While looking for the best project management tool, you might have come across Trello and Asana – the two most popular project management tools. Both are freemium project management tools that are used by many big brands. Adobe and Google use Trello, whereas Deloitte and General Electric employ Asana.
While both Trello and Asana are among the most popular project management platforms in the market, which one should you choose for your business? Here in this post, you will find a detailed comparison between the two to make the pick easier.
What is Trello?
Trello is a task management tool that uses the Kanban project management system and helps you to organize and track your projects. The tool has boards that have tasks. Each task comes with a card that sits on a list. You can have as many cards and lists as you need.
The 3 basic lists are to-do, work in progress, and completed. However, you can add or remove lists depending on your needs. Trello also allows you to drag and drop tasks from one list to another.
What is Asana?
Asana was developed by Facebook executives Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein in the year 2008 to help manage Facebook’s internal coordination. In 2011, this application was made available to the public.
Asana has a very basic and plain approach to task and project management. With this tool, users can create and organize tasks for today, next week, and later. Additionally, the users can group the task into projects and divide the tasks by project, purpose, or themes. Asana also offers some pre-existing templates that you can customize based on your requirements.
Trello vs. Asana: The Detailed Comparison
Features
The first thing that might come to your mind while opting for a project management tool is; what does it offer? Here in this section, we have mentioned what the two tools have to offer:
Trello
Trello is simple and best to use if you are a beginner. It offers task management, sharing resources within a task, communicating via comments, sharing team calendars, and tracking the tasks.
Although it does not offer any financial management features, it allows you to integrate with other programs. Trello also allows you to track the percentage of tasks completed in the internal checklist that you have created.
Asana
Asana is a collaboration tool that covers all the basics of project management. Although Asana does not have any financial management tools either, Asana has other attractive features making it the best project management tool. This includes task lists, Gantt charts, and Kanban boards. You can share team calendars that help create and track your tasks.
What makes Asana unique is that it offers workload management. With this feature, you can track the amount of work each member of your team has and set a limit on their workload. This workload management timeline is represented visually with a graph.
Additionally, Asana follows the philosophy of transparency, communication, and collaboration between the team members and management.
Result – Trello has limited features while Asana is better in terms of the variety of features it offers.
Support
Although it matters how good a software tool is or how many features it offers, customer support matters even more. What if you are in the middle of something and you get stuck? You need to ensure the project management tool you choose offers the best customer support.
Trello
Since Trello is owned by Atlassian that owns Jira, the support structure is very similar. Trello allows you to raise support ticket forms every time you face an issue. However, they offer phone support to all business and enterprise plan users.
Additionally, Trello also offers a knowledge base and blogs on Trello-related topics, team management, et cetera.
Asana
Since Asana does not have a phone number on the website, this makes it difficult to get in touch with the support team. However, they have a contact form available, but it takes a long time for the team to reply to them. Additionally, Asana is known for the guides, FAQs, forums, webinars, and use-cases that are more detailed when compared to what Trello has to offer.
Result – Since Trello offers phone support and effective and responsive ticket support, it becomes the better option in terms of customer support.
Ease of Use
Both the tools are very user-friendly project management tools and have the best and easy-to-use features. But which one is the best? Let’s look into that:
Trello
Trello is considered the best project management tool with the highest score in terms of ease of use. Everything about Trello is very attractive, and it ensures the user understands the basics of the interface and does not face any issues while using the Trello board for tracking tasks.
From the time you sign up, Trello helps you out with the basics of creating your own boards, lists, and implementing tasks. Everything is mentioned clearly in a step-by-step process.
These steps include creating project phases for your card, the tasks for the board, adding due dates, checklists, users, task labels, and the process of moving the tasks inside the board.
Asana
The main aim of the project management tool is to provide the users with the maximum functionality possible and make it easy for them to use.
Asana chooses the traditional project management interface, with a navigation menu on the left, user options, and the help center option on the right top corner, and a task management window on the center of the screen.
Asana’s setup and walkthrough are very simple, but the tool also gives various task management views to choose from, making it very easy for the managers to execute different projects.
Result – Trello is the winner in terms of ease of use. Unlike Asana, Trello is very simple to understand. You can get started with Trello in a minute or two.
Pricing
Since pricing is the same for both the project management tools, we need to look for the unique functionalities the two offers for different plans, including free options.
Trello
Trello offers its services at a very reasonable price. It is not the cheapest project management tool, but Trello offers a good value for the money unless you do not need any budgeting or invoicing features.
One of the most impressive things about Trello is that it offers a huge list of features it offers in the free version. It allows you to add unlimited personal boards, cards, lists, users, 10 team boards, and two-factor authentication.
