Asana vs Trello: Battle of the Project Management Platforms 101

As a business evolves, the number of employees, workers, departments, and projects also scale up in unison. With an increasing number of teams such as Product Development, Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, and so on, management and collaboration across cross-functional teams have become a daunting problem. For continuous development, an effective Project Management Platform is required that will automate the processes and boost productivity.

Asana is a Project Management tool that can strengthen businesses to achieve success seamlessly with Workspace Management Dashboards. It provides many advanced tools allowing companies to manage projects. Asana offers significant customization for planning and organizing projects to help teams boost productivity and deliver requirements within the timeline. Leveraging its excellent reporting features you can get insights into your business performance and can take the required actions accordingly.

Trello, a Cloud-Based Project Management Platform makes it easy to keep track of all your projects and ensures that you hit all the deadlines. It was founded in 2011 by Fog Creek Software and was spun out in 2014 to create the foundation of a new business before being sold to Atlassian in January 2017. Trello uses Kanban Principles, a way of Visualizing Workflows, to offer a comprehensive picture of a project from start to end. Trello’s Boards, Lists, and Cards are used for this purpose.

In this article, you will gain information about the factors that drive the Asana vs Trello Decision for Project Management tools. You will also gain a holistic understanding of Asana, its key features, Trello, its key features, and which tool to use in 2021- Asana vs Trello. Read along to find out the appropriate Workspace Management Tool for your Business – Asana vs Trello in 2021.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Asana
  • Key Features of Asana
• Introduction to Trello
  • Key Features of Trello
• Factors that Drive the Asana vs Trello Decision
  • Asana vs Trello: Collaboration
  • Asana vs Trello: Views
  • Asana vs Trello: Agile Features
  • Asana vs Trello: User Experience and Ease of Use
  • Asana vs Trello: Integrations
  • Asana vs Trello: Target Audience
  • Asana vs Trello: Use Case
  • Asana vs Trello: Pricing
  • Asana vs Trello: Reporting Abilities
  • Asana vs Trello: APIs
  • Asana vs Trello: Support and Customer Service
• Which Workspace Management tool to use in 2021 – Asana vs Trello
• Tabular Difference between both the platforms
• Conclusion

Introduction to Asana

Asana is a Cloud-based Project Management Software that helps business teams manage, organize, and design their Workflow. It is offered both as a SaaS platform as well as a Mobile app. Here, you don’t need to spend hours writing emails or on conducting unproductive meetings to follow up on the project status. With Asana you can easily assign tasks to team members, set task priorities, and track project progress, keeping everyone on the same page. You can add subtasks to a project and add Task Dependencies to see what needs to be done by whom.

You may need to organize an event at your place or write your next blog, Asana can help manage your deadlines and goals. When you manage your tasks in Asana, you have the freedom to organize your projects in a way that is best for you and your team. This helps your team focus on the most important tasks with less effort. Whether it is for personal use or if you are building a new company, you can get started right away as it is free for a team of up to 15 folks. As your business grows, you can opt for Paid Business Plans that provide more flexibility to automate your Workflows with no user limit. 

Asana runs on the Work Graph Data Model which provides a fully connected, accurate, and up-to-date map of the work happening in your organization. It represents all the units of work such as tasks, ideas, goals, agendas, relevant conversations, files and status information, etc.

For further information about Asana, you can follow the Official Documentation.

Key Features of Asana

The developers at Asana have put in continuous efforts to enhance the platform by incorporating regular Customer Feedback. Working to make Projects across Businesses manageable, they have come up with some of the most intuitive features:

• Remote Access
• Asana Timelines
• Asana Portfolios & Workload
• Asana Calendar View
• Collaboration
• Customization
• Online Communities & Support

1) Remote Access

You can go online and access all your projects from any location, anytime, and from any device of your choice.

2) Asana Timelines

Through Asana Timeline, you can set up stages for your project and check the status of various tasks as things get done.

3) Asana Portfolios & Workload

According to different departments, you can build separate Portfolios and see an overview of each team’s performance. The Workload tab lets you see how much work is assigned to whom, allowing you to distribute responsibilities efficiently.

4) Asana Calendar View

In Asana Calendar View, you get the list of tasks assigned to you and your team that needs to be completed on a specific due date in a bird’s eye view.

5) Collaboration

With each task mentioned in the Asana Calendar View, you and your team members can attach files, leave comments, and appreciate someone’s work using the Like button. 

6) Customization

Based on your style, you can customize and design your Workflow process. You can start building Asana Calendar, Boards, Timelines from scratch or use the templates provided in the catalog. 

