Asana vs monday – Project Management Head-to-Head

In an Asana vs monday.com head-to-head, you’ll find monday.com that is ultimately the better choice – it scored 4.7/5 to Asana’s 4.5/5 in our 2023 testing. Although both providers are very capable, monday.com is the easier one to use and has better task management and collaboration tools than Asana. You’re also less likely to be stuck waiting if you have an issue because monday.com has 24/7 live support available on all of its plans.

If you’re concerned about the cost implications of a new software tool and you don’t have much budget spare, bear in mind that monday.com retails at a lower price than Asana. Specifically, monday.com’s first paid plan is almost $3 cheaper per month than Asana’s first paid plan, and the provider’s Pro plan is almost $6 cheaper per month than Asana’s $24.99 per user, per month Business plan. Considering there’s very little offered by Asana that isn’t monday.com, the latter is the better choice.

 There are a couple of instances where Asana has an edge over monday.com, such as the integrations on offer. Fortunately, both Asana and monday.com offer a free plan, a wide range of workflow creation features, security options, and project templates – so you’re unlikely to be disappointed with Asana. Read on for a closer look at how they compare across core feature categories, and how their price plans stack up against one another right now.

In this guide, you’ll find:

• Asana vs monday.com: Head to Head
• Asana vs monday.com: Functions & Features Comparison
• Asana vs monday.com: Ease of Use Tests
• monday.com vs Asana Value Comparison
• Asana Costs vs monday.com Costs
• Is it Easy to Switch Between Asana and monday.com?
• What’s New in Asana and monday.com?
• How Do Asana and monday.com Compare to Other Providers?
• About Our Research
• Asana vs monday.com Verdict: monday.com is Better Than Asana
• Asana vs monday.com FAQs

Asana vs monday.com: Head-to-Head in 2023

Both Asana and monday.com are project management tools designed to help teams keep track of their tasks while efficiently communicating with each other. In our last round of testing, monday.com scored 4.7/5, the highest score out of the 10 providers we tested, while Asana scored 4.5/5. 

Their interfaces are similar, offering a central dashboard with multi-use rows that are easily customized using drag-and-drop editing functionality. Greater customization and useful enterprise-level security capabilities are available as part of higher-priced plans for both services.

Key takeaways

• Both Asana and monday.com have great free plans. monday.com’s free plan only has a ‘seat’ (user) limit of two, meaning it’s only really suitable for individuals or duos. Asana, on the other hand, allows for a minimum of 15 users on its free plans.
• monday.com’s biggest strength is its ease of use. If you’re looking for an easy software program that everyone in your team will be able to learn to use quickly, then look no further than monday.com. When we tested monday.com and nine other project management providers, we found the interface the most easy to navigate. 
• monday.com is cheaper than Asana. monday.com has two paid plans (Basic and Standard) cheaper than Asana’s cheapest paid plan (Premium). It also has a cheaper option for larger businesses, with monday.com’s Pro plan coming in at almost $6 per user, per month cheaper than Asana’s Business plan. If you’re already using Asana and thinking of switching, the small amount of downtime you may experience from data migration will be worth it from a cost perspective.
• Asana and monday.com have similar customer support options. Both providers offer email support and have extensive knowledge bases for DIY troubleshooting, and score 4.5/5 for customer support. However, monday.com only offers onboarding assistance on its enterprise plan, whereas Asana offers this on every plan aside from its free plan. However, monday.com offers 24/live support on all plans, whereas Asana only offers it on its Enterprise plan.
• monday.com has better security options than Asana. monday.com scores 5/5 for security, compared to Asana’s 4.4/5. One big difference is that Asana doesn’t offer an IP restriction function on its Enterprise plan, whereas Monday.com does. However, Asana does offer features like single sign-on on its cheaper plans, but monday.com only offers this on its Enterprise plan.

Who are monday.com and Asana best for?

• monday.com is best for first-time project management software users.
• monday.com is better for teams on a budget.
• Asana is better for teams that need to integrate with other apps.
• monday.com is best for teams that need communication functionality.
• Asana is best for teams looking to compile post-project feedback.
• monday.com is best for teams that want a clear, straightforward interface.

Asana vs monday.com: Functions & Features Comparison

Both Asana and monday.com offer a healthy range of features needed to keep a team operating at peak efficiency. Overall, Asana scores 4.2/5 for functionality – which is better than the likes of Zoho Projects, Smartsheet, Jira, and Basecamp. However, monday.com scores 4.4/5, second only to ClickUp (4.6/5), our top-rated provider for functionality.

