Tech Corner Trello vs Asana: Managing Your Growing Team in 2020

Tech Corner Trello vs Asana: Managing Your Growing Team in 2020

By Kevin Snow

As your team grows it becomes more and more difficult to track what your team is working on and the status of different projects. Having teams working remotely to help stem the spread of COVID-19 adds an additional challenge to effectively keeping your project schedules on track.

Implementing a project management system is the most popular answer to how to manage a growing team and more complex project load. But picking a project management tool is a very personal choice that is unique to every business. You need to consider the size of your team, how complex your workflows are, your budget, and what features you need vs what features you want.

And because you will be entering information about your business into it, you also need to consider its security.

There are several different tools on the market that you can use that fall into one of two classes, true project management tools and online team collaboration tools. Which category online apps fall into depends on their built-in features and ability to handle complex projects, ie: a rocket launch.

Two of the most popular tools used by business to facilitate collaboration and manage tasks are Trello and Asana. Both systems are considered team collaboration tools as they are missing the advanced project management features found in fullscale project management systems including native time tracking and financial management.

Trello vs Asana: Features

The first thing you will notice when you log in to Trello is that Trello only offers a Kanban board layout. This isn’t a bad thing. They have focused their development on one project management style, and it has paid off. Trello easily has the best Kanban set up I’ve seen in an online collaboration tool. Most of the core staples of project management are readily apparent, including task management, resource sharing within tasks, communication through task comments, and a shared team calendar.

However, Trello does have a limited feature list. But the features they have all provide capabilities that allow users to use Trello more effectively and in some innovative ways. For example, Trello took one common feature and turned it into a really cool feature. Some project management tools allow you to measure task completion using an arbitrary sliding percentage scale. Which in most cases is a totally useless metric. Trello improved on this by tying the task completion percentage to an internal checklist you create, as shown in the image above.

Asana offers a longer list of features focused on providing project management basics and allows users to choose from Kanban boards, task lists, Gantt charts, or even a calendar when setting up their projects.

Asana has added a few unique features that Trello lacks including workload management and progress reports.

Workload management allows you to track how much work each member of your team is juggling at one time and set limits on their workloads to prevent burnout. Workload is shown as a visual timeline, highlighting areas where team members are within their workload thresholds and when their work exceeds their capacity.

The “progress” view on Asana is a view that lets the project manager announce to team members or guests how the project is coming along.

While Asana does include a more advanced communication capability for project team members than Trello, it isn’t Slack or MS Teams. Fortunately, both systems integrate with Slack and provide robust notification and task creation capabilities within the Slack client.

Both Asana and Trello allow you to attach files to specific tasks, but in Trello the only way to see that file is to open that specific task. Asana has a “files” view that allows you to track every attachment in a project.

Winner: Asana

Asana is the clear winner due to its wide variety of options and features available to its users.

Trello vs Asana: Usability

When it comes to usability, Trello and Asana take completely different approaches to ensuring functionality for the end user. Trello is focused on being an out of the box solution that users can start using with minimal effort, whereas Asana wants to provide the most functionality and options for users while balancing that with the ease of use for the new user.

Because Trello is focused on one project management style (Kanban) it has been able to evolve its new user onboarding to be very intuitive and provides step-by-step processes to follow to create your own board.

Asana throws a lot of options at you right off the bat, starting with how you want to view your project. They do a good job of walking you through the basic project set up steps and functions including setting up a new task and manipulating the task through as it progresses through the project. However, you aren’t walked through every function and capability Asana has to offer. However, it isn’t that hard to find the information and figure things out.

Mobile access is a key feature that any collaboration tool needs to have available and neither Asana nor Trello fail to deliver, although they do this in completely opposite ways as well.

Trello’s mobile app mirrors its desktop app almost identically which can create some usability issues when accessing it on your phone but on a tablet this is not an issue. The standard way of working with Trello cards is dragging them between columns. While this is still doable on the mobile app, it is not as easy as on the desktop app.

Trello on the other hand jumped with both feet into the mobile app world developing an app that considers how people use their phone and tablets making its feature rich environment easy to use on mobile platforms. Not every feature is available for mobile tough.

