We compared Asana and Microsoft Project based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
In summary, Asana stands out for its effective task management, team collaboration, and user-friendly interface, with highly praised customer service and positive ROI. On the other hand, Microsoft Project offers detailed task management, powerful reporting, and seamless integration with Microsoft programs, with excellent customer service and positive ROI as well. Differences include Asana's affordability, intuitive interface, and automation capabilities compared to Microsoft Project's detailed project tracking, versatile templates, and robust reporting functionalities. Users suggest Asana could improve its interface and integrations, while Microsoft Project could enhance collaboration features and streamline project scheduling.
Features: Asana's most valuable features include effective task management, team collaboration, project organization, seamless integrations, and a user-friendly interface. On the other hand, Microsoft Project stands out with its detailed task management, project progress tracking, interactive Gantt charts, and robust reporting functionalities. Microsoft Project also offers efficient resource allocation, effective collaboration tools, customizable project templates, and the ability to handle large and complex projects.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Asana is generally described as transparent, affordable, and flexible, while Microsoft Project is considered to have minimal setup costs with no additional expenses. Asana offers various plans suitable for different business sizes, whereas Microsoft Project has a straightforward and user-friendly licensing process., Asana's ROI is achieved through improved task management, collaboration, productivity, and cost savings. Users praise its intuitive interface and automation capabilities. On the other hand, Microsoft Project's ROI comes from streamlined projects, resource allocation, team collaboration, and increased profits with its robust features.
Room for Improvement: Asana users have suggested an enhanced interface, better integration with other applications, improved mobile app features, advanced automation options, and customization capabilities. On the other hand, Microsoft Project users desire a better user interface, improved collaboration features, intuitive project scheduling and resource management capabilities, and enhanced integration with other Microsoft software.
Deployment and customer support: Users of Asana mentioned spending three months on deployment and an additional week on setup, while others mentioned spending a week for both deployment and setup. On the other hand, users of Microsoft Project provided feedback with various timeframes for deployment, setup, and implementation phases., Asana's customer service is highly praised for its excellent assistance and prompt issue resolution. Users find their support staff to be knowledgeable and attentive. On the other hand, Microsoft Project's customer service is highly regarded for its effectiveness and efficiency. Users appreciate the support team's knowledge, responsiveness, and availability of support channels.
The summary above is based on 74 interviews we conducted recently with Asana and Microsoft Project users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"It is stable and easy to set up."
"Asana provides a lot of options and a lot of customization to give the best efficient way for your business to operate. For example, I can customize my tasks, tables, and pipelines the way I want them to fit my business model. It's easy and highly customizable."
"My task box displays all of our tasks, organized by day, helping us to focus on what needs to be done each day."
"Stable Kanban style tool for collaboration and task management. It runs smoothly and has a straightforward setup."
"Asana allows you to create your own project with sub sections with subtasks that can be assigned. The feature I really love is that you can tag people to notify them that there has been progress on a project as well as add attachments."
"The most valuable feature of Asana is the ease of navigation."
"Asana, despite its compact size, proves to be incredibly valuable. When initiating a project, it offers the ability to generate a personalized form for clients. In this particular context, my clients include the customer success team and solution architects. This feature allows me to provide them with a convenient means to submit their requests, resembling a ticketing system geared towards internal operations. Moreover, it enables efficient allocation within my team. For instance, if a question pertains to customer success, I can assign it to the CSOps manager and the team. Similarly, if it relates to a specific channel, it can be allocated accordingly."
"The most valuable feature of Asana is the tracking of comments and documents in one place."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Project are you can create critical paths pretty easily, and you can import from an Excel spreadsheet to your task list as you create it during your working sessions with your team."
"The standard project planning features and charts are most valuable."
"The solution is very complete. It makes it a great option for project managers and they can use it extensively in almost any organizational setup."
"The most valuable feature is the Auto resource leveling tool because it shows students that often, expert resources get over-scheduled, and that dealing with the issue by just using the auto-resource leveling tool would have a large impact on the delivery date."
"It has a nice interface that aligns with Excel and Word."
"It's most useful feature is that it interfaces with Project Server so we can, from my perspective, from a portfolio perspective, we can see across the organization."
"Microsoft Project offers comprehensive project overviews and the ability to rate down what we have and what we need in terms of software."
"It's an easy solution to set up."
"The mobile application of Asana has to be improved a lot because no one wants to do a complete project management task on mobile."
"It's hard to integrate Asana into other parts of the company workflow, so integration is an area for improvement."
"In Asana, there's no way to add a custom date field."
"Some updates are outdated, and their functionalities can affect the end outcomes."
"The documentation for integration could be improved. We require more information to facilitate the integrations."
"This solution has a learning curve, where it is initially difficult to use."
"A user should be able to identify an assignee for specific tasks or task types while applying the template, or at a minimum, allow for a default assignee. As it is, the template gets created with the just task dates driven by the project start and end dates inputted by the user. In my current situation, I'm assigning myself to many tasks, so I have to do that manually every time. Even if I eventually start adding other people to assign tasks, there won't be more than a handful to do. However, those few people will have multiple tasks. It would be nice to be able to select those individuals during the setup rather than having to do so manually once the project has been created."
"You need to have an action plan, otherwise, it won't be as effective."
"I would like to see both Time and Team based options improved."
"Collaboration is an area that needs improvements."
"Project is not easy to scale. It isn't a cloud-based solution where everybody can utilize it at the same time without version issues when you save your file. We use it at the enterprise level, but you have to share the files to others within your organization through Teams or SharePoint. One improvement would be to transition to cloud-based functionality. However, that might limit the functionality in other ways."
"The new version has made it a bit more complicated."
"The solution is a basic tool that does not give you analytical insights. It does not have any AI capabilities which can also help to plan."
"This solution needs more templates focused on types of projects to ease setup."
"It would be ideal if the solution integrated more with Azure DevOps and other work management platforms like Jira."
"I am not that close to it anymore, but I know that there were some cut and paste issues when we were trying to move one group of roles to another, and they used to muck up the interdependencies between the tiers, rows, and other things."
Asana is ranked 3rd in Project Management Software with 43 reviews while Microsoft Project is ranked 2nd in Project Management Software with 77 reviews. Asana is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Project is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Asana writes "Extremely stable, user-friendly, and easy to navigate". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Project writes "A stable solution that very accurately runs projects". Asana is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Wrike, monday.com, Jira and Trello, whereas Microsoft Project is most compared with Jira, Microsoft Project Server, Smartsheet, Broadcom Clarity and monday.com. See our Asana vs. Microsoft Project report.
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