Asana vs monday.com: Project Management Head-to-Head

Asana and monday.com are both highly capable, easy-to-use project management software tools with free and paid plans geared toward different-sized organizations. You'll find their interfaces quite similar, offering a central dashboard with multi-use rows that are easily customized using drag-and-drop editing functionality.

You'll have access to greater customization and useful enterprise-level security capabilities if you opt for higher-priced plans for both Asana and monday.com. The two providers include straightforward automation builders and a wide range of task management features, providing 10+ project views each. Read on to find out more about the two providers in this Asana vs monday comparison, or check out the table below for a quick comparison:

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

Most businesses will find monday.com to be the better choice – it scored 4.7/5 to Asana's 4.5/5 during our 2023 testing series. monday.com is quicker to set up and has better task management, data, 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. However, Asana has better integrations and workflow creation options on offer.

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. 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.

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 allows for a minimum of 15 users on its free plans.
• monday.com is easier to use than Asana. When we tested monday.com and nine other project management providers, we found the interface the easiest to navigate – it takes a more minimalist approach than Asana.
• monday.com is cheaper than Asana. monday.com has two paid plans cheaper than Asana's first paid plan. What's more, monday.com's Pro plan costs $6 per user, per month less than Asana's Business plan. If you're thinking of switching from Asana to monday.com, the small amount of downtime you may experience during 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 knowledge bases for DIY troubleshooting, and score 4.5/5 for customer support. monday.com only offers onboarding assistance on its enterprise plan, whereas Asana offers this on every plan bar the 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, but monday.com does. However, Asana offers single sign-on on its cheaper plans, but monday.com doesn't.

Who is monday.com best for?

monday.com will suit first-time project management software users who want an easy-to-use tool to get started with. It's by far the friendliest tool for project management we've tested, and you don't need to be tech-savvy at all to master monday.com – as we mentioned above, the 24/7 on-hand support means you'll rarely be stuck for long, regardless of what plan you're on.

We'd also recommend monday.com over Asana to any business on a tight budget, as monday.com has much cheaper plans. monday.com is also better for project teams that need constant lines of communication. We'd also probably opt for monday.com if your project is really data-intensive, as monday.com edges Asana when it comes to data visualization tools.

Who is Asana best for?

We'd recommend Asana over monday.com if your core decision-making factor for project management software is how it'll integrate into the existing stack of software you currently use at work. While monday.com has a number of useful integrations, Asana will seamlessly connect with 35 different data and reporting apps and has over 50 communication integrations. What's more, monday.com doesn't allow integrations on its free and Basic plan.

Asana is also a better choice if you have absolutely no software budget at all, simply because monday.com's free plan has a user limit of 3, while Asana's can support a small team or business of up to 15 people before you have to pay anything. Granted, the plan is limited compared to its paid counterparts, but it's a pretty good deal considering you aren't spending a cent.

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 this assessment area.

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

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. 

Layout and project views

When it comes to their layout and the different views on offer, monday.com and Asana are pretty similar. 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”.

monday.com – which now markets itself as more of a “work management” platform – naturally starts off with a “workspace” view, within which you can create different folders, sub-folders, and boards. This means it's a great option for teams who don't just need a space to manage projects but also, all their other workplace operations.

When testing monday.com's plans, I found the layout to be even less cluttered than Asana, which itself has quite a tidy interface. Starting a project on monday.com is incredibly simple – you can create a board, and then add tasks to it. You'll then be able to split your tasks into different groups. The minimalistic interface meant I didn't feel overwhelmed with the settings and features during setup – Asana felt slightly cramped in comparison.

The Main Table view in monday.com Image: Tech.co testing process.

Both monday.com and Asana provide various views you can use to visualize your tasks/task progress – including a table view, a Kanban board, a Gantt chart/timeline view, a list view, and a spreadsheet-style view. Neither provider includes their Gantt chart on their free plan, and you can simply switch between the views using the top menu bar.

Managing tasks

We found the whole process of managing tasks very intuitive when using monday.com and Asana – most changes are able to be made with a click of a button with minimal menu diving. Overall, monday.com scored 4.5/5 for this assessment area to Asana's 4.3/5.

