Trello vs Asana: Pros & Cons for Managing Projects & Tasks

As a project manager, you are responsible for managing a project from the project initiation phase to the project closure phase. Managing a project requires you to keep an eye on several elements at the same time such as the project goals and objectives, milestones, resources, project deadlines, and others.

Keeping track of your project elements without the aid of project management software is a daunting task. The work of this software is to help you track all the elements in your project at a glance from a central location.

Although there are many project management software in the market, Trello and Asana are two of the best for effectively managing your project. Both tools help you simplify the project process and improve project productivity and efficiency.

While both Trello and Asana are great picks, you often have to choose one over the other. So, which tool is better?

In this article, you will get a comprehensive breakdown of Trello and Asana, including their main features, software integration, pricing, customer support, reviews, and others.

Let’s get started.

Trello vs Asana: An Overview

What is Trello?

Trello is a task management software that uses kanban board (also called Trello board) to visualize, organize, and track your projects. Founded by Joel Spolsky in 2011, Trello was acquired by Atlassian (the developers of the software Jira) in 2017.

There are over 1 million teams that use Trello to manage their projects and other tasks including top companies including Google, Squarespace, and Costco Wholesale. Trello is an easy-to-use and visually intuitive tool that shows you what you are working on, who is working on what task, and the progress of various assigned tasks.

Trello is based on the kanban system. Imagine a whiteboard split based on the team or individual working on it and project or task type, and categorized based on the project status (To Do, Doing, and Done)? This explains how Trello works in a nutshell.

Trello is a collaboration tool that allows team members to collaborate on tasks and projects. They can collaborate on the various cards on each board, tag people, comment on tasks, add due dates and descriptions, add images or attachments, and many more.

Project managers can use Trello to create tasks (including delegating tasks to each team member), drag and drop tasks, create new tasks, mark completed tasks.

What is Asana?

Asana is a web-based project management software founded by Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz in 2008. Trusted by thousands of users, Asana is used by top companies including Twitter, Navy Federal Credit Union, Time Inc, and others.

This popular collaboration tool helps create tasks and organize them into three groups just like Trello. Unlike Trello however, these groups are called Today, Upcoming and Later. You can divide your tasks by project, theme, or purpose.

Asana offers pre-existing templates and allows users to create custom templates that fit their needs and requirements. With this cloud-based project management software, you can easily assign tasks to team members, track project progress, and set task priorities. Asana is suitable for discussing multiple tasks and dependency management.

Ease Of Use

Having advanced features on your project management software is a huge plus for your business. However, without a good user experience, users will struggle to properly use the advanced features.

If you are new to using a software tool to manage your project, you are better off avoiding any complex project management solution. So, how do Trello and Asana compare in terms of ease of use?

Trello Ease of Use

Trello embodies simplicity. When using Trello, team members can expect a very smooth experience because of its simple interface.

Navigation from the homepage to the project workspace is made easy through a drop-down menu that links information like solutions, resources and pricing. Users can visualize the progress of projects in the works using its smart, drag-and-drop task management interface.

Despite possessing some powerful features, Trello does not overwhelm even untrained users. Completing your project management board can be done within a few clicks. Assistance is provided through Butler, Trello’s automation bot, which uses rule-based triggers according to your preferences to set up.

The major drawback for Trello is that for all of its simplicity, it lacks several advanced functionalities which could make it unsuitable for managing multiple projects.

Asana Ease of Use

Asana's selling point is a clean, economic user interface despite its concentrated features. Users are able to manage multiple tasks in the manner most suitable for them as there are different kinds of task managers including kanban board, workload, timelines and lists.

As long as you do not fall far behind your schedule, you will not be burdened by a cluster of tasks that can overwhelm you. You can avoid this through inbuilt automation that will handle repetitive tasks.

Asana's timeline view, a Gantt chart, is a smart tool for scheduling tasks. This feature helps sort multiple tasks based on dependencies. Asana alerts you if you have not taken these dependencies into account when lining up your tasks.

Winner: Trello

In terms of advanced features, Asana boasts more features than Trello. However, when it comes to user experience, Trello edges out Asana.

Asana may have more use for big and diverse project teams, but Trello effortlessly combines organization and speed allowing even the most inexperienced users to get up to speed very quickly.