Here are some of the features that make it a recommended project management tool for the price they offer:
- Free – It offers unlimited boards, cards, lists, 10MB per file attachment limit, 10 team boards, one power-up per board, 50 automated commands per month, and two-factor authentication.
- Trello Business Class at $9.99/user per month – All the free features plus 250MB per file attachment limit, high-priority support, custom board background, unlimited team boards, custom fields, calendar view, app integrations, 1,000 automated commands run per month, and much more.
- Trello Enterprise plan at $20.83/user per month – All the previous features with unlimited commands run, power-up administration, and personalized onboarding.
Trello’s pricing is very competitive compared to other task management tools, but the features in the free plan make Trello very competitive in the market.
Asana
Asana offers the free version to all the users using it for the first time. However, the free version has some limitations compared to what Trello allows its free users. Here are some of the paid pricing features of Asana:
- Basic – Free: Task list, Kanban board, calendar, app integrations, and the ability to add up to 15 users.
- Premium – $19.99/user per month with an annual contract: All the free features plus timelines, advanced searches, custom field creation, premium Asana Academy content, and special privileges.
- Business – 19.99/user per month with an annual subscription: All the premium features plus portfolios, workloads, forms, automatic proofing, and Adobe Creative Cloud integration.
- Enterprise – Negotiable pricing: All the Business features plus user provisioning, data exporting, custom branding, and high-priority support.
Result – Although both the project management tools have a similar pricing structure, Trello wins the race because of the extensive features it offers in the free tier.
Integration with Software
Both Asana and Trello are collaboration and project management tools, i.e., they do not deal with budgeting, invoicing, and other financial needs. To fill in these gaps, you need integration features.
Trello
Trello allows you to integrate with different tools to provide a better user experience. Some of the integration tools are:
- Slack
- Jira
- Adobe XD
- GitHub
- Google Hangouts
- Zapier
- Gmail
- Mailchimp
- Dropbox
Asana
Asana offers 100 different app integrations that help to manage your projects. Some of the most-used integrations include:
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- Dropbox
- Microsoft Outlook
- Slack
- Google Calendar
- Everhour Reporting
- Trello
- Mailchimp
Getting Started
People want to use software that has an easy signup option, onboarding content, and helpful demonstrations.
Trello
Trello offers simple sign-up options. All you need to do is enter your email address and sign up. Then you need to enter some simple information and you are ready to get started.
You don’t have to waste your time adding any payment information. Once you are in the dashboard, you will be provided with a step-by-step guide on using the software properly.
Trello also has an extensive knowledge base and informational blogs, which contain posts on different project management concepts.
Asana
Unlike Trello, Asana has a different startup process. Once you have entered the project information into the free trial form, Asana sends you an invitation email and gives you access to use the software rather than immediately allowing you to start using the tool. This results in a slight delay.
Asana’s onboarding content is a little difficult to find. It, however, offers a guide on setting up your project, adding your team members, managing and planning tasks, and more.
Result – Trello wins because it offers a quick sign-up process, an easy startup guide, an easy onboarding process, and effective support content which will guide you better.
An Overview
Who is Trello for?
Trello is best for people looking for Kanban-style project management as it is the best Kanban software in the market. However, this software does not offer financial management features like creating an invoice or budget reports.
Trello is recommended for internal projects, team management, and collaboration, like managing a team or directing new marketing efforts.
Who is Asana for?
Asana has a similar market as Trello, but it has a few high-end features other than focusing on project management. Instead of focusing on one management style, Asana allows you to choose between task lists, kanban boards, charts, and workload management. Additionally, Asana also offers collaboration tools for internal project management.
Comparison Table: Trello vs. Asana
| Basis | Trello | Asana |
| Task lists | Yes | Yes |
| Gantt timeline charts | No | Yes |
| Shared team calendar | Yes | Yes |
| File sharing | Yes | Yes |
| Communication | Yes | Yes |
| Budgeting | No | No |
| Time tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Invoicing | No | No |
| Outside integration | Yes | Yes |
| Resource management | No | No |
Which One is the Best? Trello vs. Asana
While comparing these two project management software, you need to know that both are the “best” project management software. You need to choose which one will work best for you and your team.
However, Trello is the best in terms of ease of use, customer support, quicker onboarding process, and features offered in the free tier.
On the other hand, Asana is a versatile task management software that offers unique and best tracking options and several integrations, making it the best choice for managers who are working on different teams and projects.
Conclusion
Hope this post helped you understand Trello and Asana, and the differences between the two popular project management tools. The detailed comparison will, hopefully, help you decide the best one for your needs. So which one did you choose? Tell us in the comments section.
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