Asana is overpriced for what it offers. There. I said it. Now let me spend the next 2,500 words explaining why I still think it is one of the best project management tools you can buy, why that pricing complaint is more nuanced than it sounds, and why I keep recommending it to teams even when cheaper alternatives exist.
Because here is what I have learned after using Asana for a full month with a 12-person team: being good and being expensive are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes the most polished tool costs more. The question is whether the polish is worth the premium. And with Asana, the answer is... mostly yes. With caveats.
What Asana Gets Right
The interface is clean. I mean genuinely clean, not "clean-looking-but-confusing" clean. You open Asana and you know where things are. The sidebar shows your teams and projects. Click a project and you get your tasks organized into sections. Everything has an assignee, a due date, and a status. It sounds basic. It is not. The number of project management tools that manage to feel cluttered and overwhelming within five minutes of signing up is staggering (ClickUp, I am looking in your direction), and Asana avoids that trap entirely.
Tasks can live in multiple projects. This sounds like a small thing but it is not. Our marketing team had a task called "Write blog post about product launch." That task existed in both the "Blog Content Calendar" project and the "Q1 Product Launch" project simultaneously. Not a copy. The same task. Update it in one place and it updates in the other. For cross-functional teams where work spans multiple initiatives, this eliminates the duplication problem that plagues simpler tools.
The multi-view thing. Every project can be seen as a List (traditional task list), a Board (Kanban columns), a Timeline (Gantt chart), or a Calendar. Different people on our team preferred different views. Our project manager lived in Timeline because she needed to see dependencies and deadlines at a glance. Our writers preferred List because they just wanted to see what was due next. The design team used Board because they think in terms of workflow stages. All of these views look at exactly the same underlying data. Move a card on the Board and it moves in the List and shifts on the Timeline. This is not unique to Asana -- Monday.com and ClickUp do it too -- but Asana does it with the least visual noise.
Custom Fields Changed Our Workflow
This is where Asana went from "nice task manager" to "okay, we actually need this" for our team. Custom fields let you add your own data columns to any project. We added fields for content status (dropdown: Draft, Editing, SEO Review, Final), word count target (number), publish date (date), and content pillar (dropdown). These show up as columns in List view, labels on Board cards, and they are fully filterable.
Our editor could filter to show only articles in "Editing" status due this week. Our SEO person could see everything in "SEO Review" sorted by publish date. I could look at the whole pipeline grouped by content pillar to make sure we were not writing five articles about the same topic while ignoring others. All from the same project, just with different filter configurations saved as different views.
The advanced filtering is surprisingly powerful once you dig into it. You can combine multiple conditions -- show me tasks assigned to Person A OR Person B, with a status of Draft, where the word count target is above 2000, due in the next 14 days. That kind of query runs instantly and updates in real time. I did not expect a project management tool to handle that level of specificity, but Asana does it without breaking a sweat.
Goals and Portfolios -- The Strategic Layer
Here is where Asana separates itself from tools like Trello or basic Kanban boards. Goals let you define measurable objectives -- "Publish 40 articles this quarter" or "Launch 3 marketing campaigns by March" -- and link projects and tasks to them. As the linked work gets completed, the goal progress updates automatically. No one has to manually update a spreadsheet or send a status report. The system just knows.
We set a Q1 goal for article output and linked our editorial calendar to it. Every time an article moved to "Published," the goal bar ticked up. It was oddly motivating to watch. And it saved our team lead from having to ask "so where are we on the content numbers?" in every weekly meeting. The answer was always visible in Asana.
Portfolios give you a bird's-eye view of multiple projects at once. Status, progress, owner, timeline -- all on one screen. For anyone managing three or more concurrent projects (which is basically every project manager I know), this view eliminated at least two hours per week of status meeting overhead. Honest estimate.
But -- and this is a big but -- Goals and Portfolios are only available on the Advanced plan. Which costs $24.99 per user per month. I will get to why that is a problem in a minute.
Automations That Actually Save Time
Asana calls these "Rules" and they work on a trigger-action model. When X happens, do Y. When a task moves to "Ready for Edit," automatically assign it to the editor, set a due date three days out, and post in Slack. When the editor moves it to "SEO Review," reassign to the SEO person with new due dates. When something is marked complete, notify the project lead.
We set up five rules across two projects and they eliminated probably 30 to 40 manual reassignments and notifications per week. That is real time saved. The builder is visual and easy -- you drag a trigger, add actions, done. Took maybe 10 minutes per rule.
The limitation is that you cannot do conditional branching. Like, you cannot say "IF the priority is High THEN assign to Senior Editor, ELSE assign to Junior Editor." It is always a flat trigger-then-action chain. For complex logic you would need to connect Asana to Zapier or Make, which adds cost and complexity. ClickUp's automations are more powerful in this regard. But for straightforward workflows, Asana's Rules do the job well.
Integrations and the Broader Workflow
Asana connects to over 200 apps, and the integrations that matter most are the ones that keep your team from leaving Asana to do work elsewhere. The Slack integration is particularly well-done: you can create Asana tasks directly from Slack messages, get notifications about task updates in Slack channels, and even complete tasks from Slack without opening Asana. For teams that live in Slack, this means task management happens where conversations happen, and the friction of switching between apps drops to nearly zero. We tested it for a week and found that our team created about 30% more tasks once they could do it from Slack, which suggests that the previous barrier was not a lack of things to track but the inconvenience of switching tools to track them.
The Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integrations are solid for converting emails into tasks and attaching Drive or OneDrive files. The Figma integration shows design file previews directly inside tasks, which our design team found genuinely useful for review workflows. And the Zapier and Make connections open up everything else -- syncing with CRMs, triggering tasks from form submissions, updating spreadsheets when tasks complete. The integration ecosystem is not the deepest in the project management category (Monday.com probably has more native integrations), but it covers the apps that most teams actually use.
The Pricing Elephant in the Room
Okay. Let me be straight about this because it is the single biggest reason I cannot give Asana a higher rating.
The free plan (Personal) gives you up to 15 users, unlimited tasks and projects, List/Board/Calendar views, and basic integrations. That is actually not bad for small teams with simple needs. But it is missing Timeline view, custom fields, task dependencies, and workflow automations. So basically all the stuff that makes Asana actually useful for real project management.
The Starter plan at $10.99 per user per month unlocks Timeline, dependencies, custom fields, forms, and basic automations. This is the plan most teams actually need. For a team of 10, that is $110 per month. Competitive with Monday.com's Standard plan. More expensive than ClickUp at $7 per user per month, which includes more features at that price point. But okay, fine. Reasonable.
Then there is Advanced at $24.99 per user per month. That is where Goals, Portfolios, Workload management, advanced automations, approvals, and proofing live. And here is my issue: that is a 127% price increase from Starter. For a 20-person team, you are looking at $6,000 per year instead of $2,640. The features locked behind Advanced -- particularly Goals and Workload -- are not luxury extras. They are things most growing teams need. Locking Workload behind a $25/user tier when it is a basic capacity management feature feels like it is designed to force upgrades rather than deliver value at the right price point.
ClickUp gives you goals, time tracking, workload views, mind maps, whiteboards, and docs for $7 per user per month. Seven dollars. Asana charges nearly four times that for a subset of those features. The difference is that Asana's implementation is more polished, more reliable, and less cluttered. Whether that polish is worth 3.5x the price is a question only your team and your budget can answer.
How It Stacks Up Against the Others
I already talked about ClickUp. More features, less money, rougher around the edges. If your team can tolerate a steeper learning curve and a busier interface, ClickUp is the budget king. If your team values clarity and will actually adopt the tool because it is not overwhelming, Asana justifies its premium. I have seen teams try ClickUp and abandon it after a month because it was "too much." I have never seen that happen with Asana.
Monday.com is the closest competitor in terms of vibe. It is colorful, visual, and non-technical people love it. Monday has better reporting and dashboards than Asana, and its automation builder is more flexible with conditional logic. But Asana has Goals and Portfolios for strategic alignment, the multi-project task homing feature, and generally better structure for complex cross-functional work. If your team's work is primarily project-based with clear status stages, Monday is great. If you need to connect daily tasks to quarterly OKRs and track multiple programs at once, Asana is stronger.
Jira is a different beast entirely. It is built for software development teams doing agile -- sprints, backlogs, story points, burndown charts, deep GitHub integration. If your team writes code and follows scrum or kanban, Jira is the tool. It does not try to be a general-purpose work manager and it should not. Asana is for everyone else: marketing, content, operations, HR, event planning, client services. Many companies use both -- Jira for engineering, Asana for everything else, connected through integration. That is probably the healthiest setup if you have both types of teams.
Things That Bug Me
No built-in time tracking. In 2025. A work management tool that does not let you track how long things take. You need to integrate with Toggl or Harvest or Clockify or whatever, which means another subscription, another tool, another place where things can break. ClickUp has time tracking built in. Monday.com has it built in. Asana does not. It is baffling.
Reporting is adequate but not exciting. You can build dashboards with charts showing tasks by status, tasks by assignee, tasks completed over time, and so on. But compared to Monday.com's widget system, which lets you build genuinely impressive visual dashboards, Asana's reporting feels like an afterthought. It gets the job done. It does not impress anyone in a stakeholder meeting.
The mobile app is... fine. You can check tasks, update statuses, add comments. But you would never want to do real work on it. Creating tasks from your phone is clunky. Navigating between projects is slow. It is a companion app, not a real mobile experience. For people who work on the go a lot, this matters.
And for very small teams -- like, three or four people -- Asana might be overkill. The overhead of setting up projects with sections, custom fields, automations, and views is only worth it if you have enough complexity to justify it. A three-person team could probably get by with a Trello board or even a shared Notion page. Asana is built for teams that have grown past the "we can keep track of things in our heads" stage.
4.2 out of 5
I keep going back and forth on whether that number is too low or too high. Asana is beautifully designed, thoughtfully structured, and genuinely helpful for teams managing complex work. The multi-view system is best-in-class for clarity. Goals and Portfolios are underrated features that provide strategic visibility most competitors cannot match. The workflow automations, while limited in flexibility, save real time every week. And the integration ecosystem with 200+ apps means Asana connects to basically everything your team already uses.
But the pricing holds it back. Hard. The gap between Starter and Advanced is too wide, too expensive, and gates features that should be more accessible. No time tracking in 2025 is embarrassing. And the reporting needs work.
If money is no object, Asana on the Advanced plan is excellent. If you are budget-conscious, the Starter plan is good but you will constantly wonder what you are missing. And if you are on the free plan, you are getting a demo, not a tool.
I gave it a 4.2. Some days it feels like a 4.5. Some days it feels like a 3.8. It depends on whether I am thinking about the product or the price.
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