Key Features

Before selecting an effective project management collaboration tool for your organization's needs, you must consider its top features and qualities that differentiate it from other options.

Now let us compare two popular tools in Asana and Trello to arrive at the best option concerning their individual qualities and what they tend to bring to the project process.

Trello Key Features

Multiple Templates

Trello comes with ready and tailored-made board templates to help smoother the user experience process. Some of the features of the pre-set templates are:

• Team management
• Sales
• Marketing
• Productivity

Automation

Butler is primarily an automation feature in Trello that helps minimize the occurrence of repetitive work with the use of rules and commands. Here are some of the goods that the Butler feature offers.

• Card Buttons: Sets up your card with just a single click of a button.
• Rules: Sets up by a series of actions taken.
• Due Date Commands: This tool is triggered when the task is close to its due date.
• Calendar Commands: Give commands to prevent recurring events.

Cards

The smaller unit of work on the Trello project management collaboration tool is the Trello card. Cards provide information on individual tasks such as:

• Task descriptions
• Task dependencies
• Subtasks
• Due dates
• Task Assignments

Boards

This feature forms the basis of the entirety of the collaboration tool with its collaboration with the Kanban project management method. In addition to allowing the creation of multiple kanban boards, the board feature of the Trello collaboration tool affords users easy control and oversight capabilities of their projects.

Power-Ups

Trello has a page full of power-ups consisting of apps and add-ons which provide enhanced and improved capabilities to its already robust features.

With the variety of apps that make up the power-up list on Trello, integration seemingly has become an issue of the past. Here are some of the power-up features that can be easily integrated with Trello.

• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Dropbox

Asana Key Features

Mobility

Asana is available for use as a mobile app for iOS and Android. This comes in addition to its use already on its web app. The mobility feature helps to ensure that Asana is readily available and easily accessible to all.

Work, Project, and Task Management

This is the totality of the project management system. Work, project, and task management features ensure the smooth running of the project process by acting as an efficient watchdog.

Here are some of the notable features of the work, project, and task management feature that keep an eye out for the project process.

• Projects
• Tasks
• Subtasks
• Task assignments
• Grouping tasks into sections and columns
• Custom fields
• Due dates
• Start dates
• Project timeline
• Attachments
• Sticky notes
• Likes function
• Project dependencies
• Rules
• Approvals
• Templates

Communication

Communication is essential to the success of any project process and this fact is given the attention it deserves in Asana. Some of the features put in place to aid effective communication in Asana include:

• Task comments
• Image proofing
• Project conversations
• Variety of languages
• Rich text format

Views

Views are the entirety of the visual outlook of Asana. They provide a detailed description of the project process. Some of the notable features of the view function include:

• My tasks (prioritized to-do list)
• Inbox
• List function
• Search function
• Workload
• Calendar view
• Files view function

Reporting

The reporting feature is specifically designed to keep an eye on the happenings surrounding the project process. Asana’s reporting feature helps point out important and achievable encounters during the project process.

Here are some of the key reporting features Asana provides.

• Goals
• Milestones
• Portfolios
• Project status updates
• Dashboard (a custom real-time chart that provides an overview of the project process)

Team Management

Team management is one of the most crucial and pivotal features of project management software solutions. Asana places emphasis on ensuring proper management of team members is core to its operation.

Here are some of the visible features of team management that you can find in Asana.

• Teams: Groups of stakeholders assigned to various tasks in the project process.
• Followers: Entails project teammates added as followers.
• Guests: All collaborative partners on Asana.
• Permissions: Limiting access on a need-to-see and know basis.
• Admin Controls: Designated project stakeholders empowered to make administrative decisions.
• Privacy Controls: Limiting access to key and sensitive project information.
• Data Security: Back-up key data to ensure optimum safety of project work.

Winner: Asana

Both Asana and Trello aim at ensuring proper task and project management with the most effective collaboration tool to boost project outcomes.

They both have some stand-out features all aimed at providing an edge over the other. For this battle of the better project management collaboration tool, Asana has an edge over Trello due to the more extensive range of features it affords its users.