Both providers offer features on their paid plans that are suitable for granular task management, such as sub-tasks, task comments, milestones, and task dependencies, while limiting these features on their free plans. Whichever provider you end up choosing, rest assured you'll be able to manage tasks that demand multiple editors and contributors.

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

In Asana, these finer task management tools 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.

One thing several members of our group highlighted during testing is that Asana will often make automated suggestions on which tasks should link to each other. Although monday.com doesn't offer this, it does have an AI tool that is currently in beta but can perform automated task generation based on basic inputs relating to your project goals.  So, once again, it's quite hard to split them when it comes to advanced features.

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

However, there are a number of subtle differences that give monday.com the edge. For example, Asana now joins monday.com in offering time tracking – and since March of this year, users have been able to add estimated and actual time fields to templates and sub-tasks! However, monday.com will let you assign billing amounts to employees' time, which Asana won't let you do at present. Another is the spreadsheet view – monday.com offers a conditional formatting function, whereas Asana doesn't, and this makes it easier to find tasks and data. 

During our monday.com tests, we often 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. monday.com packages in the same sort of features for less money than Asana, while remaining tidier and more welcoming.

Head over to our monday.com review for more about the provider's task management features.

Best for project and workflow creation: Asana

Both monday.com scores 3.8/5 for workflow creation, while Asana scores 4.1/5, putting them towards the top of the pack. Only Teamwork and ClickUp scored higher in this assessment area last time than Asana and monday.com.

Project templates

Asana has always offered preset and custom project templates on all plans including its free plan, whereas monday.com never used to offer this on its no-fee package. However, even on monday.com's free plan, you can now customize project templates to suit your business's needs.

On all of monday.com's plans, you'll get access to project templates based on nine different organizational departments, as well as four different business types – freelancer, real estate, non-profit, and startup.

With Asana, on the other hand, you'll get access to templates pertaining to seven organizational departments including HR, design, sales, and marketing. All in all, monday.com will be the better option if you want to get up and running quickly with a preset template designed for teams like yours – but Asana is certainly no slouch in this regard.

Automation builders

Asana has one of the best automation builders among the 10 project management tools our testing group reviewed. It was extremely simple to use and very self-explanatory, meaning it didn't take much time at all to streamline repetitive administrative tasks like notifying team members when tasks were completed.

Adding an automation in Asana. GIF: Tech.co's testing process

However, much of the same can be said for monday.com's automation builder, which was just as straightforward and helped monday.com to a 4.5/5 ease of use score. They're both pretty similar tools in terms of functionality and what they actually let you do, but monday.com's is text-based and marginally easier to get to grips with.

Adding automations in monday.com. Image: Tech.co's testing process

Another reason to choose monday.com is the fact the provider 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, if you're a large business or team, the fact Asana puts no limit on the number of automations you can build might be a decisive factor – monday.com's Standard plan limits the number of automations you can make to 250. The Pro plan has a 25,000 automation limit, however, and is cheaper than Asana's Business plan.

Workflow designers & form builders

Another big difference between Asana and monday.com 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. This is a key reason Asana edges when it comes to scoring this assessment 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. It's a handy feature to have if you're intent on really freeing up time for your staff to focus on valuable work, and you feel like administrative tasks are slowing you down.

Both providers offer form builders, another key tool you'll need if you want to compile post-project feedback. However, 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 Data Visualization: monday.com

monday.com was the only provider to achieve 5/5 for data visualization on our last round of tests – and it really has everything you could need in this regard. Asana scores an impressive 4.8/5 for data visualization, the second-best score for this assessment area.

However, the features that help Asana achieve that score are available on the free plan. In fact, there are several better free project management software solutions available, such as ClickUp, which includes 6 preset charts and 5 widget options on its free plan.

Building dashboards

If it was Asana vs pretty much any other project management tool, we'd be singing the praises of their data dashboard, which is incredibly clear, easy to edit, and genuinely useful when it comes to gaining insights about your project from performance data. It's much easier to use than the likes of Wrike, ClickUp, and Jira's dashboards.

However, monday.com's dashboards are just a little bit more customizable and powerful. On its first paid plan, you'll be able to create a dashboard with data from one board, while the Standard projects plan ($10 per user, per month) will let you build one with data extracted from up to five boards. By the time you get to the Enterprise plan, you'll be able to build dashboards that pull in data from all the projects being completed by monday.com across your business.

