Jira vs Trello vs Asana: Best for PM in 2024
Welcome to our Jira vs Trello vs Asana project management software comparison.
All three tools are popular options, frequently used to support business teams such as tech teams, creatives, marketing teams, and more. But which tool is best for what? And how do you pick the best option for your needs?
To answer these questions, we’ll compare their key differences and benefits in this article, using screenshots and user reviews.
We’ll also provide a fourth alternative for businesses looking for a truly distinct option: Productive, a tool for comprehensive agency management and data-driven decision-making.
Keep reading to learn more!
Jira vs Trello vs Asana: Key Takeaways
- Jira is a popular project management tool for agile development and product project types. However, it might not be the best choice for teams in creative industries due to its complex user interface and industry-specific feature set.
- Trello is a streamlined tool with an intuitive interface, best for smaller teams and personal task management. It’s a good option for basic task management and collaboration, but it lacks some key features for client work, such as integrated time tracking.
- Asana is a not too simple, but not too complex project management option. It provides basic time tracking and workload management features, but lacks advanced financial oversight and reporting.
- We’ll also introduce Productive, a fourth alternative for business leaders looking for end-to-end agency operations management. It’s an especially good pick if you want to combine financial management and advanced reporting with features for managing your project progress and team collaboration.
Businesses Choose Productive
Switch from multiple tools and spreadsheets to an all-in-one agency management solution.
What Is Jira?
Jira is a project management tool designed for agile software development teams, DevOps teams, and product management teams.
Core features for agile teams include Kanban and Scrum boards, customizable tasks, and agile-based reports (burn-up/burndown charts, sprint reports, velocity charts).
JIRA’S KANBAN BOARD
For tech teams and DevOps engineers, the most important features include integrated feature flagging tools, CI/CD (continuous delivery) integrations, and first and third-party tools, such as Bitbucket, GitHub, and Gitlab.
Jira also offers a knowledge management tool, Confluence, to streamline the creation and management of project specifications and other internal and client documentation.
There are free and paid versions of the tool, so keep in mind that it can incur additional costs if you’re looking for advanced features (AI, permissions, unlimited storage).
JIRA’S CONFLUENCE TEMPLATE EXAMPLE
Pricing:
- Jira has a free forever plan with unlimited pages and spaces for up to 10 users
- Two paid plans and an enterprise plan with custom pricing
Why Use Jira?
Jira is one of the most popular project management tools for larger teams working on agile projects and project management for web development.
JIRA’s comprehensive support for Scrum and Kanban frameworks is exceptional. The ability to effortlessly create and manage sprints, user stories, and epics ensures that our Agile processes are seamless and efficient.
Source: Capterra
Users also comment that Jira is fairly adaptable and customizable, which helps project managers and their teams set it up according to their preferences.
Jira also offers a large variety of integrations for design teams, IT teams, productivity teams, and software development teams (though this might be more expensive than investing in a management system for agencies, depending on how many additional functionalities you need).
When to Consider Alternatives
While Jira can be a great option for engineering teams, especially those working on complex projects, it can be too complicated for smaller teams.
Jira is a power tool with hundreds of options that can make your life worse in the wrong hands. Smaller teams do well with systems like Asana and Trello that have a narrower scope.
Source: Reddit
Creatives, in particular, have been known to express dislike of Jira’s user interface and way of organizing workflows. Asana and Jira are both more complex than Trello, but Asana is often considered a simpler choice.
Made for devs, the interface wasn’t designed for the design user. In other words, it plainly ignores the needs of the UX design teams workflow.
Source: G2
Although it can be used within different types of professional services (and not just software teams), marketing teams, sales teams, or consultancies won’t be able to get the most out of its bug tracking and issue tracking features.
Finally, resourcing and financial features are underdeveloped in the tool, so while it’s great for keeping project timelines on track, it’s not the best for comprehensive client work support.
What Is Trello?
Trello is a Kanban-based collaboration software suitable for smaller or temporary projects and teams inexperienced with project management solutions.
It’s best known for having a simple, user-friendly interface; according to a user from Capterra, “a newcomer can master it within a week”.
