Asana vs. Smartsheet Comparability – 2023

Asana and Smartsheet have lots of the identical strengths, together with huge customizability and an array of templates that can assist you get began. We checked out what makes every platform stand out among the many competitors and what could trigger them to lag behind for some customers.

Asana is a family identify in challenge administration, primarily as a result of it’s straightforward for anybody to make use of. Nonetheless, it provides a deep, versatile platform with loads of assets to get you going, like its template library. Strive Asana’s free plan to get began.

Smartsheet streamlines workflows with superior automations and instruments to construction your challenge work processes. Plus, with enterprise-level safety, you already know your knowledge will keep protected, regardless of your trade. Strive Smartsheet out without spending a dime for 30 days.

Asana and Smartsheet In comparison with the Finest Mission Administration Software program

Asana and Smartsheet each earned spots on our record of the prime challenge administration software program options, however they’re removed from alone as high quality choices to select from. In case you’re in search of one thing a bit of totally different than what these two platforms can give you, try our Golden Eggs beneath.

Monday.com delivers complete challenge administration instruments that make it a superb selection for many companies, and its fast onboarding helps you to get began utilizing it straight away. Strive its plans without spending a dime for 14 days.

ClickUp has nice assets for distant groups, highlighted by its collaboration instruments and complete dashboards. Begin utilizing ClickUp for as little as $5 per person.

Teamwork has invoicing instruments and the potential to incorporate shoppers, contractors, and different related exterior events in your tasks, making it very best for shopper work. Get a 30-day free trial of Teamwork as we speak.

Asana In comparison with Smartsheet

First, let’s take a look at what advantages and methods to make your workflows simpler every model has in retailer in terms of its core merchandise. We’ll summarize the important thing highlights of every of Asana and Smartsheet, then take a deep dive into what each excels at and lacks after this part.

Asana Highlights

Asana focuses utterly on challenge administration and has mastered the artwork of retaining issues easy. Its dashboard view offers you a fast and clear rundown of your duties—which you’ll additional break down utilizing subtasks—that’s organized utilizing tags, labels, lists, and teams. 

With pre-built guidelines, you’ll be able to automate elements of your challenge workflow so crew members can give attention to their duties at hand as a substitute of hand-offs and notifications. Plus, Asana is nice for admins by way of each workload allocation and challenge oversight. See how a lot work every crew member has and maintain tabs on how the challenge progresses with targets and progress monitoring. 

With Asana, you’re additionally having access to a superb variety of integrations to broaden the software program’s capabilities, privateness controls to make sure that solely related crew members have entry to tasks, and communication instruments like feedback, notifications, messaging, and challenge and crew conversations. The platform is versatile and strong sufficient to work for a lot of departments inside the identical firm.

Smartsheet Highlights

Based on its web site, 90% of Fortune 100 corporations use Smartsheet to handle their tasks. This spreadsheet-based answer offers you a shocking variety of instruments, on condition that it’s based mostly on one methodology. 

Get all of the challenge administration necessities alongside superior instruments for communication and collaboration, together with the flexibility to work collectively in a single doc and arrange dashboards for prime challenge visibility, plus content material reviewing and approvals. You’ll additionally get a beneficiant allotment of month-to-month automation runs on any plan, which helps your crew scale back delays by letting repetitive duties occur on autopilot. 

Smartsheet additionally sports activities useful resource administration instruments to trace finances, time, and workloads, enhanced by its insights that information you on prioritizing objects and decreasing bottlenecks. And, although a Smartsheet interface can get advanced, you’ll be able to simply discover something you want within the platform with its filters and formulation, which can take you straight to the data you’re in search of.

Asana vs. Smartsheet: Execs and Cons

We explored what makes Smartsheet and Asana work for thus many companies and what areas could current drawbacks for customers. Beneath, comply with alongside as we stack up their respective virtues and flaws aspect by aspect. 

The place Asana Shines

Simple to get began: Asana’s ease of use and quick onboarding course of make it one of many main decisions for challenge administration software program. It has loads of assets to set you up shortly, then use the platform’s means so as to add new duties with only one click on to swiftly go from an empty interface to a full accounting of your challenge or portfolio. Trying to find members and assigning them to duties is as straightforward as typing their names right into a field. 

Template library: Talking of getting up and working shortly, Asana has 27 templates that can assist you arrange, plan, and construct widespread challenge varieties. Use prebuilt templates for advertising campaigns, day by day conferences, new rent onboarding, and an entire lot extra. Choose the one which matches your workflow, then customise the weather to suit your wants. Easy tasks and assembly agendas may be arrange in mere minutes when utilizing an Asana template.

Granular customization: It could be shocking, however some in style PM platforms are remarkably stingy along with your means to customise dashboard or challenge parts. Asana is an enormous exception. Label duties, group them into sections, and create fields and milestones that may all be custom-made to your coronary heart’s content material. And challenge visualization is versatile, too, with timeline, record, board, and calendar views.

Complete dashboards: Asana offers you a whole view of duties on the principle dashboard and shows data in keeping with the way you set it up on your crew. Arrange major interfaces that present who’s engaged on what and how briskly the challenge is progressing, plus targets and scheduled conferences, multi function place. People can arrange their very own dashboards that zoom in on challenge work that pertains to them and their groups. Asana makes it straightforward to gauge challenge well being and priorities with only a fast look.