• Best for Task Management: monday.com
• Best for Project & Workflow Creation: Tie
• Best for Collaboration: monday.com
• Best for Integrations: Asana

Best for task management: monday.com

For task management, both Asana and monday.com score a high 4.3/5 and 4.5/5 respectively, but naturally, this makes monday.com the better option for pure task management. 

Asana lets users track projects in real-time, with a portfolio feature that groups ongoing projects by category, completion level, or priority, with any overdue tasks clearly visible. Each project gets a status indicator, with ranks including “on track”, “at risk”, or “off track”:

Editing tasks in Asana. Image: Tech.co’s testing process

Asana has other task management features to ensure the critical path of your projects is respected. “You can make tasks dependent on other tasks being completed, so you’ll be unable to tick them off before the first one is complete,” explains Katie, an SEO Campaigns Executive whose team started using Asana recently.

She also commented on how easy it is to assign tasks, and how useful the Timeline view was for tracking project progress.

monday.com has a pretty similar layout for tasks, but when we tested it, we found it to be even less cluttered than Asana, which itself had quite a tidy interface. When you start a project in monday.com, you can create a board, and then add tasks to it. You’ll then be able to split your tasks into different groups.

After that, you’ll be able to add different columns and add information like the task owner, the due date, a budget (which is more complicated in Asana), and the status of the task:

If you click on individual tasks, you’ll be able to add sub-tasks, draw dependencies and add comments.

We found the whole process of managing tasks very intuitive in monday.com, with most able to be made with a click of a button. There were quite a few moments during testing where we found the feature we needed was just “there” – such as marking tasks as complete. This sounds like something that would be easy to find in most competitors too, but few software programs are built in quite the same way.

Both monday.com and Asana have various different ways to visualize your tasks/task progress – including a Kanban board, Gantt chart, and spreadsheet-style view. What’s more, Asana now joins monday.com in offering time tracking – and as of March 2023, you’ll be able to add estimated and actual time fields to templates and sub-tasks!

Best for project and workflow creation: Asana

Both monday.com scores 3.8/5 for workflow creation, while Asana scores 4.1/5. Why? Well, for starters, Asana offers preset and custom project templates on all plans including its free plan, whereas monday.com doesn’t provide these on its very limited free plan.

On top of this, we found Asana to have one of the best automation builders among the 10 project management tools we tested – it was extremely simple and easy to streamline workflows than Asana, and marginally easier to use than monday.com’s automation builder. However, they were both pretty similar in terms of functionality.

Adding pre-built automations in Asana. GIF: Tech.co’s testing process

That being said, monday.com will let you build custom automations from the Standard plan ($10 per user, per month) upwards, whereas Asana only offers custom automations on its Business ($24.99 per user, per month) and Enterprise plans.

However, the big difference is that Asana has a workflow designer on all of its plans, bar its free plan, whereas monday.com doesn’t offer this at all – which is a key reason Asana edges it in this area. A workflow designer is a dedicated tool for mapping out repetitive processes and tasks, such as workflows. This tool is used for designing and visualizing them, rather than carrying then actually carrying them out, which is what the automation builder is for.

While both providers’ form builders are useful and customizable, Asana’s (pictured below) is a bit easier to use because it opts for the classic drag-and-drop interface that you’ll find in things like email template builders or online graphic design sites.

Building a form in Asana. Image: Tech.co’s testing process

Best for collaboration: monday.com

Of the two, monday.com only just comes out on top for collaboration with a score of 3.3/5. By contrast, Asana scores 3/5. monday.com offers a calendar, task commenting (pictured below), and document editing, as well as an online whiteboard, which not many other providers offer – including Asana.

Commenting on tasks in monday.com. Image: Tech.co testing process

Instead, Asana provides a project message board, which can serve as a kind of hub for project-related discussions – something we found very useful for collating need-to-know information when we tested the product. Like monday.com, Asana also comes with a calendar and task comments.

Best for integrations: Asana

Asana offers users access to a large number of third-party apps and integrations, such as Microsoft Teams, Jira Cloud, Slack, Gmail, Chrome, Outlook, OneDrive, TSheets, and more. Google and Microsoft even get their own categories, and in March of 2023, Asana also added Freshdesk, Mailchimp, and Intercom integrations too!

Overall, this helped Asana to an impressive 4.7/5 for integrations. All in all, Asana offers over 25 marketing integrations, syncs up with 35 data/reporting tools, and has over 50+ communication integrations.

The integrations available from monday.com include popular picks like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, Google Calendar, Excel, Google Drive, Gmail, LinkedIn, OneDrive, and more. As of January 2023, monday.com also integrates with Jira.

