Smartsheet vs Asana: 4 Critical Differences

With over 200 different Project Management vendors in the market, narrowing your choice to one or two tools is tough. In terms of features, many project management solutions are very similar, but this doesn’t mean that all solutions are the same.

Asana is a leading Project Management tool that is used by enterprises to manage their daily tasks and collaborate with other team members. Similarly, another widely used Project Management tool is Smartsheet. Smartsheet vs Asana are used for the same purpose but each tool has some unique features that separate them from the rest and each other. With the right information, and experience in the industry one can choose between Smartsheet vs Asana based on multiple factors.

Choosing the appropriate Project Management tool is challenging and requires effort and time. to invest in the requirements of your company, budget, security profile, etc. In this post, You will explore two popular Project Management tools, Smartsheet vs Asana. You will compare and contrast these solutions based on their features and integrations.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Asana
  • Key Features of Asana
  • Pros and Cons of Asana
• Introduction to Smartsheet
  • Key Features of Smartsheet
  • Pros and Cons of Smartsheet
• Factors that Derive the Smartsheet vs Asana Decision
  • Smartsheet vs Asana: Integrations
  • Smartsheet vs Asana: Management
  • Smartsheet vs Asana: Interface
  • Smartsheet vs Asana: Pricing and Trial Service
• Smartsheet vs Asana: Choosing the Right Tool
• Conclusion

Introduction to Asana

Asana was founded in 2008 with a simple mission, to help teams work together effectively. With Asana you can plan and manage teams, projects, and tasks so nothing falls through the cracks. Asana helps teams do their best work by ensuring they know who’s doing what by when, so everyone can follow the plan and do the right work at the right time. Teams can get work done, assign tasks, select due dates, and keep everyone on the same page.

Key Features of Asana

1. Reporting

The reporting feature in Asana provides a one-stop-shop for all the information you need, allowing you to see and track work from every angle in Asana. You use the Reporting Tool to:

• Easily report across teams and departments.
• Create reports with fully customizable charts and dashboards.
• Design your reports or choose from pre-built charts in Asana’s template library.
• Export and share your reports.

2. Kanban Boards

Asana provides kanban-style views to visualize work that moves through stages. A Kanban view is a great way of visually depicting work at various stages of a process like what’s still to do, what’s still in progress, and what’s done and this can be applied in product launches, sprint plans, accounts tracking, or content calendars.

You can adjust your boards to see the details you need. For example, you can sort by the assignee to see what each user is working on or complete subtasks from a card. You can also set up rules in your Kanban board to save time and automate work by eliminating repetitive tasks, for example, you can set up a rule to automatically move tasks to the Done column every time you complete them.

3. Timeline

Asana’s timelines represent a view of how all your work fits together. The timeline feature lets you map out projects and easily adjust plans to help you hit your deadlines. Asana’s timelines can automatically assign work when it’s needed and notify the task owners both on email and in Asana. Timelines are easy to set up in Asana, and more importantly, they’re useful to help you stay on track as your work progresses.

4. Workloads

The Workload feature in Asana gives you a single view of your team’s bandwidth so you can make informed staffing decisions and rebalance schedules if needed to prevent burnout. You can use workloads to set your team’s capacity and assign hours and effort to tasks across your project so that you can have a clear picture of your team’s bandwidth.

Workloads take the guesswork out of scheduling tasks. You can use workloads to keep schedules realistic, keep priorities on track, and avoid waiting until your team is overworked.

5. Bug Tracking

Asana enables dev teams to easily file and track bugs so that Developers can prioritize more time fixing them compared to other tasks. In Asana, there is a Bug Tracking template that you can use to help you get up and running quickly with this feature. It allows you to organize tasks by priority and to capture extra details about the bug for better context and clarity.

Pros and Cons of Asana

Pros

• Nice, simple, and easy to use.
• Has all the features a Project Management tool needs i.e. custom fields, Gantt charts, dependencies, workload tracking.
• Great for managing team communication.
• Flexible pricing, you can start with Asana in a very simple way and you only need to pay for extra features when you need them.
• Most of the features are available in the free plan.
• Lots of views (list, timeline, board, calendar) so you can customize it to what you prefer.