7) Online Communities and Support

If you get stuck at something in Asana, there is a well-established online Asana Community Forum that can assist you to easily solve your queries so that you can quickly get back on track with your work. It also provides other resources such as Asana Help where you can get instructions from an Asana expert. You can also access webinars, training, and other courses to increase your knowledge about Asana. Through Asana Guide you can access documentation on how to leverage Asana to the optimum potential.

Introduction to Trello

Trello is an easy-to-use, flexible, visually intuitive Project Management & Collaboration Tool that helps you manage and organize anything. Trello, in a nutshell, shows you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in the process, and on what timeframe. It is like a virtual whiteboard filled with sticky notes, divided according to team and projects, and categorized according to their status in the work timeline.

Trello uses Kanban Principles, a way of visualizing workflows, to offer a comprehensive picture of a project from start to end. Trello’s boards, lists, and cards are used for this purpose.

To have further information about Trello, you can follow the Official Documentation.

Key Features of Trello

• Progress Meter Checklist
• Card Records Archive
• Data Filters
• Deadline Alerts and Notifications
• Automated Email Notifications
• Activity Logs
• Information Backup
• Mobile-Friendly Views
• Developer API

1) Progress Meter Checklist

The Progress Meter Checklist helps in keeping a track of subtasks within a card in a Trello Board. Multiple checklists can also be added to a single Card.

2) Card Records Archive

You can archive cards when you no longer need them on the Board.

3) Data Filters

You can use keywords to filter and display Cards with their Card names as per the individual words in the filter keyword or certain other factors.

4) Deadline Alerts and Notifications

If you set the card’s due date and are a member of that Card, you will receive a notification about the card 24 hours before its deadline by default. You will also receive notifications in Trello whenever any action is performed on the Board.

5) Automated Email Notifications

Trello enables email alerts that can be triggered when anything happens to a Card or a Board to which you are subscribed.

6) Activity Logs

The activity feed in Trello displays any updates that occur throughout your Trello Board.

7) Information Backup

Rewind saves incremental backups of customers’ Trello Boards and restores them in an automated fashion. 

8) Mobile-Friendly Views

Trello supports user-friendly interfaces for easier navigation for mobile and tablet devices.

9) Developer API

Trello provides a basic RESTful web API via which you may interact with each type of resource (e.g., a Card, a Board, or a Member) through their URL.

Factors that Drive the Asana vs Trello Decision

Both Asana and Trello are popular Workspace & Project Management platforms in the market. There is no one-size-fits-all answer here, instead, you must choose based on your company’s needs, the number of employees, budget, and other factors to make the Asana vs Trello decision. The primary factors that influence the Asana vs Trello comparison are as follows:

• Collaboration
• Views
• Agile Features
• User Experience and Ease of Use
• Integrations
• Target Audience
• Use Case
• Pricing
• Reporting Abilities
• Support and Customer Service

1) Asana vs Trello: Collaboration

Collaboration in both Trello and Asana is pretty simple and straightforward. Both platforms provide the normal collaboration features such as descriptions, assignees, due dates, tags, comments, and file attachments.

Regardless of the features you utilize, Asana restricts you to 15 users on the free plan. Within each task in Asana, team members can be added and offer feedback on the conversation. It also includes an inbuilt inbox where all members can receive emails. Members might constantly receive reminder emails as the due date of a task approaches.

Trello allows you to collaborate with an unlimited number of people while on the free plan. It allows all team members to collaborate or communicate within each card. Users may communicate within the card, reply to comments & questions, and tag other team members to share their thoughts on the subject.

2) Asana vs Trello: Views

Asana allows users to switch between 6 different Views:

• List: The default View, which presents tasks in a list format.
• Board: This View lets you see your tasks column by column, allowing you to visualize your workflow.
• Timeline: This View enables you to piece together your plan in a Gantt Chart-style manner, communicate it with stakeholders, and meet deadlines.
• Calendar: This View only displays tasks with due dates in a calendar format.
• Progress: This View provides information about a project’s progress, such as status updates and a progress chart.
• Forms: This View gathers information from your team and generates forms.

The different Views Trello supports are:

• Board: A Trello Board is the most efficient method to move from conception to action. Projects can be planned and broken down into steps in Boards.
• Timeline: With Timeline, you can remain on top of every sprint and on track for every goal.
• Table: With the team Table View, you can see everything that is going on in your team.
• Calendar: Calendar View provides a clear picture of what work is ahead and it can also be synchronized with third-party calendars as well.
• Dashboard: Dashboard provides a bird’s eye perspective of projects and processes, allowing you to manage workloads and eliminate bottlenecks before they occur.
• Map: Trello’s Map View makes it possible to show location-based data on an interactive map in context.

