Asana vs. Monday: Which Is a Better Project Management Tool in 2022?

Project management tools are useful as they can streamline your entire project management lifecycle from start to finish. They help during project planning, execution, tracking the progress, and making improvements.

Project management tools like Asana and Monday.com are used widely by teams for managing their tasks and projects.

Since every team has different goals, requirements, and constraints, teams struggle to find the best project management software to fit their needs.

This has created an ongoing war – Asana vs. Monday.

The two major project management tools offer fantastic features and capabilities for users.

So, if you are also finding a good project management software and/or stuck between these two, this article can help you choose the right one based on your specific needs.

Stay tuned to know who wins the battle.

What Is Project Management?

Project management means planning and organizing an organization’s resources to accomplish a specific project goal within agreed constraints.

It involves teams responsible for task completion to apply suitable resources like skills, processes, methods, knowledge, and tools to achieve the goal within time, budget, and project scope. The teams also strive to optimize proper resource allocation to meet the objective, ensuring minimal wastage.

And to make it easier for teams to manage their project efficiently, project management tools like Monday and Asana are utilized. These are automated software solutions offering many benefits, like:

• Effortless project planning and execution
• Automation in planning, scheduling, monitoring, tracking, etc. to save time and effort
• Effective allocation and management of organizational resources
• Improved collaboration and communication between team members    

Asana vs. Monday: What Are They?

What Is Asana?

Asana is a cloud-based project management tool that lets you manage and track everything in your project from the beginning to completion with efficiency and quality.

It is built to streamline your project management lifecycle so you can deliver quickly while meeting all the client requirements. It also saves you from shuffling between different spreadsheets, tools, and emails; instead, you can keep your project on track and move towards successful completion.

This platform works great for small to medium-sized businesses and offers plenty of features for task management, workflow management, collaboration, attractive templates, and many more.

Businesses from across the world, such as NASA, General Electric, Deloitte, Spotify, and The New York Times, trust Asana for its ease of use, features, and other benefits.

What Is Monday?

Monday Projects by Monday.com is another excellent project management software. This cloud-based platform helps you plan, collaborate, and manage your projects in one place with ease.

Whether your project requirements are basic or complex, Monday makes everything seamless and effective so you can deliver the best. This tool also lets you manage your dashboards, strategies, issue logs, and tasks.

You can assign teammates, build custom dashboards, understand bottlenecks, and solve them using the tool. You can also monitor performance and use wide-ranging features to simplify your project management and save time.

This platform is useful for businesses of different shapes and sizes, especially for enterprises. It has garnered the trust of over 152k customers worldwide, including Canva, Coca-Cola, Hulu, HubSpot, NBCUniversal, and more.

Asana vs. Monday: Features

Features of Asana

• Reporting and updates: You can track your project’s progress with reports and status updates in real-time to understand how everything is working and solve issues early.
• Automation: You can automate and simplify your workflows and reduce errors while saving time spent on repetitive, manual tasks.  
• Collaboration: Your entire team can find project details, plans, feedback, files, etc., easily using the same tool. It will also make communication seamless between clients, team members, leaders, and vendors.
• Attaching files: You can attach files and add comments by using @ mentions in Asana to boost employee collaboration. It will tag, notify, and alert the receivers so they can respond and/or take action quickly.
• Workloads: Asana offers “Workload”, a feature to prevent burnout of employees by enabling you to set restrictions on workloads on each member.
• Forms: Using “Forms”, you can standardize the work intake process and enable others to easily get project details and request work. You can also use a calendar to track work, spot issues in the schedule, and make adjustments.
• Portfolio: Visualize your project’s progress with “Portfolio” in real-time, address risks, and report project updates to your stakeholders.
• Viewing options: You will get different viewing options in Asana, such as Gantt, calendar, and Kanban boards.
• Templates: Use attractive templates for common processes instead of creating them from scratch for marketing, design, operations, product, sales, engineering, IT, HR, etc.
• Security and privacy: Create a private and safe place to store and manage your sensitive work. You can also enforce security controls to know how members are using the platform and safeguard data. 

• Integration: Asana supports 100 integrations with tools such as Gmail, Teams, Splunk, Okta, Adobe, PowerBI, Zapier, Zoho, Slack, Vimeo, Canva, Dropbox, Notion, GitHub, Trello, Miro, and more.

Features of Monday

• Project dashboards: View and access high-level data in real-time for your schedules, goals, resources, budgets, etc., and quickly make smart decisions.
• Viewing options: Monday provides various viewing options such as Kanban boards, timelines, lists, and Gantt charts to track project scope, milestones, metrics, etc.
• Baseline: Create a baseline to easily compare planned vs. actual schedules and make improvements.
• Advanced integrations: Monday integrates easily with plenty of tools code-free to extend its functionality and make it easier. It includes Jira, Salesforce, Dropbox, Slack, Teams, Sheets, Gmail, Calendar, Zoom, etc.
• Templates: You will get a variety of pre-made customizable templates to choose from for your projects.
• Custom automation: You can also configure custom automation with a few clicks on Monday.com and get alerts to know of issues and outages and fix them before anything goes seriously wrong.  
• Enterprise-grade security: Monday helps you protect your work and user data with the necessary team and user permissions, audit logs, an uptime SLA, and GDPR and HIPAA certifications.
• Collaboration: It promotes effective collaboration among your team members. It centralizes every file in a single place so that nobody misses any data. You can also attach important notes and collateral about your clients and customers.

