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Trello and Asana are popular with teams and enterprises around the world. These project management tools are versatile, easy-to-use, scalable and feature-rich. But in a head-on comparison of Trello vs Asana, which one should you choose for your business?
Let’s find out.
There seems to be a general consensus that Asana is better. Of course, this is a rather simplistic way to look at things and only factor in its ease of use.
Overall, Asana is better for teams working on complex projects and need additional features, workflows and integrations. But if you just need a kanban board, then Trello is your best friend.
We see the benefits of both project management tools and their excellent team collaboration options. They make collaboration a breeze in a time when remote working poses significant challenges for project management.
A Brief Overview
While it’s difficult to give an absolute answer to Asana vs Trello, Users can say that Asana tends to deliver more for less than Trello. This is mainly because the power-up system ends up costing you more down the line.
If all you need is a kanban board and don’t have use for many of Asana’s bells and whistles, Trello should be your choice, as the Trello board is just way better than Asana’s.
With Trello, you only get one power-up per free account, so you need to use it wisely. Asana’s free plan offers more flexibility, which is why so many project managers like it. If you need to run a more extensive team, you will find it to be limited in some aspects but you will be able to see the benefits of moving up to the business plan.
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What are Trello’s strengths?
In brief, Trello is a free kanban board with many additional features that users have to purchase.
Trello works well for teams that need to use a kanban board as a central part of their project management software. All other features are related to that one major component.
Its editorial calendar and a linear flow of tasks bring a lot of conveniences because enterprises can easily integrate them with their APIs.
Trello is popular with freelancers and self-employed professionals who just want to track a few daily tasks.
Kanban boards — the hallmark of Trello — are straightforward to understand and easy to use. They’re great for organising tasks and projects. And it is impossible to overlook Trello’s most significant advantage in that it is entirely free.
As one of the first project management software on the market, Trello might seem limited in its capacity, but it performs all intended functions surprisingly well. It serves all kinds of projects or teams, including content teams, marketing projects, customer support tracking, sales pipelines, HR tracking, etc.
Although Trello is not a fully comprehensive project management suite, it is a solid collaboration tool for beginners and seasoned professionals.
With Trello, you can collaborate, communicate and manage remote teams using a kanban board system for planning, scheduling, and prioritising tasks complete with due dates and labels. If you power up, you also get access to a shared team calendar view that helps with synchronisation.
Time-tracking is also available as a third-party integration albeit you will have to pay an additional cost for this feature.
The card system that Trello uses makes it easy to communicate with other team members through the commenting section at the bottom. You can upload attachments, tag other users, add emojis, or even attach other Trello cards.
However, Trello does not support dedicated budgeting features.
What are Asana’s strengths?
Unlike Trello, Asana offers a ton of features with its free version. One of them, the board view, is a similar kanban board and comes with even more capabilities like rules, custom fields and workflows once you upgrade to the paid version of the software.
Perhaps the best quality of Asana is how user-centric it is. It’s one of the few project management tools that prioritises the team and the project manager as well as the goals of the organisation. Asana incentivises every employee to use the software to maximise the worker-centric features and manage tasks.
The number and type of features that Asana offers make it a full-fledged project management tool that fits the needs of smaller companies and enterprises alike. The core of Asana is not the kanban board but rather the list view and what you can do with it.
Asana makes it very easy to create new projects and tasks with just a single click. One of the most vital qualities of Asana is its integration with other apps such as google drive, which provides many additional benefits to teams and project managers.
The emphasis here is on task and workload management to prioritise different aspects of the project without confusion among team members. Similar to Trello, there are no native budgeting or invoicing features in Asana.
With Asana, you get the options to create, schedule and prioritise tasks in several different formats. These include task lists, Gantt (timeline) charts, and kanban boards. This level of flexibility suits teams of all sizes and work styles.
A shared team calendar makes collaboration for remote teams as easy as anything. You and your team can access and update it in real-time.
When it comes to resource management and time tracking, Asana lets you track two of the most valuable project resources — workload and time spent on tasks.
Multiple premade templates make it easy to get started with minimal preparation time. You can even automate repetitive tasks so you can focus on more dynamic and demanding assignments, further saving time.
Asana has a significant competitive advantage in its user-centricity. Most people are not tech-savvy enterprises or simply lack time to navigate complex project management tools, so the simplicity of Asana is a real lifesaver.
Unlike other project management tools, Asana does not revolve solely around the project manager. But it helps them retain complete control and visibility into every task that team members are working on within a project. Asana’s feature called “Workload” provides live visual representations of every team member’s current tasks and shows if anyone is particularly overloaded.
Having said this, Trello might be a better option for small businesses with straightforward processes. Asana is ideal for medium and large enterprises due to its features that allow them to handle the complexity of projects they are dealing with. In a remote work setting, both these tools are perfect for getting things done.
It is not a question of Asana vs Trello but somewhat of what features you need to manage your projects. There are plenty of reasons to consider both thanks to their well-rounded project management features — it’s just that Asana just does it all a little better.
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