Asana Room for Improvement
Their workflows and automation could use a big improvement. I don't even know if they have anything in that regard right now. I would really love to see a way where you can send custom alerts based on a task's completion or status change or an approval coming through. I would love to see a way to get some low-code functionality into Asana because right now, that is a big miss.
On top of that, their dashboards are incredibly lacking. The way the widgets connect to the projects, they don't pull the data in the way that I really want them to. When I build a dashboard in Asana versus Smartsheet, I can't pull in data via a custom text field in Asana, but in Smartsheet, I can. That's a huge advantage because sometimes, you just want to report on really niche tasks or a launch date in a specific project or a collection of projects, and Smartsheet's dashboard features will let you do that, but Asana won't. So, their dashboards are lacking, and the workflows are pretty below where the market is right now.
I would love to see a complete revamp of how they do dashboards right now. Dashboards are really poor. They don't display information well, and they don't look good. They don't pull in data in an advanced search kind of way. They are very simplistic. If you're a traditional project manager and you're PMP certified and you understand project management, you're going to be very frustrated with Asana's dashboards because they do not speak the language of project management. That's because of the way they are set up. So, I would like to see that completely revamped. It's just not an industry standard.
View full review »The documentation for integration could be improved. We require more information to facilitate the integrations.
View full review »It would be beneficial if Asana had a predecessor feature that automatically adjusts all subsequent dates when changes are made to a timeline. For example, if I assign a designer four hours for one task and two days for another, and the completion of a task takes longer than anticipated, it would be convenient if updating one date could prompt the adjustment of all other relevant dates. Essentially, this feature would streamline the process and eliminate the need for manual adjustments.
Buyer's Guide
Asana
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Asana. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
TA
Tyni Amore
Sales Specialist at Brown-Forman
Some customizations and functions are still not available, however, so far, they haven't been a deal killer. Asana appears to be open to suggestions, and as they are continually making improvements, these might be implemented in the future.
It takes some time to get used to and is initially difficult to navigate Asana. It gets much better as you get to know about Asana. Since you can’t set up an advanced search to distinguish between tasks, folders, and projects, I also have trouble with the search feature.
View full review »More features can be added.
It would be great if Asana could create a library for each project within the interface. For example, if you are working on ten projects and need to make daily changes to all of them, having a separate library for each project would be helpful.
View full review »KC
Kathryn Coffman
Founder at Coffman Consulting College Counseling
Improvement-wise, I would like more options for changing notification settings. Currently, there are only a few available options, but it would be helpful to have more control over the notifications received. For example, if you are on a project, you can receive every notification related to it, even if the task isn't yours.
It would be interesting if Asana could integrate with email platforms like Outlook and on, Gmail, and Google Calendar. This way, when a project has a due date, it could automatically appear on people's calendars.
View full review »MK
Mahmoud Koja
Customer Success Manager at GSA analytics
There is always a constant need to update the product to be able to give it more features in terms of tasks like adding commands or nodes. The product's page is not user-friendly. In general, the product's page should be more friendly to use. Asana does have all the things the user requires, making it a good product.
The calendar view in Asana has shortcomings and can be improved. The other element is the ability to natively be able to add additional connectors to better manage the planned time versus the actual time for each task.
The timesheet aspect is an additional feature I like to see in Asana since we now use another application called Toggl for managing our time cards. It would be better if we could do what we do in Toggl directly in Asana since it would be easy to plan activities.
One of the main things I've been wishing for is an ID, a short ID, just like Jira. That is another tool that I used before. It has an ID for every task in Asana. So it's a short way to know what task are you writing your things on, and it's easier to control your activities.
In Asana, there's no way to add a custom date field. That's another thing.
Both of those functionalities I'm wishing for, or I'm hoping for in the short term.
Occasionally, Asana does go down.
View full review »The use of Asana can be restricted if it is not set it up the right way. In some instances, there were subtasks where more than one person needed to review it, but I could only assign it to one person. I would have to create a subtask under a subtask and then assign it to other people. This could be improved.
View full review »RC
Randy Casquejo
Customer Relationship Manager Coordinator at Yamaha Motor
While having custom templates is a big benefit, I see a lot of opportunities for improvement in Asana's execution of the concept. 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.