There are more marketing integrations on offers from monday.com but a much narrower selection of communications apps that the provider integrates with (3 – Slack, Zoom, and Teams). monday.com also doesn’t allow users to integrate with other programs if they’re using the free or Basic plan, which means 4/5 it only scores

Best for Ease of Use: monday.com

Both services are relatively easy to use, although our we found monday.com slightly more usable (4.5/5) than Asana (4.2/5). On our usability tests, we found both Asana and monday.com among the easiest providers to use, but monday.com in particular seemed like it would suit teams that don’t necessarily have a high level of technical ability. 

Both services offer a dashboard that lets users access each tool they’ll need within a few clicks, which we found pretty simple to navigate around when we used them both during testing.

The monday.com dashboard can be edited with a simple drag-and-drop function as well, but users have reported some lack of responsiveness during daily use – although this wasn’t a problem we encountered. Asana can be quite difficult to use when there’s not a dedicated feature available to perform some specific tasks, whereas there are slightly more workarounds in monday.com to deal with this circumstance.

Overall, however, both Asana and monday.com are very easy for newcomers and veterans alike because they both avoid unnecessary submenus and make more complex project details into a customizable option, rather than a necessity. They both make efforts to improve their apps too, with monday.com releasing a new font for 2023 that’s more modern and slightly clearer than the one it was using last year.

As you can see from the picture below, however, monday.com’s interface is quite minimalist and tidy:

monday.com’s Kanban view. GIF: Tech.co’s testing process

Best value: monday.com

monday.com successfully beats out Asana on value in multiple ways, scoring 3.9/5 for pricing to Asana’s 3.7/5. monday.com offers more plans than Asana does, with four paid plans to Asana’s three. This makes it just a little easier for businesses to pick the plan that works for their needs, without paying for features they don’t want.

Plus, when you break down the comparable plans, monday.com is slightly less expensive. Both services charge a set price per user, per month, with monday.com’s $8 and $10 per user, per month plans undercutting the comparable $10.99 per user, per month Asana plan. If you want a plan with more advanced features, monday.com is still priced better, with its $19 per user, per month Pro tier plan comparable to Asana’s $24.99 per user, per month Business plan.

Asana Costs vs monday.com Costs

Asana offers three paid plans, starting at $10.99 per user, per month, plus one free plan. In contrast, monday.com offers a free tier along with four paid plans, starting at the slightly lower price point of $8 per user, per month. Here’s how the two compare:

Asana pricing plans

Asana’s three paid plans are Premium ($10.99 per user, per month), Business ($24.99 per user, per month), and Enterprise (custom pricing). There’s also a free plan available, but it’s quite limited.

As we just mentioned, Asana’s free plan (Asana Basic) is nowhere near as useful as its paid tiers. Asana scores an impressive 4.8/5 for data visualization, for instance, but none of the features that helps the provider achieve that score are available on the free plan. In fact, there are several better free project management software solutions available.

Like Asana, monday.com’s data visualization tools are also limited on the free plan, but they’re super-easy to use and the provider is updating them all the time. Since March of this year, monday.com users have been able to dock widgets, which removes clutter around vital pieces of data stored and displayed on dashboards. This makes it much easier to focus on specific information in isolation.

Asana Premium ($10.99 per user, per month) adds features including a timeline, task dependencies, milestones, custom fields, custom templates, advanced search, and training materials. Plus, Asana increase their custom field limit in June 2023 from 30 to 100, so you’ll be able to customize even more aspects of your project.

Asana Business ($24.99 per user, per month) comes with everything in Premium, plus team project portfolios and a Workload view to see each user’s tasks at a glance, among other features. This is the first Asana plan with custom automation via Asana’s intuitive automation builder, which helped the provider achieve a commendable 4.1/5 score for workflow creation.

Asana Enterprise includes Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) for single sign-on, plus user provisioning/de-provisioning, which lets an operation’s IT team dictate when and how users gain access to the service. Also included: A 99.9% uptime promise and the tools to build custom apps and integrations.

See our complete guide to Asana pricing for more details, or just read on for an overview of each plan.

monday.com pricing plans

monday.com has a free plan, plus four paid plans. It’s the Standard Projects plan that really sticks out as a good value package, with an excellent range of features and a cheaper price tag ($10 per user, per month) than Asana’s comparable Premium plan ($10.99 per user, per month).

monday.coms Basic tier ($8 per user per month) is an upgrade on the Individual plan and has no user limit as well as 5GB of storage, but for $8 per user, per month, you’d maybe expect a few more features. There’s no automation, milestone function, or even a Gantt chart.