3) Asana vs Trello: Agile Features

Leading an Agile Software Development team is a difficult task. You must plan features, prioritize them, perform sprints, hold meetings to keep everyone on track and release high-quality, bug-free code on time. To manage all of this, you’ll need a Project Management Platform that can handle software development projects effortlessly.

While Asana does not have the capabilities of a full-fledged agile tool, it helps you plan, organize, and manage Agile projects and Scrum sprints in a tool that’s as flexible and collaborative as your team. The ways in which teams can use Asana for Agile Management are Bug tracking, Sprint planning, Product feedback, Product launches, Product roadmap, and Work requests.

The Agile features of Asana are:

• Boards
• Timelines
• Custom Fields
• Dependencies
• Conversations
• Feedbacks

Trello is entirely built on Kanban, making it simple to get started. Your Board can include several columns known as Lists and Cards to indicate a task inside each project. When you wish to demonstrate progress, you move a card from one column to the other. It is also extremely visual, enabling you to easily identify project stages, team member responsibilities, and task due dates. Trello is ideal for small teams that only require a Kanban board to monitor tasks. Trello has Half-baked Agile capabilities. While you can use Trello for Scrum, it cannot be used as a full-fledged scrum tool as it lacks user stories, estimation points, and agile reports.

The Agile features in Trello are:

• Boards
• Labels
• Custom fields

4) Asana vs Trello: User Experience and Ease of Use

Asana has a lot of features and functional capabilities, hence for new members it will take some time to align to its interface. It provides detailed step-by-step documentation that helps you become an expert with Asana’s interface. To make things easier, Asana uses a left navigation bar for guidance and has specific tabs inside the project for different views. Asana also includes Sections to help you organize tasks into particular buckets.

Trello is easier to install and known for its ease of use even to non-technical users. If you had to gather your entire team in one room and explain to them how Trello works, it wouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes.

5) Asana vs Trello: Integrations

Both Asana and Trello have strong third-party integration support. Both tools have a long list of platforms (100+) with which they integrate. Slack, InVision, Dropbox, Salesforce, Hubspot, Github, Gmail, and many more are available.

6) Asana vs Trello: Target Audience

The customers of Asana are majorly IT and non-technical teams of all sizes, especially, Designers, Marketers, Sales Teams, and Customer Success teams as Asana enables pretty good team collaboration.

Trello is used by Freelancers, Small Startups, and Small Businesses that only utilize kanban and do not require strong project management capabilities. It can support the needs of small engineering teams as well.

7) Asana vs Trello: Use Case

Asana is ideal for large enterprises with complex projects to manage. A manager who wants to lead a large team and needs everyone to work in unison to achieve tasks would benefit the most from this software. The visible changes with each completed task or continuing project make it quite straightforward for a manager to track. Its capacity to assist large-scale initiatives makes it an obvious choice for major businesses.

Trello is better suited for a small team with a simple business process. Its user-friendly task management system makes it simple to handle a project that would benefit from a Physical Kanban Board.

8) Asana vs Trello: Pricing

Asana is free for up to 15 people for a limited set of features. Its Premium plan costs $10.99 per month per member (when paid yearly) or $13.49 per month per member (when paid monthly). The Business plan costs $24.99 per member per month (when paid annually) or $30.49 per member per month (when paid monthly). You must contact their Sales teams if you desire an Enterprise plan.

Trello is free for unlimited users. However, if the customer desires better security and integrations, the Business plan costs $10 per member per month (when paid annually) or $12.50 per member per month (when paid monthly). Trello’s Enterprise plan starts at $17.50 per month per member billed annually.

NOTE: While Asana is free for the first 15 users, when you add your 16th, you will be charged for all 16 members on the premium plan. Trello’s price is similarly comparable.

9) Asana vs Trello: Reporting Abilities

Asana provides a timeline tool along with custom fields and zoom features to view a summary of your project. Using the advanced search feature, you can generate custom reports that help you control what data you want to filter out so you can track tasks at risk, completed work, project progress, and other elements. Using Google Sheets integration, you can also take project data from Asana and insert it into custom reports and visualizations. Asana also has portfolios that centralize critical information across multiple projects in one location for at-a-glance summaries of each project’s status.