View full review »KH
Kylen Hunt
Co-Founder at KH&Co
The world is moving to a lot of video-type communication and having a quick way to do video inside the platform or communicate via video from one person to another could be very handy. In a couple of other platforms, I have looked for a way to communicate with the team with a short 30-second video that I can just click on, record, send, and be done with it.
I don't think it needs additional features as much as having a way to onboard the team and having a better way to get everybody accustomed to using it. That's what we need to figure out. I don't know if that's anything that Asana can do as much as it is just figuring out how to build an implementation plan for the product on our end.
EM
reviewer2156610
Partner & Customer Success Operations Team Lead at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
The documentation could be enhanced by incorporating more visually informative videos that demonstrate how to accomplish specific tasks. While Asana's community support is valuable for answering questions, finding precise answers often requires sifting through multiple posts. Having concise and explanatory videos would greatly improve the user experience. When searching on platforms like Google, there are many individuals sharing their approaches to using Asana. However, the information provided is often not directly applicable to one's specific needs. Therefore, it would be advantageous to have comprehensive video tutorials that address common user queries. This would provide a more efficient and intuitive way of accessing information, especially when it comes to learning how to navigate and utilize Asana's features effectively.
Asana offers a variety of view formats that provide different levels of visibility. These include board view, list view, timeline view, and dependency view. For a single project, you can explore multiple views depending on your objectives. If you're working on a long-term project, you may prefer the timeline view to track your progress and have a macro-level overview of where you stand. On the other hand, for more granular tasks, the board view can be helpful in monitoring the progress and visualizing how things are advancing. The choice of view is not merely a feature selection but rather a decision based on the visibility it offers for your specific needs.
View full review »Asana should provide the ability to have read-only users. Sometimes, I need to collaborate with people external to my organization, and I would love to invite them to my Asana board and assign tasks to them. Sometimes, these are short collaborations. I work in marketing, and sometimes I work with agencies.
I would love to do project management on my side, which would be way easier. It's difficult to have short-term collaborations with external users because the operations team owns the final licenses, and I work for marketing.
If you are not tagged in the task specifically, even though the task is in your department, you're not going to get notified that there is a new task for your department. You need to constantly have the assignment program open, so you can check in and basically do the tasks that are new, to assign them accordingly.
From my department, if I send a task to a different department unless they open it and tag me personally, I'm not going to see this task anymore. That's a little bit tricky for us. We need that to be changed.
We don't get enough notifications. Everyone has to keep opening up Asana to check and see the tasks. If something isn't tagged, it won't show up in anyone's notifications.
View full review »MO
reviewer2219163
User Happiness Manager at a recruiting/HR firm with 501-1,000 employees
The user interface is so busy. It took me quite some time to understand how to navigate my way around the product. The application itself is busy. There’s so much information on it. When we log in to Asana, we have so many icons, and it is difficult to understand how to find things. The user interface is not easily accessible. The product must reduce the information on the interface. The solution has more color and fewer applications.
View full review »We have not used Asana on our private server. We have only been using the cloud solution. We need an on premise solution for government agencies. This would be an improvement if this was possible.
Better integration could be an area for improvement in Asana. It's hard to integrate it into other parts of our company workflow because our company infrastructure has a lot of security firewalls, but I'm not sure if there's anything Asana can do about it.
View full review »The messaging feature could be better.
View full review »AB
reviewer973497
Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
You have to understand some basic functions on how to do tasks. For example, I didn't use any help file or helping tool to try to understand better what it could do. It took me, let's say a few trials to find how out how to import somebody on the Cloud. There just needs to be a bit more direction on how to use it at the outset.
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Cameron Burden
Immigration Technology Specialist at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees
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.
View full review »If you have been using a tool like Jira for many years, it make time some time to get used to the minimalist layout in Asana. Once you get used to it, you may find it easier and faster to use than Jira.
I'm not an expert on Asana. I'm only a user, and it does exactly what we want it to do. We are really happy with the software, so currently, there's no area for improvement.
On the development side for technical project management, Asana is missing features. We only use it for discussing tasks and strategies, and we use it for customer to-do lists. It doesn't have the source code integration that Jira and Jira Service Desk both have. We have Jira deployed on-premises for our development department. Our technical project management is on Jira, while our general project management is on Asana.
