Asana

Best Free Project Management App for SMB

Comments: Asana is very easy to use, fast, reliable, and powerful. Just with their free version, I've got nothing else to ask for. It got all I need to run my business and work with my clients. It's the best free project management for me.

Pros:

When we switched to Asana years ago, I didn't appreciate it right away because it's a new environment to me had to make a lot of adjustments. But as I use it every day, I got familiar with the app very quickly. It is very easy to use and might have a little learning curve. Navigating the app is all common sense though, and their help docs are very handy if you got any problems. Even though I'm familiar with the app, when I tried to open their knowledgebase, I was surprised to know there's a lot more I can do with Asana. Even with just the free version, it's so powerful and you can do so many things! It's good enough for SMBs who are just starting out. For me, some premium features are just too much so the essential features are sufficient for my business and work. Another thing I like is you can switch to Kanban view, so it's a goodbye Trello for me. I use this view often on sprints and it's very handy and effective. Another feature I like is you can convert an email to a task in Asana just by forwarding it to a specific email they give you, then it will be added automagically in your specific project. I'm also happy that they have released their desktop app. That's a huge help for me in decluttering my browser tabs.

Cons:

Asana is a beast. There's nothing to dislike from this app.

Awesome software but we couldn't get people to adopt it.

Comments: It's a great piece of software and in another organisation I think I could have happily adopted it. However, it wasn't the right fit for our organisation or our users.

Pros:

Asana's free plan is very generous, and would have covered our main needs. Their commercial pricing is also fair and provides good value for money. As an organisation, we work across multiple offices and countries and good project management was always a bit of a gap. I was very enthusiastic about Asana and loved the depth of features, particular the granular tracking, and the good integration with external tools (we have worked hard to try and connect our workflows together). The ability to communicate at multiple levels within projects was also something I found very appealing.We spent quite a bit of time setting up projects as part of the testing process, and I enjoyed the ability to do it properly (compared to the very complicated set of google sheets we had been using prior to this)

Cons:

The biggest gap we found was that for users not steeped in project management or project management tools the learning curve was too high. They either used it superficially, or avoided using it all. It was not a criticism of the software per se, as the UI is well-thought out and there are lots of support resources. However for an organisation like ours, we needed something far simpler for our users, as technological resistance is always a challenge. WE may not have used it to it's full extent, but it would have been useful to have the ability to simplify some of the viewsm as not all users needed or wanted the depths of controls presented to them. I also found the reporting slightly frustrating. It wasn't actually a core feature we needed, but the reports that did exist were sometimes frustratingly incomplete.

Alternatives Considered: Time Doctor, Trello, and Slack

Reasons for Choosing Asana: We needed better tracking and oversight of projects.

Switched From: Google Sheets

Reasons for Switching to Asana: We ended up going with Trello rather than Asana due to the simpler learning curve and the ability to use it at multiple elvels.

Terrible Service - Avoid at all cost! Go to other options (e.g. Clickup, etc.), or you'll regret it

Comments: Teririble, we have switched since then and found software with better features + service at better prices.

Pros:

At first it seemed ok, but as we needed more and more features we found Asana extremely lacking and terrible service to match.

Cons:

The service is absolutely atrocious. They charged us for 1 year + where there was literally 0 activity on Asana. We kept sending emails (about 4-5 in total) saying that we wanted a cancellation and they did not cancel.

This is a great software but has a lot of setup involved and requires constant maintenance.

Comments: I like Asana because I see how useful it is for better creating strategies for how I spend time on different tasks and how useful that time ends up being. I mainly use it as a complement currently to the main software I use for task management because I don't want to spend the necessary time setting this software up extensively until I see more of a use with it that I need to spend that time doing that. I do like just going through the minimal things I utilize with it now though because it ultimately helping me get used to the software and learn little by little as I go so hopefully that help me eventually be able to use all the extensive features that offer once I finally feel confident enough about how to use each one. It has been consistently over the course of a little over a year now the task management software that I refuse to give up on. I think eventually it will be what I use to manage the majority of things for my business but until I scale that doesn't seem to be something that I should spend a lot of time implementing right now. I hope they will release more clear resources that will help me understand how to setup and use the software easier as time goes on which would be the biggest help and thing they could change in my opinion that would make a world of a difference when using their software.

Pros:

I like the collaboration and communication features as they help work with your team on tasks very easily and keeps information in one easy to access place so no one ever has trouble finding something they need to complete work again and also the timeline view is great to help plan work so that you can make sure important work gets finished before starting work that you shouldn't start before something else is completed so that you have all the necessary things available when it's time to do the task. The ability to update the status and progress of projects and goals is helpful so that you can get an overall general idea of where work needs to be picked up and what work is going well so you can adjust the time that is spent on those things to get the work that is lacking up to speed and progressed with where other work is at so you don't fall behind in one area. I like how much information and elements I can add to tasks using this software because it helps me make sure that everything about a task and all the information and resources to complete when it becomes time can be added and available when that time comes which helps keep everything super organized and helps you spend less time locating these things since it is all already added to the task information on a task's panel and you can begin working right away. This software overall helps improve time management and also helps when working with others which makes it extremely useful for many businesses.

Cons:

I don't like the complexity of implementing Asana as a software you are planning to use for your organization or business. There is a lot of setup work involved when trying to use this software to manage everything on a project level for your business. It also requires a lot of time to keep up with maintenance and updates to everything you create for it to keep it up to date and useful to everyday use for organization and task management. I would say this software is better for larger organizations, teams, or businesses with project managers on their staff that would be in charge of overseeing the upkeep for this software so that it would always be able to be used for the current time for what your team is working on. If it falls behind even a little bit it is hard to catch it back up and takes a lot of time that smaller businesses with less resources don't need to spend their time focusing on as their time would be better spent doing tasks that will provide benefit to them in the long run. It is also very hard to learn the best ways and the correct ways to use some features and the education is not clear enough that they offer to assist with this so it is really hard if you're not a experienced project manager to understand this software as well as I would like someone to able to understand. The time spent working on keeping this software updated is just much better spent in most cases on the work that would be more valuable to work on and get done.

Alternatives Considered: Trello and monday.com

Reasons for Switching to Asana: The monday.com software was offering many of the features as Asana but Asana does offer a lot more than monday.com offers so I chose Asana so I could have the ability to use all the different aspects of their software instead of being limited in some areas. I chose Asana over Trello because Asana uses easier to understand terminology for what they call different features and things on their software and Trello uses confusing terminology to distinguish their features and software to be unique but ultimately a simpler to understand software seems more valuable to me so I went with Asana so that the better terminology that use that makes more sense when they refer to different features they offer to remain clear when starting to learn how to use this software.

Powerful project management tool, but impressively flexible

Comments: Asana, allowed us to move our project management all within one tool and also to communicate with clients better than ever.

Pros:

The simplicity to use the system initially, added with the details customisation and flexibly of rules and automation in the back end, allow the team to use this at different levels.

Cons:

There are lots of features so can take some time to become efficient at using the tool to its best capabilities.