Asana vs. Monday: Differences

Here are the differences between Asana and Monday based on the following parameters.

Workflow, Task, and Project Management

Both Asana and Monday.com offer project, task, and work management. But how do they do it differently? What makes one outshine the other?

Let’s find out.

Asana: To manage your ongoing projects and tasks and view them in a single place, Asana offers a Portfolio feature. It works great for a complete project rather than individual tasks. You can use 50 templates or create one from scratch and manage your projects.

You will get many view categories like lists, timelines, and Kanban boards to display your workflow differently. Asana also lets you drag and drag your tasks to a selected view to visualize the task for insights.

In addition, you can include due dates to prioritize work and mark boards by upcoming, today, or later. The calendar view lets you track issues in your schedules and fix them, while “Company Goals” is used to define your goals and make everyone align with them.

Monday.com: It lets you divide projects into smaller tasks to make it easy to complete them. It comes with a project management feature to build dashboards and manage your complex projects across departments. You will also get a complete view of your portfolio with various layout options and find who’s working on what.

Divide tasks by time, have a quick conversation with any team member aboard, assign one item to different members, and enhance collaboration. Like Asana, Monday helps you manage your workflow using views like timelines, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, etc. However, switching from one view to another is easier on Monday compared to Asana.

Monday.com offers several pre-made templates to plan, perform, and track the tasks in a single place. You also get boards to motivate your team and automated alerts on reaching milestones and deadlines to make quick fixes. You can even automate recurring tasks, move them through your pipeline, and prioritize them.

Winner: Monday as it is easier to switch between views and provides more options for views and templates to create and manage workflows.

Ease of Use

Asana: Asana has an intuitive and attractive user interface with plenty of options like templates and layouts (list, board, calendar, and timeline). You won’t find much trouble getting started and creating your projects, adding team members, assigning work, and setting the workflow.

Plus, to make things easier, you can use any of their 50 templates based on your use case and start with your project management. But if you don’t want to use templates, you can create one from scratch or pull spreadsheets from a third-party solution.

Overall, Asana makes your project management fun, but it might sometimes confuse you with lots of functionalities. And if you are new, you might find it hard to learn and adapt to it.

Monday.com: Like Asana, Monday offers an intuitive user interface and is beautiful. It allows you to create boards for a project, sales pipeline, marketing plan, roadmap, etc. Monday also lets you assign a single task to multiple members and group project phases, deal stages, and timeframes.

For easy visualization, you get several options – table, calendar, Gantt, Kanban, timeline, form, and more. Most importantly, you can easily customize different parts of your dashboard like colors, viewing options, item counts, and more. You can also view and filter activities by group, time, column, name, etc.

In addition, you will get a vast number of pre-built templates each for content creation, marketing, design, sales, docs, and more, to make your work easier and preview them before using.

Overall, due to an overwhelming number of options and features, using Monday can become really confusing, especially for new users. Its learning curve is also pretty steep.

Winner: Monday, since it offers lots of customization, its learning curve can be subdued easier than that of Asana.

Reporting and Analytics

Good reporting and analytics reflect how your project is moving, spot issues, and fix them to take it towards successful completion.

Asana: Asana offers a 360-degree on your project with in-depth reports so you can monitor the progress. It provides different types of reports:

• Progress: Get full status on the project’s progress for the month with all the tasks that are completed, ongoing, or need to start.
• Work health: You can view an upcoming task by project and custom field, along with overdue tasks for each project.
• Resourcing: You can track the tasks performed by a team member for the week and projects in a month and view the total number.

As explained previously, you can view the reports in different layouts based on your preference. The reporting tool will be sufficient to track all your employees’ activities, tasks, and projects in a single place without needing any reporting tools and monitor their performance.

Monday: Similar to Asana, you can track your projects, timelines, and employees on Monday. It has “My Section” to monitor things your team will require to complete a project. It also aggregates and manages all the project data based on the deadline. However, it doesn’t have advanced reporting features like Asana.

Winner: Asana because of its detailed reports on tasks, employees, and project progress.

Automations and Integrations

Automation

Asana: It lets you automate repetitive tasks to save time and effort and invest in other important activities. It offers specified rules to automate tasks such as assigning tasks, tracking progress, remaining notifications, time tracking, etc. If you don’t find your action, you can create custom rules.

Monday: It offers plenty of code-free automation for status updates, due date alerts, email notifications, dependencies, assigning tasks, creating workflows, tracking time, getting progress updates, and more. You can also customize the automation to meet your needs.

Integrations

Asana: Asana integrates securely and seamlessly with 200 solutions, so you can use the single platform to do everything without switching tools. Some of them are Slack, Salesforce, Gmail, Zendesk, Zoom, Teams, Outlook, Zapier, Vimeo, Jira Cloud, Dropbox, Canva, Lucidchart, YouTube, Notion, GitHub, GitLab, Trello, Sentry, MailChimp, and more.