Cons 

• Asana lacks some more advanced Project Management capabilities e.g. snapshots on the project timeline, and also you can’t easily report cost and time estimates.
• Very versatile but not tailored to any particular industry.
• Doesn’t have native time tracking.
• Lacks native Reporting Tools. You can integrate with 3rd party viz tools but they’re not as good as a native solution.

Introduction to Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a Cloud-based dynamic work management platform that intuitively empowers teams and organizations to create the workflows and solutions they need to quickly achieve more. Based in Bellevue, Washington, Smartsheet was founded in June 2005 by John D. Creason, W. Eric Browne, Brent R. Frei, and Maria Colacurcio.

With the increasing pressure to become more Agile, more innovative, and better serve your customers, more and more enterprises are buying into Smartsheet’s offering so that they can innovate, save time, improve collaboration, achieve mission objectives, and maintain relevance.

You can use Smartsheet to capture, plan, and manage all your work in an intuitive, flexible, and scalable experience. On Smartsheet, all of the work you do starts in a sheet–flexible data capture and management location that allows you and your team to collaborate in real-time through a single Cloud-based experience.

Key Features of Smartsheet

1. Flexible Views

Starting from a simple Grid View made up of columns and rows similar to a spreadsheet, you can capture all sorts of project data in a sheet. Smartsheet’s Columns are customizable and track specific data, things like Contacts, Dates, Dropdown Lists, Check Boxes, Symbols, and System Data like those created by and modified data. Rows help you group tasks into hierarchies and keep the team organized with attached files, links, and conversations documented right where you need them.

From this basic Grid View in a sheet, team members can switch to Gantt, Card, or Calendar Views to fit the way they work–same data, different views. Gantt Views are great when looking at tasks and dependencies. Card Views are good for clearly visualizing and prioritizing your work. The Calendar View lets you visualize all of your work overtime.

2. Collaboration

Another great feature in Smartsheet is that you can share your Sheets easily with team members inside and outside your organization to collaborate in real-time. To get the best results and results and reduce E-Mail back and forth, teams keep as much information in sheets. If you’ve been shared to a sheet as an Editor, you can attach files, including images, and use conversations to centralize all of your assets and communication. 

This makes it easy to retrieve information and ensures that everyone is working from the same set of information. The sheet owner can set up automated alerts, update requests, and more that you can respond to directly in the notification center. There is also a proofing feature that allows team members to review and comment on work in a streamlined approval process.

3. Dashboards & Reports

Real-time visibility is about getting the right information to the right people at the right time to drive work forward. The dashboard is where all the metrics and charts come together. Dashboards are a great way to communicate a lot of information in one place, quickly and easily. You can use dashboards to create a customized view to centralize important resources, track key metrics, and provide real-time visibility across all of your work, quickly and easily using line graphs, bar graphs, and charts.

Reports in Smartsheet are a powerful way to consolidate key information from multiple sheets into a single overview. They function as a bidirectional filter, so they’re great for both answering key business questions and effectively managing and updating work across multiple sheets.

For example, you can create a report for your sales pipeline to see how much business is expected to close across the entire team, have a customized roll-up of sales activity that automatically updates to reflect changes, and then communicate this information to stakeholders to facilitate data-driven decision making.

4. Project Tracking

The project tracking feature helps you to track and maintain crucial information about your project. It automates your timeline using the start date to estimate the end dates. For easy monitoring and to get up and running quickly with project monitoring, Smartsheet includes a pre-built project tracking template that can be found in the solutions center. You can use the template to display real-time data on key project details like milestones or at-risk tasks.

All this important information then flows to the project tracking dashboard with widgets that pull in live data from your sheets and reports. You can then share it with your team and stakeholders so that everyone can stay on the same page.

