Are you drowning in to-do lists, missed deadlines, and frustrated teammates? It’s a common struggle in today’s busy world.
Choosing the right project management tool can be the difference between chaos and organized collaboration, between missed deadlines and achieving goals.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering which tool you should choose between Asana and Jira.
In this article, you’ll find all the information you need to decide based on your project needs.
So, let’s jump right into it.
Asana vs. Jira in a nutshell
Asana and Jira are among the best project management tools. Small teams, scaling startups, and large organizations also use these tools.
However, it’s notable that their target audience and use cases differ.
Asana was founded by Facebook alumni and was designed with team collaboration and workflow in mind. It’s known for its intuitive and user-friendly interface, which is suitable for managing multiple departments easily. Meanwhile, Jira is geared toward technical teams with a narrower focus and tends to be more technical.
Board features highlight Asana’s versatility with Kanban boards, list views, and calendar views, while Jira offers structured Scrum and Kanban boards.
Their exporting and reporting capabilities differ, with Asana providing basic reporting and CSV exports, while Jira offers advanced agile reporting formats and various tracking tools for agile teams.
The customization of these tools also varies, with Asana offering predefined templates and views while Jira has highly customizable workflows. Both offer mobile apps but lack built-in communication features, which Lark has.
As for pricing, Asana’s premium plans offer features at a higher cost, whereas Jira’s standard plan is more affordable but has fewer inclusions. Their customer service also varies, with Jira providing better support options for paid plans.
Asana’s ease of use makes it suitable for teams prioritizing simplicity and quick adoption. Jira’s steeper learning curve requires 1 to 2 weeks for users to feel comfortable despite the comprehensive learning materials.
Asana vs. Jira: Which has the best features?
Check out the best features Asana and Jira offer to help you decide on your next project management tool:
User interface
Asana offers a more intuitive design, while Jira leans toward being more technical and suitable for agile teams.
Specifically, Asana lets you manage all departments, allowing you to communicate between them seamlessly. Meanwhile, Jira works best in managing smaller projects, like those that are more technical and narrowly focused.
Additionally, you’ll find that Asana lets you assign each column a different color for better visibility and distinction and choose stages with colors for each task. Meanwhile, Jira only lets you set one color per priority and has a default issue coloring.
Finally, Asana’s project boards and reporting interface are noticeably sharper, more robust, and offer automation features. On the other hand, Jira seems to do better in advanced features and integrations.
Board features
Asana offers Kanban boards, list views, and calendar views. With Kanban boards, you have a visual way to manage tasks and workflows and the listview if you prefer to manage tasks the traditional way.
The calendar view is handy for considering deadlines when reviewing your tasks.
Besides Kanban boards, Jira also has Scrum boards, allowing you to help your team manage sprint work. Additionally, you’ll notice that Jira’s Scrum boards follow a structured agile approach.
Exporting and reporting
Asana offers basic reporting tools where you can treat each project as a searchable database and create custom reports. Then, you can export your reports in a CSV format, allowing your team to customize the data further.
On the other hand, Jira’s reporting capabilities have an advanced agile approach and offer multiple formats. For example, you can get project reports from a project’s home screen. The issue navigator lets you get various output formats for third-party reporting software.
Finally, Jira offers Agile teams various reporting formats to track progress, such as Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Sprint Burndown Charts, and Velocity Charts.
Customization
While Asana is a flexible platform for project management, it also offers predefined views and templates, such as Kanban boards, list views, and calendar views. Meanwhile, Jira offers highly customizable workflows.
Mobile app
Both Asana and Jira offer mobile apps that are available on iOS and Android phones.
Chat and video conferencing
With multiple people needing to collaborate on projects, built-in communication features, such as Chat and Video Conferencing, are necessary. Unfortunately, neither Asana nor Jira have these, so you might want to consider Lark instead.
Lark lets your team use the built-in chat feature to share files, images, and videos. You don’t need to use a separate app to hold meetings. Lark’s video conferencing feature lets you hold one-on-one or group meetings with up to 1,000 participants.
You and your team can also focus on the meeting since Lark offers a feature that auto-generates the meeting minutes.
What are they best for?
