Monday vs. Asana: Which Project Management Platform is Best?

As the team’s Operations Manager, I’m responsible for vetting and familiarizing myself with project management platforms that help move our company forward. When I started with Three(i) Creative Communications, all of our client-facing or company tasks were housed in a Google Spreadsheet. Mane, we have come a long way. In the process, we’ve experienced quite a few systems to see what works for us and what doesn’t. It was interesting in our team meeting one morning to hear that some of the team members liked each program (software platform) for different reasons based on their roles in the company.

Let’s explore the pros and cons of each of the two latest systems we have used, Monday and Asana, from an operations manager’s lens. 

We started out using Asana because it had a helpful free plan and reasonable pricing for our team size at the time. The pros of Asana are the ease of use with your mobile device app, its integration with Gmail and other programs, and the various plan levels ranging from free to $24/month per user. Asana made it user-friendly to track company goals, see team usage of the system, capture weekly team meetings notes and collaborate on tasks, an Operation Manager’s dream! The cons of Asana were the limited support from the company when issues arose, there was no CRM to track clients, and it didn’t help us do sales forecasting. 

At the top of the year, we migrated our team’s tasks and client tasks from Asana to Monday. This was largely due to the sales and marketing team needing a comprehensive company dashboard to help with budgeting and sales forecasting, along with task management. The pros of Monday are the ability to use it as a CRM, which allows us to create better email lists; advanced automation that helps ensure stuff doesn’t fall through the cracks; and features that help track our team workload easily. The cons of Monday are it isn’t easy to add a task from email or your phone to the platform, the only opportunities to get training are from third-party people/companies or online videos, and it’s a bit more complicated to add users outside your organization to tasks/boards. 

When you’re choosing your project management system, it’s important to consider what different employees in your organization will need in their roles to be successful before saying it works or it doesn’t work. In our experience, we evaluated the costs and additional features as our team grew and ultimately decided to switch to a system, that in my opinion, caters more to the needs of the sales and marketing team than the operations team. This realization is okay because it’s what the company needs currently to be successful. The next time you are charged with deciding on a new product or platform to integrate for your company, remember that each department will experience it differently, so be intentional about meeting their core needs.

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