Communication and collaboration: Asana’s many avenues of communication imply that your crew received’t miss a beat whether or not they work collectively in the identical workplace or remotely. Constructed-in crew messaging reduces the necessity for third-party communication platforms and retains interactions centralized within the place the place different work is occurring. Identical to Slack, you’ll be able to ping people, units of customers, or a whole crew. And that’s not even together with Asana’s notification system and task-level commenting, which might embody file attachments, @ mentions, and extra.

The place Asana Wants Enchancment

Doc collaboration: Many different challenge administration options allow you to create and collaborate on paperwork inside the software program, however Asana doesn’t. You’ll be able to create paperwork in Asana, however you’ll be able to’t have a number of customers modifying them concurrently. Given what number of different issues Asana prioritizes relating to crew communication, it’s a bit disappointing that this beneficial PM characteristic has been missed.

Can get dear: Some companies can get by simply nice with Asana’s free plan, however anybody anticipating to make use of Asana options like automations, superior reporting, timeline view, or portfolio administration should go for a paid plan. The entry-level paid tier at $10.99 per person monthly, with the highest finish working a heftier $24.99 per person monthly. The excellent news is that Asana doesn’t have a person minimal, which many different options, together with Smartsheet, do. Earlier than subscribing, contemplate Asana’s free plan, which permits as much as 15 customers and has all kinds of instruments in its personal proper.

Restricted automations: Asana has greater than 70 guidelines for constructing automations to deploy in your workflows. That’s an honest quantity, however you’ll have to go for one of many paid plans to make the most of these. And, if you wish to create customized guidelines, you’ll have to pony up for the most costly plan. Nonetheless, the excellent news is that Asana doesn’t restrict your month-to-month automation runs like Smartsheet and another PM platforms.

The place Smartsheet Shines

Superior automations: Smartsheet’s automation options are so superior that they’ll in all probability take a minute so that you can choose up and get the cling of them. When you do, although, you’ll have some highly effective time-saving instruments in your arms. You’ll be able to create customized guidelines to deal with every thing from mundane duties that scale back your crew’s day-to-day workload to superior chains of occasions to deal with time-consuming in-platform actions for you. Thankfully, the automation builder’s drag-and-drop interface additionally makes it easier to create elaborate sequences.

Quite a few templates: Smartsheet boasts a dizzying array of over 350 templates to get you began on any challenge in a snap. The corporate has gone deep in contemplating who its potential person could be, and its exhibits with templates that cater to particular industries, PM methodologies, occasions, and campaigns. These make the method of implementing Smartsheet on your group quicker, which is particularly useful when your crew may have a bit of additional time to be taught the platform’s nuts and bolts.

Intensive reporting and analytics: Smartsheet helps you to generate experiences throughout tasks and particular person sheets to assemble precisely the data you need in every report. KPIs and different analytical parts may be stored entrance and heart within the person interface, with metrics at all times up to date in real-time. And this software program’s good analytics can determine tendencies in your tasks, spot bottlenecks, and provides steering on what you are able to do to keep up productiveness. 

Distinctive safety: Smartsheet has extra built-in safety measures than you’d anticipate from a challenge administration answer, permitting groups in extremely regulated industries to make the most of this platform with out fear. Past user-side parts like two-factor authentication and single sign-on, the software program additionally sports activities AES 256-bit encryption and HIPAA compliance, in addition to ISO, ITAR, GDPR, FERPA, and SOC compliance for industries like healthcare, schooling, and high quality administration.

The place Smartsheet Wants Enchancment

Steeper studying curve: Whereas Smartsheet can do rather a lot on your crew, it additionally takes some time to get by onboarding and reap the advantages. Because it’s a sheet and record PM platform firstly, its interface would possibly take some getting used to on your crew members who’re extra used to Kanban boards. The payoff is commonly value it for organizations, however in the event you prioritize fast onboarding and a user-friendly UI, Smartsheet will not be your most suitable option. 

Inflexible challenge visualizations: Smartsheet lacks loads of Agile PM options past Kanban boards. It’s not nice out of the field at establishing sprints and milestones, for instance. This will not be an enormous downside for everybody, however it will likely be for any crew dedicated to Agile methodology. Nonetheless, in the event you’re merely coming from a Kanban board-oriented platform with out the remainder of the Agile challenge administration parts, you might be able to get by with Smartsheet’s Gantt, grid, card, and calendar views.

Key options solely out there as add-ons: Smartsheet boasts loads of options, however some we’d contemplate being primary parts of a PM platform are locked away as paid extras. Useful resource administration is one distinguished instance, and the shortage of built-in time monitoring is shocking, contemplating it’s often a given on different platforms like Asana. 

The Final Phrase on Asana In comparison with Smartsheet

Asana and Smartsheet are each broadly used challenge administration options with a formidable vary of capabilities. Both can meet the wants of a broad vary of enterprise sizes and industries. However every additionally has some shocking or limiting omissions that may be key differentiators for customers of challenge administration software program. 

Asana’s person base stretches from one-person solo operations to enterprise-grade Goliaths due to its excellent flexibility in a user-friendly interface. Though it has good communication options, it lacks some necessary options like in-app doc collaboration. Smartsheet gives a stability of construction and customizability by a spreadsheet-based platform bolstered by highly effective automations. Whereas it takes time to get your complete crew happening it, it may be a severe asset to bigger operations.

Need to know extra concerning the huge world of challenge administration software program? Uncover extra data and options for managing your workflow and boosting crew effectivity in our full publish reviewing the most effective challenge administration software program.