Through Trello’s summary report you can compile data based on what you want to track at either a card or board level. You can generate a report using Power-ups that shows activities, the amount of time a card was in a list, the number of total checklist items compared to the number of completed items, and more. You can build a variety of reports through integration with third-party tools. Trello’s dashboard layouts are even fully customizable.

10) Asana vs Trello: APIs

The Asana API is a RESTful platform that guarantees all of your information is up to date and that your teams stay efficient and informed. It enables software and scripts to read data from within Asana, enter data from outside Asana, and automatically respond when things change. This might involve completing repetitive or time-consuming activities on a regular basis, producing reports on the status of tasks and projects, and remaining in sync with other applications used in your business, such as Slack or Salesforce.

Trello provides a simple RESTful web API via which you may interact with each type of resource (e.g., a Card, a Board, or a Member). The Trello API documentation is available at https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/trello.

11) Asana vs Trello: Support and Customer Service

A single problem with a Project Management Tool may create major disruptions and threaten your project’s success. So you need to know that you can count on prompt, efficient customer support anytime you need it.

While Asana provides great tutorials and forums, their support team provides priority support to the customers. Asana excels in help guides, FAQs, forums, webinars, the Academy, and use cases. It provides online support during business hours. However, Asana’s forums are an excellent resource for getting help from both fellow users and Asana staff. It also provides a detailed step-by-step documentation guide available for software installation.

Trello is owned by Atlassian, which also owns Jira, therefore the support structure is quite similar. Most problems may be resolved by completing support ticket forms or contact forms; however, priority phone assistance is available to Business Class and Enterprise users, ensuring a faster response time. Trello’s comprehensive knowledge base such as tutorials, pop-ups, FAQ sections and blogs not only aid with Trello-related use cases or challenges but also provide team management articles and guidelines.

Which Project Management Solution to Use in 2021 – Asana Vs Trello

Both solutions have pros and cons. Trello is the visually appealing Kanban-style solution that is ideal for smaller teams, but questionable when projects start piling up and more features are required. Asana, on the other hand, is comparatively complex with the interface, and more powerful — particularly when it comes to delegating tasks and managing multiple projects.

Trello is intuitive even to a non-technical user, whereas Asana takes a more traditional, task-centric list-based approach to organizing teamwork around particular projects and keeping everyone informed. Both are reasonably priced, with Trello being somewhat less expensive and offering a free edition for unlimited team members. The free version lacks features but can be adequate for a small business.

In the end, it may come down to personal preference. The best part about freemium goods is that they may be tried out for free.

Tabular Difference of Both Platforms

Sl. no	Factors	Asana	Trello
1	Collaboration	Team Members addition in a task, inbuilt inbox, Feedback in conversation	Addition of members in Cards, Comments, Questions, Tag other team members
2	View	List, Board, Timeline, Calendar, Progress, Forms	Board, Timeline, Table, Calendar, Dashboard, Map
3	Agile Features	Boards, Timelines, Custom Fields, Dependencies, Conversations, Feedback	Boards, Labels, Custom Fields
4	User Experience & Ease of Use	Wide Range of features, Detailed guide for usage, Left Navigation Bar, and Specific tabs for navigation. A bit slower to understand	Easier to install and understand even for non-technical members
5	Integrations	100+ Third-Party Integrations	100+ Third-Party Integrations
6	Target Audience	IT & Non-technical teams of any size, large organizations	Freelancers, small startups, small businesses
7	Use Case	Large enterprises with complex projects, multiple functionalities, more power	Small teams with simple business process
8	Pricing (per month per member)	Free: 15 people, limited featuresPremium Plan: $10.99 (paid annually)/ $13.49 (paid monthly)Business Plan: $24.99 (paid annually)/ $30.49 (paid monthly)Enterprise Plan: on contact with Sales Team	Free: Unlimited users, limited featuresBusiness Plan: $10 (paid annually)/ $12.50 (paid monthly)Enterprise Plan: Starts at $17.50 (paid annually)
9	Reporting Abilities	Timeline tool with Custom Fields & Zoom feature, Advanced Search, Portfolios for dashboards & visualizations	Summary Report, Power-ups for custom reports, Third-party integration, Customizable Dashboard Layouts
10	APIs	RESTful interface	RESTful Web API
11	Support & Customer Service	Tutorials, Forums, FAQ section, Detailed Documentation, Priority Support, Webinars, Academy, guides	Online Customer Support, Priority Phone Assistance, Tutorials, Pop-ups, FAQ sections, Articles, Guidelines, Blogs

Conclusion

In this article, you have learned about the factors that drive the Asana vs Trello decision. This article also provided information on Asana, its key features, Trello, and its key features.

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