Asana is best for small and scaling teams looking to manage several projects in one place, such as marketing, HR, project management teams, and teams with handline general projects.
On the other hand, Jira is designed for agile projects that product teams tend to use more, such as software development and tech teams.
Asana vs. Jira: Which has the best integrations?
Verdict: Jira offers more integrations than Asana, making it a better option.
Asana has over 230 integrations on the App integration page that are easy to connect. Some of these integrations are native and pre-built. What’s great about native integrations is their seamless data flow and intuitive workflows.
Asana’s App Integrations page lets you look for apps depending on your needs. Some popular categories are Communication, Files, Finance and HR, IT and Development, Marketing and Design Operations, and Sales and Services.
Additionally, you can integrate Asana with Zapier, automating tasks and workflows between Asana and other apps. Furthermore, there are no known bugs in these integrations.
Meanwhile, Jira offers more integrations than Asana, at over 1,000. Like Asana, these integrations are native, pre-built, or can be added through Zapier.
Most integrations are geared toward development tools, like Confluence and GitHub. Additionally, you’ll notice seamless integration with development platforms, allowing boosted communication and better workflow efficiency for agile teams.
Jira’s marketplace for its integrations is organized into categories, such as Agile, Time Tracking, Reporting, and Project Management, letting you quickly browse through apps depending on your needs.
Like Asana, Jira allows customization by connecting Jira to a wider range of tools. And so far, there are no known bugs in Jira integrations.
Asana vs. Jira: Which has the best pricing?
Verdict: Both Asana and Jira offer free software versions, but the features are noticeably different than the paid tiers. Here’s a basic comparison of their free plans:
Asana’s Standard plan costs $10.99 per user per month when billed annually, while its premium plan is $24.99. These paid plans include unlimited users, 100 GB storage, access to over 100 integrations, and advanced reporting and dashboards.
Meanwhile, Jira’s standard plan costs $8.15 per user monthly, billed annually. Its premium plan is $16 monthly per user, billed annually. The Standard Plan only includes up to 10 users, 250 GB storage, access to only three integrations, and advanced reporting dashboards.
If you’re looking for a more affordable option, Jira’s Standard plan is cheaper than Asana. However, if you’re looking for a free version, Asana’s Personal version is an excellent choice for small teams of up to 10 people.
Asana vs. Jira: Which has the best customer service?
Verdict: Considering the support options these software offer, Jira turns out to be the better option for its response times for paid plans and availability of product demos.
Asana offers various support options to help you get the most out of this software.
Support ticket through Asana Support Bot (on the website): This is on the bottom-right of the Help Center homepage, allowing users to create support tickets and receive assistance from the Support team.
Community forum: Users can ask questions, share ideas and issues, as well as learn from the experiences of others.
Knowledge base: It has the Help Center, where you can find updated information, offering concise and easy-to-navigate articles, tutorials, best practices, and useful tips.
In-depth courses: Asana offers project management, work management, and team collaboration courses.
For Enterprise subscriptions, 24/7 English support is available with a response time of 2 business hours.
Jira also offers several support options, including the following:
Support ticket: Let you create a support ticket and get help from their support team.
FAQ page: This allows you to check for burning questions and quick fixes.
Contact form: Use the form to reach out to their support team.
Product demos: Join a weekly product demo to learn how to use the Jira software.
Response times from their support team vary depending on your plan. Standard subscriptions can take from 2 business hours to 2 business days, depending on the level of inquiry impact. Their support team is available 9 hours per day, Mon-Fri.
Meanwhile, customers with Enterprise subscriptions might receive responses from their dedicated team between 30 minutes to 24 hours, depending on their inquiry impact level. Enterprise customers also have access to 24/7 support.
Asana vs. Jira: Which is the easiest to use?
Verdict: Asana is easier to use than Jira. Asana is a better choice for teams prioritizing simplicity and quick adoption than Jira. It has an intuitive interface, and the average learning curve typically takes less than a week.
Additionally, Asana provides extensive tutorials and knowledge base, making onboarding easier.
On the other hand, Jira has a more complex feature set; the learning curve is steeper. It generally takes 1-2 weeks for users to feel comfortable with the tool. However, its comprehensive training resources help users a lot.