Asana doesn't offer this kind of business-level dashboard feature, restricting the function to the project level. It's not quite as capable in this way, so unless you're going to be combining data across multiple projects, you may find monday.com's data tools a little overkill.

Data display options

There are six widget options available on all of monday.com's paid plans, but it's monday.com's Pro plan that you'll really appreciate if you want detailed data relating to how your project is progressing. There are 6 preset chart types available and you'll be able to make custom charts by pulling through data from custom fields.

Creating a chart in monday.com. Image: Tech.co's testing process.

On the whole, monday.com's custom chart builder is a lot more functional than Asana's. monday.com lets you “stacked” charts with three tracking parameters, and export the data directly from them if you need it elsewhere.

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.

Best for Collaboration: monday.com

Of the two, monday.com only just came out on top for collaboration with a score of 3.3/5. By contrast, Asana scores 3/5. monday.com offers a project message board, task commenting (pictured below), and document editing, as well as an online whiteboard. 

Importantly, on monday.com's project message board, you can send files, which you can't do on Asana's. You can also create documents from scratch, which means you'll have even less of a reason to leave the app.

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. However, beyond this, there really isn't that much offered by Asana when it comes to collaboration, and if your team is big on communication, we'd definitely recommend monday.com.

Best for Integrations: Asana

While monday.com has a solid range of integrations and scores a respectable 4/5 for its range of connected apps, this is a real strong point for Asana – it scores 4.7/5 for integrations thanks to a huge library of over 200 apps, programs, and tools.

Although monday.com includes more integrations than Asana now, it won't allow users to integrate with other programs if they're using the free or Basic plan, which means it didn't score as well in this category.

Finance, HR, and reporting Integrations

Asana has more than 18 financial app integrations, including Zenefits, KosmoTime, Timely, Lumos, and Time Doctor, as well as 35 reporting apps that it connects to including Tableau and Looker.

This is a lot more than monday.com makes available for these two integration categories. monday.com only integrates with six finance apps (including Quickbooks), but does connect up to over 50 data reporting platforms, including a Google and Microsoft forms embedder.

Marketing, Email, and CRM integrations

monday.com offers seamless connections to a variety of marketing apps, such as Canva and Miro integrations. Of course, monday.com also offers its own, dedicated CRM platform which you can download and use alongside monday.com's work management platform.

Asana, on the other hand, integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud, Wistia, and Canva. In March of 2023, Asana also added Freshdesk, email provider Mailchimp, and Intercom integrations. Both providers integrate with widely-used email programs like Gmail and Outlook.

Communications integrations

Almost all businesses use software that connects them to remote members of their team in 2023, so it's no surprise that Asana and monday.com both integrated with a range of popular communications platforms, most notably Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Both providers also offer a Zoom integration, but monday.com's is only available to US users at the moment as it was only launched in September 2023. However, if you are based in the US, you'll be able to use it to sync meeting information with items in your monday.com boards. Asana's performs pretty much the same function.

Best for Security: monday.com

Account-level security options

Asana and monday.com both offer two-factor authentication on all of their plans – which not all project management software tools we tested do. For example, Smartsheet and Wrike both only offer this feature on their Enterprise plans – but in an ideal world you should be implementing this wherever you can regardless of whether you're a large enterprise or a small business.

Security options for enterprises

monday.com's Enterprise plan includes IP restriction capabilities, something that Asana's Enterprise plan doesn't offer – and this can be a useful feature for IT teams wanting total control over the devices accessing monday.com's software.

Both monday.com and Asana offer 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, although monday.com also provides this in its Service-Level Agreement.

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. However, as we've mentioned already in this article, monday.com takes a minimalistic approach that's somewhat unique in the project management space – it just feels a lot less noisy than the other competitors we regularly review.

“monday.com felt more like it had been tested and troubleshooted more times than other software,” said Alice Martin, a business software writer who participated in our recent ease-of-use tests. “Everything was placed very intuitively. It felt kind of like an Apple product in the sense that you just instinctively knew how to work it, which was good.”

Asana, while simple enough, 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. Its interface, especially when you try to edit a task, can also feel a bit cramped. But it's far, far easier to use than Jira, Zoho Projects, and Smartsheet. 

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.

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 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.

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, Integrations, 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