in its management tools

When we consider Asana vs Monday, both tools have each of the capabilities listed here to varying degrees. We discuss how each of these functions performs in both packages where we take a look at each solution in detail below.

Why Are Project Management Tools so Critically Important?

Creating organised structures, deadlines, and reports are only the technical component of why these tools matter so much to teams. There’s a more important human factor that considers the working environment and effective teams in greater detail, one of the reasons why this is a good alternative to Jira.

If starting a new project is akin to embarking on a long expedition, project management tools act as an inventory list and route map to guide teams in the right direction. Enabling communication, resource sharing, and providing a detailed overview, choosing the right tools can be the difference that leads to success on many projects.

Projects delivered using effective management tools have proven to be delivered faster, cheaper, and more accurately than those delivered with poorly performing tools.

How to Choose a Project Management Tool for Your Teams

It’s often difficult for managers to put any meaningful distance between two competing project management tools. There has been many cases where team leaders have bought into one solution that looked like the right fit only to find challenges and issues when teams dig deeper under the surface.

In comparing Asana vs Monday, we’ve done the digging first to find the unique features and functionality that will make each solution ideally suited for different kinds of teams, projects, and working environments.

Some of the key challenges that both software solutions can solve include:

• Lacking quality communication between departments and teams
• Disorganised task lists and deadlines frequently being missed
• Inability to incorporate feedback into working practices in a methodical way
• Teams and their members facing an uneven workload during projects

Both Asana and Monday can solve these challenges and help teams to accomplish more. How they do this and the features that go into tackling them are what will make the difference between both software suites. Here, we’ve broken down the key elements of both packages to analyse their use.

Asana

Source: Asana.com

Asana is built with productivity first and foremost on its list of concerns. The suite’s visually appealing design is built to allow teams to orchestrate both day-to-day work and high-level project strategy in a way that is intuitive and easy to navigate.

First launched in 2012, Asana was one of the first project management tools to be available on an entirely cloud-based platform. Today, the software is known for being highly customisable to a team’s needs and being one of the front-running reporting tools for project managers.

Boasting well over 100 integrations to choose from, Asana fits into project requirements and existing software with ease to create a highly productive solution. After adoption, teams invariably see a notable increase in productivity with Asana’s capable project management tools.

Asana Workflow Management

With a range of views and visualisations available to study projects, Asana is designed around making good workflow management easy to achieve and even easier to understand. Task dependency built-in to Asana’s workflows means teams can ensure they don’t get too far ahead of the project or leave critical tasks behind.

Asana Integrations

Source:Asana.com

When it comes to Asana vs Monday, the number of integrations available gives the software suite a notable advantage. With over 100 integrations from Mailchimp, to Dropbox, slack, and Github—there’s very little the package can’t do when it comes to interfacing with existing workflows and tools.

Asana Pricing

Asana’s free tier pricing extends to teams of up to 15 people and offers unlimited project sizes, tasks, and files. For small teams and independent developers, this no-cost package alone could be enough to satisfy many project requirements.

Additional features and larger teams are available on premium and business packages from $10.99 per month.

Asana at a Glance

A highly capable and customisable solution, Asana can offer a lot for teams looking to adopt highly effective project management tools. Some of the key benefits offered by Asana include:

• A free version supporting teams up to 15 strong
• Flexible project views including lists, timeline, and boards
• Ability to add comments, due dates, and attachments to cards
• Real-time analytics and charts to map progress
• Workload tracking to help team members manage workloads
• Ability to set strategic goals in-platform

Monday.com

Source: monday.com

Monday.com offers what it describes as a WorkOS to enable teams to enable organisations to deliver everything from HR, IT, and sales to project management and documentation solutions. Offering a complete solution for businesses, Monday’s project management solution allows teams to deliver everything from simple applications to complex software packages.

First launched in 2014, Monday.com has grown fast to capture a large market share and a loyal following of users.

Like Asana, Monday features exceptional visualisations and the strong core functionality you’d expect of a capable project management suite. Where Monday stands out is in its simplicity and ease of use amongst project managers and team members.

With the vast majority of Monday’s functionality available from a single page, the simplicity of the suite makes it useful for both dedicated project managers and team members pulling double duty to get stuck into development or design tasks too.

Monday.com Task Management

Monday breaks with traditional task management solutions in the way it names and describes tasks. In Monday, a task is a “pulse” and these pulses behave slightly differently from the way you might expect.

A pulse, for example, isn’t necessarily represented by a single card—although it can be. A pulse is a unit of work that can be assigned to a team member with a status, priority, timeline, and dependency tree. Each pulse can be multiple tasks or a single one. It might represent a feature, test plan, or another unit of work towards making a software project more complete.

Monday.com Workflow Management

Source: Monday.com

The biggest strength of Monday’s model of working is the way it can arrange workflows with seamless visualisation all into a single interface.

The progress bar design allows you to keep tabs on individual pulses at a glance while the visualisation menu allows you to dive deep into workflows. With all the charts, timelines, calendars, and views you might require, Monday is designed from the ground up to give you a better understanding of your projects.

Automations play a key role in Monday’s workflows. With ready-made templates, it’s trivial to automate a wide range of tasks such as assigning team members and sending notifications with just a click.

Monday.com Integrations

Offering more than 40 of its own pre-built integrations, Monday is more than capable of placing itself in a handy position within your existing workflows. With an API that developers can use to interface with the suite, there’s not much that the package can’t do to assist teams.

Monday.com Pricing

Monday’s free version is available only for teams of up to two people. Ideal for individual developers, teams of any size will have to subscribe to one of its paid plans after an initial free trial.

The most basic package of the suite starts at $8 per user, per month. More feature-rich versions of the software are available at $10 and $16 to offer additional boards, integrations and automations. Compared against Asana, both of Monday’s premium offerings come in at a lower cost per user and offer equally rich project management options.

Monday.com at a Glance

A consistently growing project management tool, Monday.com offers exceptional automation templates, a wide array of compatible software, and a lower per-user cost in comparison to Asana. Some of Monday’s key features and benefits include:

• Hundreds of customizable visual templates
• Drag and drop feature in columns and rows
• Instant updates and notifications for every pulse
• Apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android
• Highly powerful automations to complete tasks

Asana vs Monday: Which One Should You Use?

Offering two of the most powerful and capable project management tools out there today, both Asana and Monday are capable of handling the vast majority of software projects with ease.

The one that will work best within your teams is entirely dependent on the size and shape of your teams. The features, types of interface, and functionality that will make the biggest impact will be best understood by you and your teams.

Asana’s stellar workflow management, powerful integrations, and industry-wide reputation make it a powerful management ally. While Monday’s automation capabilities, low-cost entry, and exceptional visualisations also make it a competitive offering in comparison.

With all the features of both packages considered here, it’s up to you to decide where to go next when it comes to Asana vs Monday for your project management requirements.