Top Asana Alternatives & Competitors Reviewed (2024)

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

Asana offers essential project management features, but has limited financial management and budgeting features. For more complex projects, you’ll need to consider some Asana alternatives. Here they are:

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

If we compare Productive vs Asana, Productive offers more advanced features in a single platform, including budgeting, resource planning, and all-around reporting.

This makes it one of the top Asana alternatives for teams that want to reduce the number of tools used to manage client projects.

Learn how Productive supports your agency’s growth.

Productive’s additional features include workflow automation and AI, user-based permissions management, and even integrated sales CRM.

Let’s explore some of the main benefits of using Productive vs Asana.

If you like Asana’s real-time collaboration and customizable dashboards, Productive’s Project Management offers all of this and more.

This includes a variety of customizable project dashboards, such as Gantt charts, Kanban boards, Calendar, List, Timeline views, and more.

You can also create project templates to standardize and speed up setting up your future projects.

As a task management software solution, Productive includes custom fields, task 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:

While Asana doesn’t offer a budgeting and forecasting feature, financial management is one of Productive’s core features.

Define your budgets and employee billable rates with Productive’s Budgeting. 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 in real time, such as when a project will run out of budget or your profit margins.

Productive also includes a Billing feature for creating and sending invoices to clients. It pulls your budgeting information, whether you’re using fixed-price or T&M billing, so you can get more reliable data.

Invoices can also be copied from Productive to QuickBooks or Xero with Productive’s native integrations.

Asana has some capacity planning and utilization features, but you can’t connect them with your project budgeting.


With Productive’s Resource Planning, you can get high-level project planning that takes into account employee availability and utilization.

The biggest advantage is the Forecasting feature. Based on your resource scheduling, Productive can provide data on your future project performance, including budget, profit, and revenue.

This supports strategic decision-making on large-scale projects.

You can also visualise and forecast your utilization data to optimize human resources management.

Learn more about supporting your project resource management process.

Another feature that Asana doesn’t provide but Productive does is an integrated Sales CRM solution.

Productive’s CRM solution is a lightweight option for agencies that want to connect their sales and project workflows in one platform.

You can customize your sales pipeline stages, track deals and mark their progress.

Just like individual tasks, each deal has its own comment history, assignees, to-dos, etc., which helps sales teams collaborate and stay on track with progress.

Emails from leads can be forwarded to Productive to keep communications in one place.

You can also build sales proposals and export them as PDFs by using your agency rate card data.

Find out more on what makes Productive one of the best agency CRMs.

Asana can provide project progress related reports, but Productive pulls from all platform activities for a more integrated overview of your data.

Productive’s Reporting uses data from project management, budgeting, billing, resource planning, sales CRM, and more to build visual, real-time reports.

You can use one of the 50+ agency-focused templates or creating your own from scratch. There are various customization options, such as grouping and filtering data or switching up visualizations.

To share reports, project managers can create custom dashboard and add various reports with widgets. There’s also Productive’s Pulse which sends reports automatically on a designated tempo.

Additional features include: Sales, Purchase Orders, Revenue Recognition, Client Portal

Productive offers various integrations with HR, accounting, and collaboration tools.

Integrations include Slack, Google Calendar, and Outlook for scheduling and updates; Xero and QuickBooks for accounting; BambooHR, Breathe, and SAP for HRIS; Memtime for time tracking; and more.

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

Airtable is great for agencies that want to build customizable business workflows, but it’s not the suitable for teams that want to start managing projects as soon as possible.

Key features:

Pros: For project managers looking for a truly customizable and flexible solution, Airtable can be the right Asana alternative.

Cons: On the other hand, if you’re not ready to spend time setting up and linking your data, you might want to consider an Airtable alternative with out-of-the-box customizable views.

Trello is ideal for smaller teams with a focus on simple team communication and task management features, but is even less robust than Asana.

