Top Asana Alternatives & Competitors Reviewed (2024)

Asana can be a great starter project management solution, but what happens when your business grows?

Asana offers essential project management features that help make your day-to-day work easier. However, it has limited financial management and budgeting features. For more complex projects and business insights, you’ll need to consider some Asana alternatives.

In this article, we’ll present 10 of the best alternatives to Asana with their features, pros, and cons. Keep reading to find the best option for your business!

Asana is a team collaboration and project management software. Its most notable features include customizable workflows (five project views, including Gantt and Kanban), time tracking, automations, and basic resource management.

Asana has overall positive reviews on Capterra and G2, averaging a 4.4-star rating. The most frequently mentioned downsides include:

Users consider Asana a good beginner tool and a suitable option for smaller companies: “If you are using Asana for very basic projects, there is not a whole lot to complain about” (Source: Capterra).

But if you’re looking for more, we’ve got the best options for you.

From project management tools to more robust options with advanced reporting and budget management features, here are some of Asana’s best alternatives:

Productive is best described as an all-in-one agency management tool. It’s the perfect choice for supporting both simple and complex projects.

Along with project planning and management capabilities, the software offers advanced features for business operations. The key ones include financial management and forecasting, resource scheduling, and utilization management.

Learn more about the benefits of using Productive to streamline business processes.

Productive includes all necessary capabilities for project progress tracking. This includes custom workflows that you can use to tailor your boards to your management styles, such as Gantt charts, Kanban boards, Calendar, List, and more. You can also create project templates to standardize and speed up future engagements.

As a task management software, Productive includes custom fields, hierarchies with dependencies, to-dos, milestones, file sharing, and automatic notifications (that you can adjust for frequency and platform).

 Finally, you can also benefit from features such as:

Productive’s Time Tracking feature is fully integrated into the platform. You can use a timer (with a desktop widget), track time from tasks, or even sync it with your resource bookings. This automatic time-tracking option means that you can fully streamline time management while also benefiting from a comprehensive timesheet.

Time tracking is also linked to budgeting — mark time as billable or non-billable and use this data to create invoices and handle your project accounting.

Define your budgets and employee cost rates with Productive. Productive supports fixed-price or hourly projects and retainers. You can also split budgets into separate phases to manage long-term projects more easily.

With Productive, you can monitor and visualize your key agency metrics, such as when a project will run out of budget or your profit margins. You can also forecast this data in real time for more reliable decision-making.

Learn more: Project Budgeting Software

Productive also offers extensive features for resource planning. You can view your team’s availability while taking into account their working hours, location and company-specific holidays, and personal time off. Bookings are easy to create and manage. You can drag and drop entries within or between team members and extend or split up bookings.

Advanced capacity planning features include placeholders and tentative bookings. Placeholders are used to account for external or future staff. Tentative bookings can be created for unconfirmed projects or scope and converted to regular bookings.
Learn more about supporting your project resource management process.

With Reporting, you can create reports by using one of the 50+ agency-focused templates or creating your own from scratch. Create custom dashboards, add various reports with widgets, and share them with team members. You can also use Pulse to subscribe to daily, weekly, or monthly status updates.

Additional features include: Sales, Purchase Orders.

Integrations include Xero, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Breathe, Zapier, Slack, Jira, Google Calendar, and more.

You can check out Productive with a 14-day free trial before you decide to subscribe to a paid plan.

Airtable is a low-code platform for building customizable business workflows.

Key features:

For project managers looking for a truly customizable and flexible solution, Airtable can be the right Asana alternative. The biggest downside is the steep learning curve and complicated UI. Since it does require some technical knowhow, it can be suitable for businesses with strong software development teams. Additionally, some Capterra users state that the reporting feature could be more robust.

Trello is a user-friendly platform known for its Kanban-based interface.

Key features:

Trello is widely known for being a very intuitive, simple project management platform. This can make it a great choice for users who found Asana too complicated or need a more visual approach (see more: software for creatives). Similarly, it’s not the best choice if you’re looking for a highly customizable tool with advanced project management features. Notably, time tracking and financial management are absent from Trello.

Check out a detailed comparison between Monday vs Trello vs Asana.

Teamwork is a robust project management tool with seamless collaboration and budgeting features.

Key features:

Teamwork is a popular Productive alternative — it’s similar in the way that it provides an all-in-one solution for business needs. For Asana users, it can be a step in the right direction towards data-driven decision-making. However, it does miss some useful features provided in tools such as Productive, like integrated time off management or individual time entry approvals.

ClickUp is a tool designed to improve team collaboration and productivity.

Key features:

ClickUp can be a great alternative if you’re looking for a variation on a tool for custom workflows and streamlined collaboration on project tasks as we showed in our detailed comparison of Asana vs ClickUp vs Monday vs Productive. Compared to Asana, it offers an additional feature: built-in documentation. However, similarly to Asana, it lacks more robust financial tracking and forecasting features.

Learn more: Top ClickUp Competitors

Wrike is a software solution with a wide range of features for business management.

Key features:

Wrike is another robust project management platform that’s suitable for smaller and larger teams. In comparison to some other comprehensive solutions (such as Productive), a downside of Wrike is that the budgeting feature is only available in the advanced pricing plan.

Learn more on how Wrike matches up to Productive and ClickUp.

Jira is a project management tool tailored to software development teams.

Key features:

Jira’s strong GitHub integration makes it an excellent choice for software development agencies. While it also serves diverse teams like marketing teams and creatives, they may not be able to get the most out of this tool.

Related: Website Project Management Checklist

Basecamp is a popular project management software option for teams with simple projects.

Key features:

Similarly to Trello, Basecamp is another good alternative for project managers that want to further scale down their software. However, unlike Asana, Basecamp doesn’t offer a free version. Basecamp can be a good alternative for small teams, but it’s not the best option for complex projects.

Smartsheet is a project management software solution built for spreadsheet experts.

Key features:

Smartsheet is designed to resemble spreadsheet-based solutions. This can make it a good option for project managers used to managing most workflows in Excel or Google Sheets. A user on Capterra has even described the tool as a “giant spreadsheet”. However, this also means that the interface is outdated and there’s more reliance on manual actions (such as data entry), which is less than ideal.

Microsoft Project is a part of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of products, often used in project management for architects and construction companies.

Key features:

The biggest benefit of the Microsoft Dynamics suite, and Microsoft Project in extension, is that various modules can be integrated to create a customizable tool. However, Microsoft Project in itself is reported to be difficult to navigate and onboard to.

To summarize, you should consider the following criteria when researching top Asana alternatives:

If you’re ready to make a switch, there are a couple of options for data import to Productive. You can import task and basic information (such as time entries or time off categories) on your own. For more advanced data import, you can reach out to Productive for personalized help.

Book a demo today to find out what Productive can do for your agency.