The Standard tier ($10 per user, per month) includes the Gantt chart omitted from the Basic Projects plan is included, plus automations (250 per month), a calendar view, and guest access. Storage is increased by 20GB too,

The Pro tier costs $19 per user, per month, and includes a formula column, private boards, time tracking, and a chart view, as well as more automations and integrations (25,000 per month for each, up from 250). The custom-priced Enterprise tier adds a higher API rate limit, higher-level support, audit logs, and a whopping 250,000 actions per month for both automations and integration

Check out our full guide to monday.com pricing plans for more detail.

Is it Easy to Switch Between Asana and monday.com?

If you’re already using Asana or monday.com and thinking of switching over to the other one, of course, there’s quite a lot to consider.

The first is your bottom line – will swapping providers actually make things cheaper? In the case of Asana vs monday.com, monday.com is far better value for money, with Asana’s Business plan ($24.99 per user, per month) costing more than almost all other competing plans on the market. For small teams, a plan like monday.com’s Standard projects plan ($10 per user, per month) will be more than enough – and the savings will make the downtime worth it.

That being said, migrating large amounts of project data takes time, and planning this around your business’s inevitably hectic schedule to avoid as much downtime as possible isn’t the easiest thing in the world to navigate.

Switching from Asana over to monday.com is much easier than the other way around, as monday.com has a native Asana integration that allows you to consolidate all of your projects and tasks in monday.com. You can still go on using Asana if you’d like to – which some teams do if their department is simply using monday.com as a central hub to coordinate a variety of different teams – but both apps achieve similar purposes.

If you’d like to migrate your data from monday.com to Asana, on the other hand, you’ll have to use a third-party integration tool like Zapier. This takes a little bit longer, but it’s still a relatively simple process.

What’s New in Asana and monday.com?

The most interesting recent news is that monday.com now has an AI assistant, which can help with a variety of different tasks. As of August 2023, the tool is currently in Beta form. monday.com’s AI assistant can be used to rephrase emails, summarize complex tasks, and create formulas that calculate things like the total number of hours your team is spending on sub-tasks.

Asana now also has an AI tool called “Asana Intelligence”, which can suggest important actions to take on all aspects of your project. It can aid with resource reallocation, message generation, summarizing information, and identifying blockers in specific parts of your project.

AI tools aren’t the only thing these providers have been developing. In August 2023, for example, Asana diversified its permissions, creating “editor-level permissions” for project members who need to make changes to tasks and messages but shouldn’t be allowed to modify the project structure.

The provider is also updating its workflow management features too. Also in August this year, Asana made it so that you can add a new rule for when tasks or all subtasks are marked complete. You could, for instance, set a rule for a task to auto-complete once all its subtasks are completed.

This year, monday.com has also upgraded its workflow management processes significantly. In February of 2023, monday.com made it much, much easier to adjust custom automation recipes, and now you can remove conditions and triggers seamlessly.

monday.com now has 9 custom automation categories. In May 2023, the provider added a quick error-reporting function as well, so it’s easier to report automation-based issues.

How Do Asana and monday.com Compare to Other Providers?

Asana and monday.com aren’t the only project management tools worth checking out before you part ways with your money.

If pricing is your priority, we’d recommend ClickUp. Not only did ClickUp get a better overall functionality score (4.6/5) than both monday.com (4.2/5) and Asana (4.1/5), but it’s also cheaper than both. The first paid plan (Unlimited Plan) is available for just $7 per user, per month, and has more features than comparable plans offered by Asana and monday.com.

If data security and customer support are your top priorities, then we’d recommend Smartsheet (4.2/5). It’s got a wide range of options if you get stuck, and security features that large businesses managing sensitive data will appreciate. Smartsheet now offers a free plan to compete with the likes of Asana and monday.com, but the Smartsheet Pro plan costs just $7 per user, per month, which is cheaper than monday.com and Asana’s first paid plans.

Check out the table below for a rundown of monday.com and Asana’s closest competitors:

About Our Research

Here at Tech.co, we perform our own research on all the tools, software, and services we write articles about. We create research frameworks that take into account the key pain points experienced by businesses, perform extensive user testing on all the products we review, and then discuss our findings together before publishing them in articles like this one. 

We’re open about the fact we have commercial partnerships with some of the software and service providers we talk about. However, this never affects our editorial independence or opinions on products, which are solely driven by conclusions drawn from our product-led research.

When testing the top 14 project management software solutions on the market, we focused on Ease of Use, Pricing, Functionality, Customer Support, and Security. Sub-categories of “Functionality” assessed include data visualization tools, collaborative functions, as well task management, and workflow creation features.

Asana vs monday.com: FAQs