As for integrations, Asana has a wider range of easy-to-set-up integrations. Popular ones include Slack, Google Drive, and Dropbox to simplify workflow.
Jira offers deeper integrations with development-focused tools, like Git and Confluence, making it ideal for agile teams. However, setting up these integrations can be complex.
About their Dashboard or Home interface, Asana noticeably prioritizes visual clarity with a clean, drag-and-drop interface. It also has customizable dashboards that let you personalize your view and easily track your project and teams’ progress.
Suppose you’re looking to migrate from your current platform to Asana. In that case, Asana provides resources to help you make the transition manageable, such as a guide on importing data from other tools.
Similarly, Jira offers specific guides to help you import your data into it using CSV, JSON, Bitbucket, or Trello importers.
Asana vs. Jira: Which is the most secure and compliant?
Verdict: Jira is the better option regarding security and compliance as it hasn’t reported any major data breaches yet and follows the same encryption protocols as Asana.
Asana takes the security of its users’ data very seriously. It encrypts customer data in transit and at rest using industry-standard encryption algorithms, such as TLS 1.2 and AES-256. Customer data is stored cross-regionally with AWS, and data backups are encrypted, which is the same standard employed by banks and governments.
Additionally, Asana has achieved many security certifications and complies with stringent compliance criteria to guarantee utmost security. For example, Asana has received SOC 2 Type II compliance, which is given to organizations with robust security procedures.
While Asana experienced a minor data breach in 2017, affecting non-critical user information, they promptly addressed the issue and implemented additional security measures.
Similarly, Jira follows the industry-standard TLS 1.2+ encryption protocol, ensuring secure communication between your device and the platform. Unlike Asana, it hasn’t reported any major data breaches yet.
Asana vs. Jira: What are other users saying?
Users like Asana's ease of use, versatility, and collaboration features. They appreciate the ability to create and assign tasks, monitor progress, integrate with other tools, and automate workflows. Also, users praise the user-friendly interface and the customer support.
On the other hand, some users dislike the pricing system, the learning curve, and the limitations of Asana.
Specifically, they complain about the unclear and expensive pricing plans, the overwhelming and confusing features, and the lack of some functions, such as multiple assignees, spell check, and data automation. Others also reported challenges with customer service and implementation.
Despite these complaints, Asana has a high reputation among its users, with a G2 rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars and over 9,000 user reviews.
Jira also received an impressive G2 rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars based on over 5,600 reviews. Users appreciate Jira's flexibility, customization, and integration capabilities. Also, users like the features that support agile and scrum methodologies, such as boards, sprints, and backlogs.
In contrast, some users complain about Jira's complexity, learning curve, and pricing. Others also reported performance issues, bugs, and glitches with the software. Some common bugs and complaints are found in Jira’s syncing and notification features.
Asana vs. Jira: Which is right for you?
Asana and Jira are among the most popular project management tools available these days, and both have strong reviews online. Both are also used by small teams, scaling startups, and even large corporations. However, these tools differ in their target market and specific use cases.
Asana is popular among small and scaling teams looking to manage various project types in a single place. It has an impressive user interface and general utility, making it a better fit for general project management software.
On the other hand, Jira is widely used by engineering and product teams as it is specifically designed for their needs. It has more advanced features and integrations and better fits agile project management solutions.
Lark Project is another project management tool gaining popularity with product development teams. It offers a range of features, such as task management, workflows, and bug tracking, making it a great alternative to Jira.
Lark Base, on the other hand, is an excellent alternative to Asana. It has task management, team collaboration, and project tracking tools fitting for small and scaling teams.
In addition to these features, Lark also offers other tools that neither Asana nor Jira have. For example, Lark has built-in messenger, video conferencing, and cloud storage, making it an all-in-one collaboration suite, ideal for any business size and project needs.
Ready to pick the one between Asana and Jira?
Both Asana and Jira are solid project management tools. However, they differ in usage, with Asana being best for general teams and Jira only good for technical teams.
While Asana has an intuitive user experience and is quick for users to adopt it, Jira has a steep learning curve because it’s highly technical.
If you want to explore other project management tools that offer the same key features Asana and Jira have, check out Lark and try it now.
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