Monday: Monday also integrates with plenty of tools without requiring you to write code. It includes Teams, Outlook, Slack, Dropbox, Calendar, Zoom, Gmail, LinkedIn, Zapier, Adobe Creative Cloud, Twilio, Salesforce, PandaDoc, Shopify, Stripe, Pipedrive, SurveyMonkey, HubSpot, Jira, GitHub, Todoist, Trello, PagerDuty, and more.

Winner: It’s a draw

Security and Privacy

With increasing cybersecurity risks, it’s necessary to choose a system that provides safety to your business and customer data from attacks. Let’s compare Asana vs. Monday based on security and privacy.

Asana incorporates data security in its operations and products and invests in building a reliable infrastructure to support your deployments, no matter if it’s 100 or 100k. It uses best practices for maintaining secure, available, and scalable cloud applications. It includes protocols like password hashing, least privilege access, regular security assessments, security-focused development, public bug-bounty programs, etc.

In addition, Asana’s information security department uses the latest security controls and tracks malicious activities across IT devices, networks, and data centers. It also offers admin controls and data protection to visualize everything and take quick actions on time.

Asana offers Single Sign-Ons (SSO), multi-factor authentication, SAML 2.0., and a 99.90% uptime and transparency into your data in real-time. Plus, you will get daily backups, recovery methods, and regional backups to prepare for emergencies. It is also compliant with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA and has certification from SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, ISO/IEC 27017:2015, ISO/IEC 27018:2019, ISO/IEC 27701:2019, FERPA, GLBA, and HIPAA (coming soon).

Monday: Like Asana, Monday is also concerned about the safety of your data, applications, devices, and network. It provides enterprise-grade security features like two-factor authentication and SSO with tools like Okta and One Login. Monday also offers data protection with the team and user permissions, uptime SLA, and granular audit logs, along with GDPR, HIPAA, AICPA SOC, ISO 27001, and ISO 27:27018 certifications.

Winner: It’s a tie since both Asana and Monday offer plenty of security and privacy features in every plan.

Customer Support

Customer support is also a deciding factor because if you run into any trouble, you will seek the help of a supportive and friendly team to solve your issues.

Asana: It offers 24/7 customer support through chat and tickets and plenty of YouTube videos, guides, documentation, and articles. They are professional and friendly in solving your issues.

Monday: Monday offers 24/7 customer support in all its plans via emails, chat, and phone. It also provides a dedicated customer success manager in its Enterprise plan. You can also refer to their knowledge base and FAQ section to find the answer to common questions, watch YouTube videos, attend webinars, and read articles.

Winner: Monday.

Pricing

Asana: It offers four plans to meet varied needs:

• Basic: Free for unlimited tasks, messages, projects, activity logs, file storage of a maximum of 100 MB per file, 15 members, 100 free integrations, and more.
• Premium: US$10.99 billed manually for features included in the Basic plan plus Workflow Builder, timeline, unlimited dashboards, advanced search, and more.
• Business: US$24.99 billed manually for everything included in the Premium plan plus Portfolios, Workload, advanced integrations, custom rule builder, approvals, and more.
• Enterprise: Get a quote to get everything in the Business plan plus SAML, SCIM, data deletion and export, attachment controls, priority support, custom branding, and more.

Monday: It offers five plans and lets you try them for FREE.

• Individual: Free for up to 2 seats, 20 column types, Excel imports, 200 templates, up to 1000 items, 500 MB storage, 1-week activity log, 1 board/ dashboard, etc.
• Basic: $9/month, billed annually for unlimited seats, unlimited items, 5GB storage, 1-week activity log, 1 board/ dashboard, etc.
• Standard: $12/user/month for unlimited seats, unlimited items, 20 GB storage, 6 months of activity logs, 5 board/ dashboard, 250 actions/month,
• Pro: $20/user/month, for unlimited seats and items, 100 GB storage, 1-year activity logs, 10 board/ dashboard, 25k actions/month
• Enterprise: Get a quote for unlimited seats and items, 1000 GB storage, 5 years of activity logs, 50 board/ dashboard, 250k actions/month

Winner: Monday is a little bit more affordable, not much difference though.

Summary

Let’s summarize the differences between Asana and Monday in a table.

Asana vs. Monday: Which one to Choose?

From the above Asana vs. Monday comparison, Monday appears to have the edge over Asana. It has an intuitive and attractive UI, plenty of useful features, and is effortless to use with customizable options.

However, it doesn’t mean Asana is not good. Both project management tools have their pros and cons, and you must choose one based on your requirements and budget, not just looking at the vanity metrics.

If your requirements are minimal, Asana can suit you. It won’t confuse you with too many options. It’s best for SMBs looking for a project management tool with excellent collaboration and communication features.

But if your requirements are diverse and you need a feature-rich tool that’s visually appealing too, you can go with Monday.com. It also can be the best pick for remote teams and enterprises.