For your projects to succeed, you need a project management software program. With so many options to choose from, it can be a bit of a challenge to figure out which is best suited to your project.
This quick post compares the features of Trello vs Asana – two of the most popular project management tools on the market.
Hopefully, you can decide which one to choose for your projects after reading this.
Brand Overview
Trello
Trello project management tool uses the Kanban board project management system, which helps organize and track your projects. With Trello, each task has cards that sit on a list, allowing you to have as many cards as necessary. You can rearrange your tasks from one list to another.
Trello has three basic lists:
- To-do
- Work in Progress
- Completed
The project management tool comes with templates, which are a collection of sample boards. Trello is best for internal projects, team management, and collaboration.
The dashboard layouts are fully customizable. You can choose a Kanban board or Scrum view and add widgets and pages.
Asana
Asana helps you to create and organize tasks on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. But you have to be part of a team to create a new project.
The tool allows you to group tasks into projects, so tasks are split into different themes, making them easy to complete.
Asana comes with eight templates, out of which two are free. You can customize the templates to suit your needs.
With Asana, you can choose between a task list, Kanban board, chart, and workload management. The dashboard, called a portfolio, centralizes critical information across multiple projects in one location. This displays summaries and the status of each project at a glance.
Asana was initially developed in 2008 as an internal coordination tool for Facebook. However, its success soon drove the application public.
Winner: Tie
Main Features
Trello
Trello is best known for its ease of use. If you’re a beginner when it comes to project management apps, you won’t have any problems using Trello. Its main features include task management, resource sharing, and enablement of comments. It also allows for sharing of team calendars and keeping track of tasks progress for improved team collaboration. Plus, Trello integrates seamlessly with other programs.
With Trello, you can create an internal checklist that enables you to monitor task completion levels for specific tasks.
In other words, Trello allows close tracking of each task from conception to completion.
With a very attractive and intuitive interface, Trello guides the user to track tasks and offers a step-by-step process that the user can easily follow when project planning. This makes it easy for beginners to navigate Trello.
Asana
Asana offers greater collaboration for effective project management. With Asana, you can track the workload of every member of the team, set a limit on the workload, and monitor how much work is being done by every member. It has a graph on the workload management timeline that clearly displays this information.
Other unique features include task lists, Gantt charts, and Kannan boards. Team calendars that allow you to track your tasks can also be easily shared on Asana.
Asana offers greater transparency, communication, and collaboration between team members and management.
Asana prioritizes functionality over attractiveness. This reflects in its simple setup that allows users to manage different projects all at once.
New users may find Asana a bit complicated at first blush. Once they master it, the tool opens a world of endless possibilities.
Keep in mind that neither Trello nor Asana have any financial management tools.
Winner: Asana (with a slight margin)
Integration with Other Programs
It is important to consider how a tool integrates with other programs before choosing your preferred project management software. Thankfully, both Trello and Asana integrate seamlessly with other programs.
Trello
Trello allows integration with programs like Slack, Jira, Adobe XD, GitHub, Google Hangouts, Zapier, Gmail, Mailchimp, and Dropbox.
Asana
Asana offers more collaboration tools for internal project management integration. In fact, it integrates with Trello as well.
Other programs it easily integrates with include Adobe Creative Cloud, Dropbox, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Google Calendar, Everhour Reporting, and Mailchimp.
Winner: Tie
Tasks Management
For any project to succeed, you have to break them into tasks that could be easily tracked. A great project management tool should make the creation and management of tasks as easy as possible.
Trello
Trello has a task list that allows you to add items or individual tasks to cards and then tick them as they are completed so you can easily track them and monitor your progress.
Trello also allows you to break individual tasks into subtasks if they become too large.
Asana
Asana gives greater priority to tasks, so it is the main feature of the application.
With Asana, you can do many things with tasks, including creating, duplicating, or even merging them. You can also assign tasks to persons, set due dates, as well as group related tasks into sections.
When the tasks are large enough, Asana allows them to be further broken down into subtasks.
Winner: Asana
Creation of Groups
Collaboration is the key to successful project management. Let’s see how both fare in managing groups during a project.
Trello
Trello makes building teams very easy for project managers. Once built, they can be assigned to boards, and every member has access to the process and to all the different projects you have going on.
Trello allows you to build as many small teams (groups) as necessary, and each team can have as many members as possible, meaning unlimited users.
Asana
Asana gives more control over team creation, team collaboration, and monitoring. With Asana, each team has access to their own projects and offers users the opportunity to be members of multiple teams.
Winner: Trello
User Limit
Trello
Trello allows for unlimited users for free.
Asana
Asana allows only 15 users for its free option. For an unlimited number of users, larger teams, and more advanced features, you need a paid, premium version.
Winner: Trello
Conclusion
We’ll leave you to make a final choice from this comparison. Both choices are great. However, depending on your preferences, you are now better equipped to make an informed choice.
