Project management has progressed significantly since the days of Gantt charts, WBS components and complex software packages. If you decide that cloud-based project management is the right direction for your company, you probably have Asana project management and monday.com project management on your radar. Both offer a robust set of features, strong integration and strong grouping features. However, each tool has its own subtleties.

Getting started with monday.com and Asana

Learning a complex new tool is always challenging, especially something like project management, where there are multiple ways to configure task structure, visualization and reporting. Asana and monday.com both offer free initial versions, Asana offers a full-featured 30-day trial and monday.com offers a “permanent” free license with limited functionality.

In addition to the pricing subtleties, when both tools performed an introductory interview program to help guide a new user, the monday.com project management interview process was further elaborated and concluded with a list of templates based on user feedback:

Asana focused more on configuring a task classification and initial views and did not recommend templates for the user to move to the right foot.

After configuring your first template, each system integrates some basic training. Asana displays various tooltips with details of key features, while monday.com offers a basic training project template. The former would probably be more helpful for a new team member who is joining an already established project, while the latter was useful for configuring the tool for their team. monday.com’s Basic Training is a completely crowded mini-project, so you can learn the tool by interacting with it.

See: Basecamp vs. Asana: Project Management Software Comparison (TecriPublic)

monday.com vs Asana Managing daily work

While it is interesting to discuss dashboards, visualization, and reporting, perhaps the most important task of a project management tool is to help individual contributors and teams determine where they should spend their time and track when that task is completed.

Asana offers a rich and highly configurable homepage for users, with helpful information about their assigned tasks and what’s coming soon. The page is designed around configurable widgets that users can rearrange or remove.

monday.com offers a MyWork view, prioritizing interface workspaces, a powerful set of tools based more on overall project management than an individual task list. Which method is more beneficial to your organization depends on how your teams use project management tools. If they feel comfortable using this tool and use it as their personal task list, Asana is more prepared to work with members of the work tracking team associated with a larger project.

A team with a strong manager who works on the plan, focusing on monday.com projects can make them feel more comfortable.

See: 5 Key Resources to Improve Your Project Management (TechRepublic Premium)

Visualization and interface

There are dozens of ways to manage project work and relationships, from complex multi-level gant charts to cannabis-style boards. Both tools support the basic visualizations you can expect, including card views for individual tasks that allow embedding files and media, and quickly add team members using that notation.

This is another area where the tools reached the same goal with slightly different philosophies. The seat displays a board-style task and focuses on simplified, compelling visualization based on a simplified Gantt chart for scheduling and dependency tracking.

The initial configuration of monday.com was further strengthened by the work and structure dependencies that basically use nested lists and a Gantt chart that fans of tools like Microsoft Project will immediately accept. Different templates provide meaningful customization in the original views, and if the initial interface does not meet your needs, it is worth experimenting with these templates.

Both systems provide similar functionality. If your team is looking for a little more power than a tool like Trelo or Todoist, they will probably feel at home in Asana. However, if your team is more sophisticated, Asana may feel very limited and monday.com will be more comfortable and productive.

Reporting and dashboard

Predictive, with limited customization capabilities like Asana’s Task Management presentation, offers visually appealing charts. Creating and configuring new charts is easy, but advanced users may feel limited.

If you use other data visualization tools, monday.com’s interface lets you feel more at home with powerful filters, grouping and chart types.

Integration and automation

Asana and monday.com both offer strong integration into familiar applications, from collaboration tools like Slack and Teams to video conferencing and technology apps. Asana’s Workflow Tool group integration and automation, which uses metaphors like a basic flowchart to design integration with forms, automation and other tools.

monday.com uses a card-like interface that will be familiar to users of apps like If This then That (IFTTT).

I’ve created some basic integrations that send notification emails for work or add and sync items to my Todoist app that I use to track my tasks. monday.com provides a set of automation templates for each integration, which is extremely helpful if nothing else but providing some inspiration on possible or potentially useful topics.

Choosing between monday.com and seats

These tools are powerful, highly configurable and easily integrated with your existing applications. Although they look quite similar from a feature point of view, they take a short approach to project management.

Suppose your team is maturing out of simplified task lists and planning tools but doesn’t know PMP from WBS. In that case, Asana hides many complexities of project management from the end-user and is more grounded for managing workloads and medium complex programs.

monday.com, on the other hand, offers a powerful set of templates, configurations and tools that should be comfortable for experienced project managers or teams who are accustomed to working with more complex projects. Both are highly capable, but consider what you are trying to achieve with your project management software and it will guide your decision instead of looking at features.