Asana has focused on providing mobile users the key features needed to manage your tasks and projects on the go.

Winner: Trello The Asana mobile app is pretty awesome but when it comes to ease of use, Trello’s simplicity gives it the win.

Trello vs Asana: Security

Whenever you compare cloudbased tools you need to consider the security of your data and your client’s data. Both Asana and Trello pass the basic security checks. Both of them are SOC 2 Type 2 compliant meaning a third party has independently verified their security controls, and how those controls are implemented. Both programs also offer two-factor authorization which increases the security of your account by forcing you to enter your password AND a temporary code sent to your device.

The number one indicator of security is a company’s history of breaches. I checked with my cybersecurity clients and they couldn’t find any history of breaches for Asana. No small feat for a company in 2020.

Trello however is not so lucky. Their parent company Atlassian had products breached in 2010, 2017 and twice in 2019. One being a zeroday vulnerability that was publicly announced on twitter, and one was an exploit that hackers had been using for months.

Trello also allows you to make a board public which allows Google to index it and adding it into google search results.

Winner: Asana Without the relationship to Atlassian, Trello would have faired better in this section. But Asana’s clean breach history and how they handle user information makes it the clear winner.

Trello vs Asana: Pricing

Both Trello and Asana offer very similar tiered pricing options based on the number of users you have. As your team grows, your monthly cost goes up. Both also offer discounts when you pay annually. Compared to other comparable software tools, neither Trello nor Asana are among the most expensive, but they aren’t the cheapest either.

Trello offers three tiers; Free, Business Class and Enterprise. Trello’s free plan is what puts it ahead of a lot of its competition. The free plan includes unlimited personal boards, unlimited cards, unlimited lists, 10MB per file attachment limit, 10 team boards, one power-up per board, 50 automated command runs per month, and two-factor authentication.

The power-up concept is important to understanding what makes the free plan so much different from the paid plans. Power-ups are à la carte features that you add to your Trello boards. With Trello, you customize which features (or powerups) you want for each board. And the number of features you can add varies based on the account type you choose.

The Business Class ($12.50 per person per month or $119.88 per person per year) and Enterprise (prices vary but start at $17.50 per user with a minimum of 20 users) accounts come with unlimited power-ups. They also both have a 250MB size limit for uploads and let you create an unlimited number of team boards. The difference between these two types of accounts has less to do with end-user features and more with backend management options.

Asana also offers a free version of its software, however the free option has more stringent limitations than Trello does. Asana structures it plans in the customary way with features available only at certain tiers. In the Basic (free) plan users have access to task lists, Kanban boards, calendars, app integrations, unlimited tasks, unlimited projects and unlimited file storage (up to 100MB per file), and up to 15 users.

Asana’s free plan is great to get your feet wet but most businesses will find that they will need to upgrade to either the Premium Plan ($13.49 per person per month or $131.88 per person per year) or the Business Plan ($30.49 per person per month or $299.88 per person per year) to get access to advanced features including custom fields, timeline, milestones, portfolios, workload tracking and approvals.

Winner: Trello This one was really close, but Trello gets the “W” for this category based on the extensive list of features that are included in their Free plan.

And the Winner Is…

You won’t be disappointed with either Trello or Asana, but if you are looking for a tool that can grow with you and be adapted to different teams or project types, our overall winner, Asana is the tool for you.

Trello comes out ahead for its quicker onboarding and ease of use, but it can’t compare to the overall number of features offered by Asana or it’s data security.

But that’s ok. Trello isn’t trying to be the most feature rich tool for business. It wants to be simple and easy to use so anyone can make a board; and it accomplishes that with flying colors.

Winner: Asana So, what do you think? Are you all in with Asana and its versatile features? Or are you all about the ability to set up a quick Trello board? Let us know what you think.

Kevin Snow is the founder of Time On Target, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses effectively use technology to grow their business. Kevin has helped companies all across the United States shorten their sales cycle and increase their closing rates by utilizing sales automation to increase the time sales teams are in front of prospects selling. You can reach Kevin at kevin.snow@time-on-target.com