TRELLO IS A SIMPLE TASK-LIST-BASED PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLATFORM
Some of Trello’s key features include Kanban boards and project cards (which are, in essence, tasks), that can be customized with visual covers, descriptions, and various other specifics (assignee, due date, etc.).
There are additional views, such as Calendar and Timeline, and various templates designed for a variety of workflows and business needs.
AN ELEMENT ON TRELLO’S DASHBOARD VIEW
Finally, Trello provides simple data based on your project planning and daily tasks, such as assignees and due dates per card.
Pricing:
- Free version with unlimited cards, unlimited users, and up to ten team boards per workspace
- Three priced plans, including an enterprise plan
Why Use Trello?
Trello can be a great option for smaller to mid-sized teams that need a collaboration tool to keep their workflows in check. It’s also often used for personal task management and internal team initiatives, and its community-based and official templates can support very diverse use cases (HR onboarding, design system checklist, etc.).
Its visually appealing interface also makes it a great option for creative agency software. There’s also a range of powerups and third-party integration options that can help expand the tool’s array of features.
When to Consider Alternatives
Trello’s not the best choice for anything outside collaboration features and simple project planning. For example, it doesn’t provide integrated time tracking, which is a key feature for PSA project management. Resourcing and finances are also not included.
Trello is great for our purposes because it simplifies task management and is easy to learn. However, if your organization needs more comprehensive project tracking capabilities, including tracking completion times, resource allocation, or calendar planning, then dedicated software may be a better fit for you.
Source: Paraphrased from G2
We also have in-depth comparisons of Trello and Wrike if you want to learn more.
What Is Asana?
Asana is a project management software tool with a wide range of features for keeping various types of projects on track and streamlining team collaboration.
This includes five potential project views, including calendar, timeline, and Gantt charts. There’s also a personal dashboard for easier management of individual tasks and responsibilities, custom fields for tasks, and a template library for both projects and tasks.
ASANA’S GANTT CHART FEATURE
Other handy features include a workload chart for basic project resourcing. It includes visualizing workloads, filtering across people and projects, and easy allocation and reallocation.
There’s also time tracking with an embedded timer and time estimation, project-based reporting features, and workflow automations with a rules builder.
ASANA’S PROJECT MANAGEMENT CHART TYPES
Pricing:
- Free forever version with unlimited tasks and projects for up to 10 teammates
- Two priced plans and two enterprise plans with custom pricing
Why Use Asana?
Compared to Trello and Jira, Asana is a solid middle-of-the-road option. It has more task management and workflow features than Trello, but it’s also not as complicated and niche as Jira.
Between Jira and Asana, visual thinkers and non-tech teams often prefer Asana:
Great for small digital agencies. In my experience designers prefer using it over Jira, but I have yet to meet any devs that want to use it.
Source: Reddit
When to Consider Alternatives
Although it has a larger array of features compared to Trello, Asana is still a pretty streamlined software solution. While Asana can track your time and support simple resource scheduling, there’s no way to connect this to your business budgeting or project accounting processes.
A G2 review states:
You need to use a separate time-tracking engine if you are service oriented. You mostly have to use different budget-controlling apps or ERP.
For budget tracking capabilities and improved business decision-making, it’s best to consider Asana competitors with more scalability and an advanced feature set.
When I was working alone I was using Asana and it worked pretty well for a while, until the work picked up, as well as the number of employees. We found it really problematic when it came to keeping track of things and having everything in one spot for a client. As we grew, we wanted a solution that would scale better, so we decided to make the move to Productive almost three years ago—and everyone loved it.
Read how switching from Asana to Productive can support your agency’s growth.
Why Choose Productive as Your All-in-One Agency Management Software
Productive is best described as an all-in-one agency management tool, designed by industry professionals for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Why is it considered agency management software and not project management software?
Because it integrates a wide range of features for supporting end-to-end operations and helping agencies plan their future, most notably financial management and forecasting.
The biggest difference between Productive and competitors on this list includes the following three features:
1. Budgeting and Invoicing
Productive’s Budgeting includes a range of features that support business financial health and management.