Trello vs Asana Software Integrations

Software integration is a necessary feature of an effective project management solution. Trello and Asana help teams to plan and manage their work in a well-organized way. In other, for you to use either Trello or Asana for better productivity, you will need to integrate it with third-party software.

Trello Software Integrations

Trello integrates with several productivity apps you use every day in your business. This tool integrates with top work tools including Salesforce, Slack, and Zoho CRM which helps to boost customer relations management (CRM) features.

You can integrate adds-on for email service providers such as Outlook and Gmail to ensure you can easily access your emails without having to switch tabs when working on your Trello dashboard. When you connect Trello with your email service provider, you can create cards directly from your mailbox.

Trello supports integration with file-sharing and cloud storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox.

Asana Software Integrations

Asana supports integration with everyday applications that users use to run their business operations. Some of these apps include Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Nutshell, Copper, and Honeybook. You can configure Asana to work as a CRM software on its own without having to integrate with any CRM tool.

This task management software allows the integration of email services like Gmail and Outlook. You can change email into tasks, set dates and assign tasks to your teammates, and add tasks to the project without having to leave your email box.

Asana supports cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box. You can also integrate time tracking apps like TrackingTime to keep track of how much time your team spends on projects and tasks.

Winner: Asana

Trello and Asana perform similar functions and allow the integration of third-party apps. However, Asana is still a better option that allows the integration of more apps and can perform the work of CRM software without having to integrate one to perform the task.

Making use of Trello and Asana in a real-time task can give you insight into which one will work best for your task. Both project management apps offer free trials but only offer access to limited features.

Trello Pricing vs Asana Pricing

Pricing is crucial when choosing a project management application. Even if a project management system has the best features needed, you can only access them if you can afford the pricing plan.

Trello Pricing

Trello offers four pricing plans:

• The free plan is free for life and suitable for individuals or teams looking to organize their tasks and projects at zero cost. Although Trello’s free version plan offers basic features, you still get kanban board view, unlimited cards, unlimited storage (10 MB per file), unlimited power-ups per board, and unlimited activity logs. You can download the Trello app for free on your iOS and Android devices. The free version plan is suitable for personal use.
• The standard plan is suitable for teams that need to manage more tasks and scale collaboration. Designed for small teams, the standard plan provides you access to unlimited boards, advanced checklist, custom fields, unlimited storage (250 MB per file), and saved searches.
• The premium plan is ideal for large teams that need to track multiple projects. You will get access to premium features including different visualizations such as dashboard view, timeline view, calendar view, map vire, and workspace table view. This trello business class plan offers you unlimited users, priority support, simple data exporting feature, admin and security features such as two factor authentication, and workspace-level templates.
• The enterprise plan is suitable for organizations that need access to cross-team collaboration features, and more security and controls. Designed for enterprises with many large teams, this plan gives you access to unlimited workspaces, organization visible boards, power-up administration, multi-board guests, attachment permissions, and more.

Asana Pricing

Asana offers four pricing plans:

• The basic plan is suitable for individuals or teams new to managing tasks and projects with a software program. Designed for personal use and small project management needs, the basic plan is free to use. This free Asana plan provides users with access to multiple features. They include unlimited tasks, projects, messages, activity logs, unlimited file storage (100MB per file), multiple views (calendar view, board view, and list view), iOS and Android mobile apps, and 100+ free integrations with your favorite apps.
• The premium plan is best for small teams with more advanced project management needs. Users get access to the features of the basic plan plus additional features including timeline, workflow functionality, unlimited dashboard, reports, advanced search, admin console, and custom fields.
• The business plan is ideal for mid-sized companies that need to manage projects across different teams. Users get access to the features of the premium plan plus additional features like portfolios, custom rules builder, forms branching & customization, and advanced integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Tableau, and Power BI.
• The enterprise plan is best for organizations that need centralized visibility, control, and support. Users get access to adaptable work management features, advanced security and data protection such as two-factor authentication, unlimited users, custom branding, scalability, and integration to the best business-class apps including Microsoft Teams, Gmail, Zoom, Slack, Okta, and more.

Winner: Trello

Trello takes the lead here on account of its cheaper plans compared to Asana. Although Asana has more robust features compared to Trello across its premium plans, Trello is the cheaper option for businesses looking to save costs. Except you need access to the features offered by Asana that Trello does not offer, Trello is the budget-friendly choice.

