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.
"Asana has a wonderful user experience that is very easy to interact with and has tons of integrations with other products and tools."
"The ability to share projects and tasks among team members appears to be the most valuable feature."
"It is pretty comprehensive when it comes to the different views that it gives you. It gives you a Gantt chart view, calendar view, board view, and list view. It is kind of helpful to have different types of views and see how it views your different tasks. I appreciate being able to do that. The biggest thing is that it is extremely user friendly. Asana is pretty intuitive. Someone who is not tech-savvy can kind of catch on quickly. It is better than other tools like Smartsheet. Some of the other tools like Microsoft Project and Excel are great tools, but you have to invest a lot of time to learn them, which is not the case with Asana."
"What I like most about Asana is its simplicity. For example: we're not the only ones using it, and we onboard our customers to it, and normally, they have no questions."
"I love the way it monitors all of the current and past projects, and it sends notifications to keep everything on the track."
"I like how easy it is to use the rules within Asana."
"What I like the most about Asana is its API integrations because we use a lot of cluttered toolsets in our company since we need to cater to different clients, for which its integration gives us a lot of flexibility."
"The solution's user interface is very good."
"Dependencies (not typically effectively used in "Agile" techniques) allow understanding of actual project status and challenges."
"The solution is very useful for project planning."
"I use Microsoft Project to manage project timelines."
"The solution is stable."
"I like that I can change the task and include different resources related to the task."
"Microsoft Project's integrated timeline is tied to the project plan almost seamlessly, and you add whatever action item or milestone you choose. All you have to do is set up a column and click on the timeline. It will automatically put it in there and allow you to choose the type, whether it's a bar or if it's a milestone, just pointing out that single milestone"
"Microsoft Project integrates well with the Microsoft Office family of applications. It has plugins that interact with it and you can use it with Microsoft Teams. We can use plugins to communicate with JIRA, Projectplace, and Planview. It's not widely used in the company, of course, but it's something that can interact with the official tools that we have."
"I find all the features of the solution valuable."
"In Asana, there's no way to add a custom date field."
"The product must reduce the information on the interface."
"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."
"The messaging feature could be better."
"The solution can be difficult for new users to use because of the interface."
"There could be some improvements in terms of how projects or day-to-day work is organized. One of the challenges when it comes to rolling out to an enterprise is the way the projects are organized. It has a kind of setup where you have different projects and tasks, but it is not as organized as Smartsheet when it comes to organizing projects or different teams. It can get really cluttered really fast. JIRA has another suite to submit the support tickets. It would be good if Asana could branch out to incorporate some kind of workflow. It is great for collaboration and recording work, but there isn't any workflow. It would be useful if they can map out a workflow of who approves what. This is kind of a big ask, and it is not geared towards that."
"For large teams, scalability should be improved."
"There just needs to be a bit more direction on how to use it at the outset."
"I find the setup a little bit cumbersome."
"Microsoft Project should include more visualization, queries to filter out data, and more reporting structures."
"It's hard to reach technical people to get the help you need."
"The tool's deployment is complex. Integration and automation also need to be improved."
"It is a traditional Waterfall-based solution, so it doesn't lend itself particularly well to Agile development. You can record Agile sprints within it, but it is not really an Agile-based product. It can store the basic information about budgets that an Agile set of work is looking to use, but that's about it."
"The tool's most valuable feature is scheduling."
"It is positioned at the more high end. Sometimes it's more complicated than we need."
"Its reporting and its integration with some of the other related systems should be improved. It is not very easy to integrate."
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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