View full review »GP
reviewer2182713
Board Member at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
The mobile application of Asana has to be improved a lot because no one wants to do a complete project management task on mobile. While on my mobile phone, I would like to get an update quickly or a short task notification so that I don't forget anything, for which the mobile interface is very clumsy.
I don't have anything related to the additional features required in the solution on top of my mind because my company hasn't even used 50 percent of the tool's feature set. We have customized the tool based on our processes. We are using whatever we need in the tool, so I don't have any suggestions for adding features to Asana.
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Gordon E Braun-Woodbury
Marketing Operations practice leader at Calibrate Legal, inc.
For large teams, scalability should be improved.
View full review »SL
reviewer2000274
Software Engineer at CloudSense
Some updates are outdated, and their functionalities can affect the end outcomes. When a task is deleted before submission, it is not easier to locate it. The software just requires regular updates, and everything will be okay. I did not experience many performance challenges as we are able to implement projects and submit them to our clients on time.
It is simple and more flexible to work with it from anywhere and achieve the set targets. I appreciate the vendor team for coming up with the basic solutions for handling any given task and project using Asana.
View full review »Auto-shift is an essential feature for planning, but it's currently not there. It should have this feature so that when you move a task that depends on another task, the dates should be auto-shifted. For example, you have two tasks dependent on each other. When the parent task is moved or delayed, the child task should also be delayed, and the date should be shifted. When we have a very long timeline, it's very complex to go task by task and shift the dates on the task. Auto-shift is a fantastic and basic feature of project management, and having such a feature in Asana would make our lives much easier. If Asana added this feature, it would complete the suit and close the project management cycle because currently, there is a gap.
View full review »FD
FreyaDy
Freelance writer
The solution can be difficult for new users to use because of the interface.
View full review »I would like to add Asana to other email platforms. If you use Outlook, you can get an email. And since Asana is integrated into Outlook, you can connect this email to Asana, however, this is not so in other mail applications.
We'd like the capability to be able to set up weekly reminders. Right now, in order to do this, we need to change the date every time.
View full review »KM
KarlMcGowan
Co-Founder at MyBenefits
Nothing is missing in terms of features at the moment.
You need to have a plan going in or it might be hard to use. You need to have an action plan, otherwise, it won't be as effective.
View full review »FM
Fran Maita
Analyst at 1980
- The inbox feature can be a little overwhelming if you are working with Asana just from its project boards and only checking it periodically. It would be great if it auto-cleared once a project/task is marked complete.
- Email notifications can get excessive. You have complete control over them but initially, they can be annoying until you set the frequency you want them. It would be better if this was set during the sign-up process.
- Notes, discussions, and attachments in subtasks sometimes go unnoticed if working from the main project board.
When evaluating project management software, the fundamental requirement I consider remains its ability to provide me a high level of view of all areas of the project so I can drill down to what is immediately relevant.
Asana does an OK job of this, but not as good as some of the alternatives out there.
View full review »PS
Peter Soncek
Works
This solution has a learning curve, where it is initially difficult to use.
View full review »JR
Jaufre Rouanet
Partner and CEO at JRC CORPORATE CONSULTING
We tried, but we haven't been successful with it. If people don't have the training, it is not easy to use. You need to make sure that the people are trained to use the system. They can provide more resources in the form of webcasts and videos that people can use to train themselves and understand how to use it.
View full review »If Gantt charts were implemented, this would be a near perfect project management solution.
View full review »For me, this is a perfect product. I can't think of any improvements.
View full review »They should take more steps forward in all modules that relate to employees management. They have all the information so they should offer more advanced data mining tools, and even some simple tools such as task timer etc.
View full review »I haven't reached the point where I've maximized the functionality or was looking for something that wasn't there. I recently started using the API with Slack, but haven't seen any issues so far.
View full review »LH
Lawrence Hecht
President (consultant) at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I shouldn't have to use InstaGANTT to get a good view of the projects. Also, it doesn't allow me to manage projects by hour. Finally, I want to look at sub-tasks on the top-level view.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Asana
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Asana. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.