Trello vs Asana: Who Has Better Customer Support?

The best project management tools have an efficient customer support system where you get quick and helpful responses and solutions to your challenges. They provide access to articles, FAQs, and other customer resources.

Trello Customer Support

Trello offers a faster response with priority support provided to enterprise and business class users. Most of the technical problems are solved by submitting a support ticket form.

The best way to reach Trello customer support is through emails as they are less efficient with their phone support. Trello provides an extensive knowledge base which includes a company blog that helps solve technical issues. There is no live chat support but they have a well-detailed section of FAQs.

Asana Customer Support

Asana’s customer support team records a slower response time than Trello. Users can easily get frustrated when finding quick solutions to their problems.

However, where they fail in faster response, they make up for this by offering efficient FAQs and guides which makes available past solutions and approaches customers can use while waiting for a proper response from the customer support.

One of the perks Asana provides is that it has short videos which provide step-by-step guidelines with access to its free courses through its academy. While they have an active live chat, this option is mostly reserved for sales and will not assist whatsoever on customer issues.

Winner: Trello

Trello wins this round due to a faster response time through ticket forms and email. Although Asana offers an active live chat that Trello does not offer, the live chat feature focuses on answering sales inquiries rather than dealing with customer issues.

Trello Vs Asana: Who Has Better Reviews

Before selecting a work management software, you need to check what other people are saying about the software. Learning from people who have used the software before makes it easier to determine if the software is a good fit for your needs or not.

Trello Reviews

Trello has received a lot of praise, especially among small to medium-sized organizations due to its affordable plan. Businesses love Trello because of its free plan, which offers lots of project management features for free.

Many users praise Trello for its ease of use, non-blocking interface, and user-friendly display. On the flip side, a lot of users complain about the lack of widgets and some complex automation not working as they stand.

Trello has glowing reviews and has an average score of 4.5 out of 5 on GetApp (based on 20,400 reviews), 4.5 out of 5 on Capterra (based on 20,463 reviews), and 4.4 out of 5 on G2 (based on 12,420 reviews).

Asana Reviews

People who have used Asana love it for its ease of use and wide range of advanced features compared to some other competitors like Trello.

A lot of users praise Asana for its simple task management feature which helps businesses to boost their productivity and enhance collaboration among employees. Asana offers a free plan for individuals and teams just getting started with project management.

Despite Asana’s positive reviews, a lot of customers feel its premium plans are a bit expensive, while others complain about how limited its free plan is.

Asana has an average score of 4.4 out of 5 on GetApp (based on 10,300 reviews), 4.4 out of 5 on Capterra (based on 10,367 reviews), and 4.3 out of 5 on G2 (based on 8,067 reviews).

Winner: Trello

Trello and Asana both have glowing reviews, however, Trello edges out Asana due to its higher review scores over three trusted customer review platforms (GetApp, Capterra, and G2).

When To Choose Trello

Trello is one of the most widely used and effective task management software whose sole aim is to assist the project team on how to effectively restructure and organize daily tasks and activities into boards.

You can use Trello for project teams with a large number of projects to be delivered and seeking to organize their projects in a structured and orderly manner. This task management tool helps give each project its distinct look despite its peculiarities and has a wide range of features that broadens its scope of operation and ensures its use is not limited to one specific area.

Trello is suitable for small teams getting started with managing tasks and projects.

When To Choose Asana

Asana is a project management tool that offers a wide range of features to its intended users on how to effectively manage large projects. This explains why Asana is the most preferred choice for large business organizations that specialize in large projects.

This project management solution can seem to be too large and complex to be managed for certain project descriptions if not properly managed by the best of skilled hands. What makes Asana stand out and why many businesses adopt it is because of its unique ability to dissect large projects.

Quite similar to other project management collaboration tools, Asana makes use of boards in its use as well as the list of list structures to arrange and structure its tasks for easy implementation. Asana is suitable for larger teams that want to maintain a big picture view of a project.

Best Project Management Tools Alternatives To Trello and Asana

There exist a series of project management tools at the beck and call of various individuals and businesses. You have to select the best and most effective project management software based on the value it tends to bring to your project process.

