Remote working much? Well you might have heard of Asana. In its own words, Asana helps teams stay in sync, hit deadlines, and reach their goals. Asana’s competitive pricing plans, smooth UI, and easy accessibility enables it to position itself as one of the best productivity tools in recent years.
PRO TIP: Asana is amazing, but it’s missing one essential feature. Click here to scroll to that part of the article right now.
What is Asana?
Before we get into what Asana is, let’s be clear about what it is not. Asana is not an all-around project management tool. It is a task management and collaboration tool that helps your team organize and track their work.
Asana excels at managing projects that don’t require managing schedules and resources. These may include marketing campaigns, product launches, and more. Asana allows teams to make better decisions by staying on top of the actual progress made in the project. It is a great tool for project managers to delegate work, communicate responsibilities, and monitor deadlines.
Just looking for the Asana pricing? Click here to scroll to that part of the article.
Asana Features Overview
Asana offers nearly all the features you need to track and manage your projects efficiently.
Organize Your Tasks
Asana allows you to organize tasks by creating shared projects using lists or boards. You can assign tasks to team members and set deadlines for each step of the tasks for each of these projects.
You can also group tasks into sections to manage tasks, use custom fields to track information, schedule tasks beforehand, create custom templates, and more.
The Missing Asana Feature - In App Image and File Annotation
Imagine you're loving Asana. Making tickets and knocking out projects. You attach an image or screenshot to a kanban card showing a design for an upcoming feature release. But now you want to add some annotations to highlight aspects of the image – arrows, callouts, highlights, etc.
You probably know you're options. You can download the image, upload it to an editing tool, add some annotations, then download the file and re-upload it to the Asana card. That's a lot of steps.
Picture this! Built-in annotation tools directly within Asana. Yes, never even leave the interface to add your markup. That is, if they integrated the Markup Hero annotation API. In one click from the Asana card you can instantly add your annotations. Close the markup window and your updates are immediately in the card. It's magical isn't it. Here's a video showing how it works.
Not sold from that video, no problem, just test it for yourself. Here is a live demo showing a mock Asana kanban card with Markup Hero's annotation API integrated directly. Click the annotate button, add whatever annotations you want, click done and see the magic right before your eyes.
Keep Track Using Reports
Asana offers a Timeline feature to help you map out project plans and check the Calendar to get a birds-eye view of the projects, making sure that you’re aware of the overall progress.
Apart from this, Workload gives you an overview of how busy team members are, and Portfolio lets you monitor the status of all your projects, both of which provide updates in real-time.
Manage Information Using Admin Control
Once you create teams on Asana, they will be connected with a shared calendar and conversations. You can choose to keep these limited to your team or make them public to your organization. Additionally, you can designate admin control to others who will be allowed to add, remove, and manage the teams.
You can also restrict editing projects and make them comment-only. Asana allows collaborating with guests, who can be your vendors, contractors, or partners.
Communicate With Your Team
Asana also allows teams to comment on a task directly. They can also @mention teammates, tasks, or projects. This helps team members to keep their communication contextual.
You can add teammates as followers, which lets them receive important notifications regarding task updates. You can also send private messages to individuals, teams, or projects and start project discussions.
Stay Updated On-The-Go With Asana Mobile App
Asana mobile app is available for both iOS and Android devices. You can use the mobile app to create tasks and projects, manage to-do lists, communicate with your team, and stay updated on the work progress.
How Much Does Asana Cost?
Asana offers four pricing plans - Basic, Premium, Business, and Enterprise. You can get discounts if you pay annually.
Asana Basic
Price: Free
What it Offers: You can create and manage unlimited tasks and projects, store an unlimited number of files as long as they are below 100MB, and integrate with 100+ apps.
What it Doesn't Offer: The basic plan misses out on key features such as Timeline, Dashboard, Milestones, and others. Asana Basic also limits the team size to 15.
When to Use: You can use this free version if you have few projects to manage and operate with a small team. You can also use it to test the features for a couple of weeks before going for a paid plan.
Asana Premium
Price: $13.49/month. You get a discounted price of $10.99/month for the yearly subscription.
What it Offers: Asana Premium offers key features including Timeline, Dashboards, Advanced Search and reporting, Private Teams and Projects, Custom Fields, and Unlimited Free Guests, along with all the features offered in Asana Basic.
What it Doesn't Offer: The Premium plan doesn’t include useful features like Workload and Portfolios. You also don’t get advanced integrations like Salesforce, Adobe CC, Tableau, and Power BI.
When to Use: Asana Premium is a great option for you if your team handles relatively less complex projects that don’t require strict admin controls.
Asana Business
Price: $30.49/month for the monthly subscription and $24.99/month for the yearly subscription.
What it Offers: Asana Business includes everything offered in the Premium plan. Additionally, it offers Portfolio and Workload features to help you get real-time updates about the tasks being handled by your team members. You can also build custom rules to automate important steps in your work process and make the approval process seamless.
What it Doesn't Offer: Asana Business has nearly everything you need to manage tasks and collaboration. But it lacks advanced features generally sought by large organizations, such as robust security and custom branding ability.
When to Use: Asana Business is labeled to be the plan “for teams that need to manage work across initiatives.” If you are handling projects for a large organization and require a standard process for approving them, Asana Business is the plan for you.
Asana Enterprise
Price: You need to contact the Asana sales team for a price quote.
What it Offers: Asana Enterprise includes everything offered by Asana Business and advanced security and control features, such as SAML, SCIM, Data Export, native integration blocking, and more. You can also apply custom branding to keep it consistent with your brand. You also get priority support from the Asana team.
When to Use: You can choose Asana Enterprise if your organization handles sensitive data and requires additional security, control, and support.
Where Asana Stands Out
Asana offers some unique features such as custom fields, dependencies, advanced search capacity, and more.
Custom Fields
You can add details to a task using Custom Fields. For example, you can create a “Task Status” field that you can set to “upcoming”, “ongoing”, “pending approval”, or “completed”.
Task Dependencies
You can create task dependencies when one task depends on another task. This helps you avoid any delays and make sure each of the tasks is completed smoothly. If you want a better understanding of task relationships, you can use a Gantt chart to visualize task dependencies.
Advanced Search
Asana’s advanced search feature lets you search for tasks or conversations using filters that narrow down the search results. You have the option to use filters to specify Subtasks, Custom Fields, Dependencies, People, and Tags. You can also search by task status, deadlines, assigned members, and more.
Final Word
Asana is an excellent collaboration and task management tool for projects that don’t involve too much graphics. And while Asana is quite flexible and offers a ton of useful features, you might find it difficult to use for managing graphics-intensive projects.
However, as we point out, Asana is missing file annotation. If you’re an Asana client, and you like the Markup Hero API integration for Asana, please contact customer support and ask them to integrate Markup Hero!