Manage your budgeting across individual or multiple projects
You can:
- Build your project budgets with advanced options (such as expense management) or a simplified creator (including fixed-price, hourly, retainer, or hybrid models)
- Set cost rates for employees and bundle services into rate cards for easier budget and deal generation
- Manage budgeting insights such as estimated time, total revenue, costs, profit margin, and more
- Define and report recognized revenue for a more accurate overview of financial items and profits
- Track billable hours and create invoices on the platform (or copy them into accounting software such as Xero, QuickBooks, or Exact with Productive’s Integrations)
2. Resource Management
Productive’s resource scheduling and allocation features help businesses balance workloads and get a complete overview of employee availability (including time off and national holidays).
You can use tentative bookings to get ahead of your planning and schedule for unconfirmed projects and placeholders to account for external staff or to-be-hired employees.
Build your resource allocation template with Productive
Based on resource scheduling, project managers can also visualize and forecast key business metrics across the project timeline. This includes budget burn, revenue, and profit margins.
USE PRODUCTIVE’S FINANCIAL FORECASTING TO PREDICT YOUR BUSINESS FUTURE
Changes in your scheduling are immediately reflected in your data to facilitate informed decision-making; for example, if a client requests changes in scope, you can assign new teammates to the project, check the impact this has on your budgets and profits, and report back to the client with reliable data.
Resourcing also includes utilization insights to help you gauge how productive your teams are per projects or team members, whether you need to hire more staff, advertise for certain services, etc.
VISUALIZE AND FORECAST UTILIZATION ACROSS VARIOUS METRICS
3. Reporting
Productive’s Reporting feature uses data from your project activities, time tracking, budgeting, resourcing, invoicing, and more for a complete overview of business operations. Custom fields can also be used to add agency-specific metrics.
PRODUCTIVE’S PRESET CHARTS LIBRARY
You can use Productive’s library of more than 50+ agency-focused templates or create your own reports from scratch. There are options for filtering your data and grouping it by various metrics (employees, projects, clients, services, etc) and visualizing it through diverse chart types.
SWITCH FROM Column, Line, Area, Bar, Donut, or Metric REPORT VIEWS
Productive’s Pulse system is used to schedule reports to be sent automatically to the channel of your preference (Slack or email). This helps all key stakeholders stay informed and updated on project performance.
Additional features include:
- Project management: Get an overview of your progress with various project views, such as Kanban, Gantt, and Workload view. Additional features include custom automations and a Permission Builder for managing who can see and do what.
- Collaboration: Complex tasks are made simple with Productive’s workflow tools. Organize work with to-dos, subtasks, and milestones, assign statuses, check progress in the comments, and create custom fields for even more options. Productive also includes Docs (with Productive AI) for real-time collaboration.
- Sales: Manage your sales team’s capacity with an integrated Sales CRM feature. Customize stages, schedule your sales capacity, manage performance insights, forecast revenue and win probability, and more.
Pricing
- Plans start with the Essential plan at $9 per user per month, which includes essential features such as budgeting, project & task management, docs, time tracking, expense management, reporting, and time off management.
- The Professional plan includes custom fields, recurring budgets, advanced reports, billable time approvals, and many more for $24 per user per month.
- The Ultimate plan has everything that the Essential plan and Professional plan offer, along with the HubSpot integration, advanced forecasting, advanced custom fields, overhead calculations, and more for a custom price.
- You can also check out the Enterprise Plan with custom pricing for companies that would include more than 50 active users per month.
You can also check out Productive’s 14-day free trial before committing to a paid plan.
Businesses Choose Productive
Switch from multiple tools and spreadsheets to an all-in-one agency management solution.
Asana vs Jira or Trello: Which One to Choose for Project Teams?
To summarize, each software solution has its distinct differences and is suitable for different types of agency teams.
Jira is best for engineering teams working on complex projects within the agile framework.
Trello is best for simple or temporary projects for smaller teams that want an inexpensive tool.
Asana is best for businesses who want more support than Trello, but less complexity vs Jira.
Productive is the best for truly robust support for your entire team and business processes.
From budget tracking capabilities to advanced resourcing and project management — Productive has it all, unified in a single platform. Book a demo today.
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