Key features:

Pros: Trello is widely known for being a very intuitive, simple project management platform. This can make it a great choice for users on a tight budget or those that prefer a more visual approach (see more: software for creatives).

Cons: Trello isn’t the best choice if you’re looking for a highly customizable tool with advanced project management features. Notably, time tracking and financial management features aren’t included.

Check out a detailed comparison between Monday work management vs Trello vs Asana to find some Trello alternatives.

Teamwork is a step in the right direction for businesses that want more agency-focused features, but it still lacks some functionalities to make it a fully comprehensive option.

Key features:

Pros: Teamwork is a popular Productive alternative — it’s similar in the way that it provides a more unified solution for business needs.

Cons: Teamwork lacks some useful features available in tools such as Productive, like integrated time off management, advanced expense management options, individual time entry approvals, etc.

You can find out more in our comparison of Teamwork vs Wrike vs Productive.

ClickUp provides collaborative features and customizable templates, but has some frequently reported usability and performance issues.

Key features:

Pros: 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. Compared to Asana, it offers an additional feature: built-in documentation.

Cons: Similarly to Asana, it lacks more robust financial tracking and forecasting features. Additionally, users frequently report issues with ClickUp’s performance — find out more in our ClickUp vs Trello vs Asana vs Monday comparison.

You can also learn more by browsing our list of the top ClickUp alternative software.

Wrike provides a wide range of features for business management, but only provides budgeting as part of its most expensive plan.

Key features:

Pros: Wrike is another robust project management platform that’s suitable for smaller and larger teams.

Cons: 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 tailored to software development teams, but it’s approach to user design is not so popular among creatives and non-agile teams.

Key features:

Pros: Jira’s strong GitHub integration and agile-focused features makes it an excellent choice for software development agencies.

Cons: While it also serves diverse teams like marketing teams and creatives, they may not be able to get the most out of this tool.

Source: G2

We covered this in more detail in our Jira vs Trello vs Asana comparison.

You can also check out how to create a website project management checklist and other best practices for development.

Basecamp is a popular project management software option for teams with simple projects, but doesn’t provide an all-in-one workspace for clients projects.

Key features:

Pros: Similarly to Trello, Basecamp is another good alternative for project managers that want to further scale down their software.

Cons: 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.

Check out our list of Hive competitors to learn more about Basecamp and similar PM solutions.

Smartsheet is a project management software solution built for spreadsheet experts, but it can have a steep learning curve for users who are not used to Excel. 

Key features:

Pros: A user on Capterra described Smartsheet as a “giant spreadsheet”. It can be a good Asana alternative for project managers used to managing most workflows in Excel or Google Sheets.

Cons: Users have reported some difficulties with getting used to Smartsheet’s interface. A notable downside is its very limited mobile app which reduces accessibility.

Source: G2

Check out some top Workfront alternatives to learn more about Smartsheet and similar solutions.

Microsoft Project is often used for project management for architects and construction companies, but is not as modern as other popular project management tools. 

Key features:

Pros: 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.

Cons: Microsoft Project in itself is reported to be difficult to navigate and onboard to.

We also covered Microsoft Project in our guide to the top Avaza competitors.

ProProfs Project is an online project management software solution with basic features for real-time collaboration, but a lack of extensive features for comprehensive agency management.

Key features:

Pros: ProProfs Project offers a free plan with unlimited features for up to 5 users, making it a great choice for startups or small teams.

Cons: The tool doesn’t provide a resource planning feature, and also has very limited integrations with other tools — currently, they include only Outlook and Google Calendar.

Zoho Projects is another good Asana alternatives for teams on a tight budget that want more efficient workflows, but it isn’t an all-in-one solution for agency workflows.

Key features:

Pros: Zoho Projects includes good collaborative features that focus on providing operational efficiency and seamless collaboration.

Cons: Might not be the best alternative for managing complex projects with unusual requirements.

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. Users usually look for Asana alternatives due to:

Overall, users consider Asana a good beginner management 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).

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.