5. Resource Management

The resource management feature gives managers and executives the visibility they need to grow strong teams, deliver projects on time and on the budget to support the growing needs of the business. You can use the resource management feature to find and schedule the right people for every project, track and manage time spent on projects, and forecast hiring needs.

The resource management feature in Smartsheet gives you a single view into all the people in your organization including details such as their roles, profession, and location so that you can search and filter the people you need. You can use it to see who is available, what everyone is working on, and who is on vacation. You can also see future planned work to be staffed and assign it to the right people based on matching roles, skills and, availability.

Pros and Cons of Smartsheet

Pros

• Advanced BI capabilities.
• Simple to use and easy to set up Gantt charts.

Cons

• Complex to wrap your head around it especially if you have little experience with spreadsheets.

Factors that Derive the Smartsheet vs Asana Decision

The Key differences between Smartsheet vs Asana are listed below:

• Smartsheet vs Asana: Integrations
• Smartsheet vs Asana: Management
• Smartsheet vs Asana: Interface
• Smartsheet vs Asana: Pricing and Trial Service

Smartsheet vs Asana: Integrations

Smartsheet without addons is a much more powerful and flexible platform than Asana. To get Asana to work like a proper project and Team Management tool, you have to integrate several apps to achieve this functionality.

Smartsheet vs Asana: Management

Asana is more of a work coordination tool, as opposed to a Project Management tool. It works very well for keeping team members on top of tasks, managing team communications, etc. but is a pain to schedule anything in. Smartsheet on the other hand can do these tasks from the scheduling perspective more easily.

Smartsheet vs Asana: Interface

Smartsheet isn’t as user-friendly as Asana. While it has very advanced features, it does need quite a bit of customizing per sheet to implement simple workflows. Users find it quite laborious to implement basic workflows compared to Asana which is visually appealing and very intuitive. It also has some great calendar functionality.

Smartsheet vs Asana: Pricing and Trial Service

Smartsheet support is quite basic unless you pay for a full year upfront. Otherwise, you’ll only get canned responses to search the knowledge base, etc.

While Asana has a free forever plan, Smartsheet has no free plan although it does have a free trial available for every single plan (individual, business, and enterprise) that you can use to test all of the functionality to see if it’s for you. But keep in mind that you shouldn’t be basing your decisions for Smartsheet vs Asana solely on price, rather you should choose the one that delivers the best ROI (in this case, high team engagement and streamlined reporting to leadership).

Smartsheet vs Asana: Choosing the Right Tool

Deciding which tool to select from Smartsheet vs Asana are listed below:

• Depending on your workflow
• Depending on your organization
• Depends on the type of projects you run.

Choosing between Smartsheet vs Asana is quite tough because both are great tools and they offer similar baseline functionality in terms of task management, scheduling, and different views (lists, Gantt, Kanban, etc). However, if you are used to using Excel and have multiple people updating spreadsheets, SmartSheet can be a great tool to transition to as it has similar functionality coupled with advanced reporting and collaboration features.

Asana on the other hand is great for a standalone user who is working alone or with a small team and has little need for reporting and dashboard functionality. However, when you get into more enterprise use cases, you will find that Smartsheet will suit your needs much better. So first analyze all your company’s requirements and then choose between Smartsheet vs Asana.

Conclusion

In this article, you read about the 2 popular Project Management tools Smartsheet vs Asana that are widely used by enterprises for managing projects and collaborating with other teams. You read about the key differences between Smartsheet vs Asana and lastly went through some key factors that will help you decide which tool is best suited for your company. You have to invest a good amount of time collecting information on company requirements, flexibility, what type of projects you handle, and budget for Smartsheet vs Asana.

Visit our Website to Explore Hevo

Asana contains valuable data related to projects, teams, and operations. A company needs data from multiple sources like Asana and other Project Management tools to run analytics and optimize its workflow. Hevo Data is a No-code Data Pipeline solution that helps to transfer data from Asana and 100+ sources to desired Data Warehouse. It fully automates the process of transforming and transferring data to a destination without writing a single line of code.

Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up here for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand.

Share your experience of learning about Smartsheet vs Asana in the comments section below!