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.
"The only thing I love about the product is that it is beautiful."
"The ability to build subtasks and break things down off of our major tasks has been very valuable. It is very stable and extremely scalable. The initial setup is very simple."
"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."
"By using this software, I have adaptability in my work, and it can improve the production of our company."
"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."
"The tool has a lot of integrations."
"Asana has helped me (as an individual contributor) organize my daily work and given me a way to plan for longer term objectives."
"The most valuable feature of Asana is the tracking of comments and documents in one place."
"It served the purpose. It was pretty user-friendly."
"The reporting and national resource capacity planning are the most valuable features."
"We use Microsoft Project for its timeline and task management capabilities. The primary advantage is the easy application of tasks in sequence, confirming dependencies, and establishing relationships between tasks. It simplifies handling conditions, significant dates, and dependencies between various tasks."
"The most valuable feature is probably the Kanban diagram. People are familiar with the Kanban tools. When they do their scrum meetings, they have that Kanban board where you can see the different tiles for all the queries and move them from left to right. IT is familiar with that because, for development, most of the tools have that capability. It could also be more graphical, like Asana."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is time management."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"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."
"Some customizations and functions are still not available, however, so far, they haven't been a deal killer."
"The stability of Asana is good. However, there are some issues with maintenance, when the solution is down. For example, there might be maintained for a few hours where we cannot use the solution."
"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."
"You need to have an action plan, otherwise, it won't be as effective."
"In Asana, there's no way to add a custom date field."
"There just needs to be a bit more direction on how to use it at the outset."
"The documentation for integration could be improved. We require more information to facilitate the integrations."
"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."
"Its reporting and its integration with some of the other related systems should be improved. It is not very easy to integrate."
"What could have been better is the integration with Office 365 so that if you're discussing a project on Teams or there's an email related to the project, it can be tagged to the project in Microsoft Project. That functionality is currently not there."
"It would be better if there were more access to Agile implementations."
"Collaboration is an area that needs improvements."
"Microsoft Project has much room for improvement. The solution is still stuck where it was in 2013. Not much has changed since then. There is a lot that can be changed in the enterprise segment."
"There are a few bugs that can affect the stability. This is typical of most applications."
"Project availability and speed could always be improved."
"I find that MS Project has limited control in comparison to other solutions in the same sphere."
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.
See our list of best Project Management Software vendors.
We monitor all Project Management Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.