Trello and Asana are two of the most popular and widely used project management collaboration tools. With their various peculiarities, Trello and Asana have their limitations that put a question mark on their utilization for some specific project needs. Here are some of the best alternatives to Trello and Asana.

1. Wrike

Although quite similar in features to Trello, Wrike is a project management and collaboration tool that possesses advanced features which makes it suitable for both simple projects and large projects.

Main Features

• Time Tracking: Wrike's time tracking feature is one of many distinct features where each card displayed can be adequately tracked to ascertain the amount of time spent on its implementation.
• Use of Gantt Charts: The use of Gantt charts as preferred to the use of the Kanban boards is one of its stand-out features.
• Efficient Budgeting and Reporting Platform: Wrike offers users an efficient budgeting platform to ascertain the total cost of each project task to create an idea of how the project resources are being utilized. This platform has a reporting feature that provides much-needed information on important project data that may be needed during project implementation. Both the budgeting and reporting features provide value to intending users on a wide variety of data to build their project on.
• Ease of Access: All the distinct features contained on its platform are easily accessible and easy to use.

Pricing

Wrike has four pricing plans:

• The free plan offers access to centralized task management features for free.
• The professional plan is suitable for fast-growing teams and offers project planning and team collaboration features.
• The business plan is ideal for all teams across an organization.
• The enterprise plan is best for large teams and offers enterprise-grade security and scalability.

Try Wrike’s 14-day free trial to get started.

2. Jira

Although both Jira and Trello have a common ground as they are both manufactured by the same company, Atlassian, Jira is the older project management tool among the two.

Jira is a software development tool used by agile teams to plan and track their projects. This software is trusted by over 65,000 customers like Square, Visa, eBay, Cisco, Pfizer, and more.

Main Features

• Special Planning and Tracking Ability: One of the special privileges the Jira project management collaboration tool offers is the ability to plan and track the progress of project teams involved in software development.
• Reports: Jira provides users with real-time visual data on their projects which they can immediately take action on to improve team performance.
• Visualization: Users enjoy multiple visualization options including Scrum board, kanban board, and agile roadmap.

Pricing

Jira offers three pricing plans: the free plan, the standard plan, and the premium plan.

• The free plan is free forever with no future payment obligation and supports up to 10 users.
• The standard plan is suitable for planning and tracking regular projects.
• The premium plan is best for managing both simple and complex projects.

Try Jira’s 7-day free trial to get started.

3. Workzone

Workzone is an award-winning and top-rated project management software trusted by thousands of users including top companies and institutions like Allianz, Wells Fargo, Boston University, Vizient, and more.

Main Features

• Improved User Focus: The main focus of the features of the Workzone project management tool is to improve the user focus for its intended users.
• Daily Reminder: Workzone offers a daily reminder feature that aims to create awareness of the task under completion or to be completed as well as the daily schedule of activities.
• Regulation of Shared Information: The choice of information to be disclosed to who during the project process can be regulated with this project management software.

Pricing

Workzone offers three pricing plans:

• The team plan offers you comprehensive project management features for a team of five or more.
• The professional plan offers you all the features in the team plan in addition to increased storage capacity, custom project intake forms, and API access.
• The enterprise plan offers you endless customization and other features including custom reporting, enhanced reporting dashboard, cross-project dependencies, single sign-on (SSO), and workspace groups.

Try Workzone.

Trello vs Asana FAQs

Trello Or Asana: Which Project Management Software Should I Pick?

Trello and Asana are two of the most popular project management tools in the market for a variety of reasons. Both offer users powerful features, collaboration tools, and integrations with top business apps for more functionality.

Despite the similarities between Trello and Asana, they are not equal. Based on our review, Trello edges out Asana. Trello edges out Asana when it comes to ease of use, pricing, customer support, and reviews, while Asana takes the lead in third-party software integrations and features.

While Trello is the winner of this comparison, this is not to say that Asana is not suitable for you. Whether Trello or Asana is the better solution for you will depend on your unique needs.

Not sure of which software tool to pick? Try Trello’s 14-day free trial or Asana’s 30-day free trial to see which works best for you.

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