Asana vs. monday: Which project management software is best? [2026]

Back in the early 2010s, as a project manager for a manufacturing company, I lived in spreadsheet hell. Nothing tests your project management skills quite like juggling factory defects, container ship timetables, and impatient customers, all while trying to track everything in a folder full of Excel files. (I still get a twitch whenever someone mentions pivot tables.) If you'd shown me tools like Asana or monday.com back then, with their real-time tracking and automated notifications, I probably would have hugged you.

These days, both platforms offer sophisticated solutions that would have transformed my manufacturing struggles. But while both Asana and monday.com can handle complex project tracking, they take different approaches. Asana focuses on AI-powered automation and intelligent workflows, making it perfect for teams who want to reduce manual work and leverage smart features. monday also offers AI and automation features, but its primary differentiator is the fact that it's part of a broader "Work OS"—a deeply customizable platform that lets teams build and organize their workspace exactly how they want it, down to the smallest detail.

I've spent extensive time testing both platforms to compare their strengths, limitations, and ideal use cases. In this article, I'll help you understand which tool might work better for your needs, whether you're managing manufacturing operations, handling product launches, or simply in charge of a project that needs a better solution than spreadsheets.

Table of contents:

• Asana vs. monday at a glance

• Both apps are easier to use than you'd expect

• monday offers more customization options

• Both have excellent collaboration features for teams

• monday's reports and dashboards are more robust

• Asana offers more advanced automations

• Asana's AI features make more sense for project management

• Asana has a stronger free plan and offers more on its paid plans

• Both apps have strong integrations and both integrate with Zapier

• monday vs. Asana: Which should you use?

Asana vs. monday at a glance

Here's a high-level rundown of the key differences between these two productivity apps:

• Asana is best for teams prioritizing AI-powered automation. Its natural-language workflow builder, comprehensive AI suite (Smart Goals, Smart Chat, Smart Summaries), and generous free plan make it perfect for growing teams that want powerful project management without the complexity.

• monday is best for teams that need maximum flexibility. Its 15+ customizable views, 50+ reporting widgets, and flexible collaboration tools (like monday workdocs) let you create exactly the system you need, whether you're handling one project or dozens.

Both apps are easier to use than you'd expect

Project management tools are, perhaps unavoidably, naturally intimidating because of the quantity of information they need to incorporate. There are dates, assignees, priorities, statuses, asset files, comments, and so much more. So despite the commendable efforts of both Asana and monday to make project management more approachable, there's no getting around it: you'll still be faced with panic-inducing screens like this one from monday.

Fortunately, that's as scary as it gets. Don't believe me? Here's the task-level view in monday, complete with a SpongeBob SquarePants GIF.

monday makes it ever-so-slightly easier to understand tasks at a single glance because of its split-screen task view (available in the My Work view), color coding, and status summaries, with essential details on the left and project updates on the right. Asana's task view is user-friendly, too, but it takes a bit more digging to get the same level of detail.

I'm a big fan of templates for getting started quickly, so I was pleased to see that both monday and Asana have a strong selection of prebuilt options for different use cases. For example, Asana's post-sales handoff template comes pre-loaded with stages (onboarding, support, churn risk) and built-in automations that trigger as you drag clients from one category to the next.

Both apps also make it easy to see everything assigned to you. The My Work view in monday, for example, lets you organize tasks by priority, date, or status, and update task statuses without jumping between boards. (In Asana, there's an equivalent view called My tasks.)

monday offers more customization options

Asana tends to nudge you to keep your projects simple, with only a handful of columns included by default in its List view, for example (though you can add more). monday, on the other hand, wants you to customize to your heart's content: it boasts an entire "Column Center" with three dozen columns, including niche options like world clock, rating, and color picker.

The folder organization in monday is particularly powerful, especially since monday's recent addition of an extra layer of folder hierarchy. (Now, you can have two levels of folders within folders, Inception-style.) This is particularly useful if you're organizing multiple projects for multiple clients.

One thing that both Asana and monday both get right is views. It's easy to use either app to jump between, say, Gantt and timeline views to see your project from different angles. Each team member can view the project however they want: your social media manager can use a calendar layout while your creative director uses a Kanban board, and nobody gets in each other's way.

But Asana is limited to a smaller (though still robust) selection of views: List, Board, Timeline, Gantt, Workload, Dashboard, and Calendar. monday offers 15+ views, including everything Asana offers plus Map, Chart, Pivot Boards, Sales Pipeline, and more.

Both have excellent collaboration features for teams

Both Asana and monday turn each task into a mini-collaboration hub. Each offers basically the same experience: you can comment on the task, tag colleagues, attach files and images, and use AI to summarize the task or recommend edits. Each has unique advantages, too: Asana lets you record and embed video directly into the chat, while monday lets you expand your collaboration space by dropping docs into your project (more on that shortly).

Another perk of Asana is the built-in ability to send direct messages to other collaborators. This has some advantages over relying on third-party tools like Slack: Asana's direct messaging system keeps all project chatter centralized and easily referenced; it also neatly formats internal links to tasks and projects.

monday's main collaboration advantage is monday workdocs, which lets your team create and edit documents together in real-time. Unlike Google Docs, monday workdocs lets you embed live project boards right into your documents, track changes, and even set up automated workflows based on document updates. For example, your marketing team could embed a campaign timeline directly into their launch plan doc, so everyone's always working with the latest info.

You can also use either tool to manage your team's workload, though you'll need an enterprise plan to access organization-wide capacity planning. monday's Workload view uses color-coded indicators to show team capacity: blue for at-capacity, light blue for available bandwidth, and red for overload. (You can also adjust how "effort" is measured, factor in time off, and view workloads across multiple projects.) Asana's Workload feature shows you who's swamped and who has bandwidth, and can also make smart suggestions about who might be able to take on extra work.

monday's reports and dashboards are more robust

monday's reporting tools are incredibly customizable: you can design your own reports using 50+ drag-and-drop reporting widgets. Since your reports update in real time, they can serve as a high-level project command center, letting you know when you're at risk of going over budget, maxing out your team's capacity, or delivering a project late.

Asana's reports are great for keeping your project on track—showing you at a glance how many tasks are overdue, for example—but not quite as well suited to creating in-depth ROI-style reports. Still, you can customize your dashboard with all sorts of widgets, and Asana adds more all the time. (Recent additions include burndown charts and stacked bar charts.)

Asana offers more advanced automations

Asana offers three ways to create automations: you can select premade automations, draft them visually using a flowchart, or create custom rules (manually or via AI). This gives you an impressive amount of flexibility when automating your processes.

If you need to create a relatively simple rule—like moving a task when its due date approaches—there's a prebuilt automation for that.

For anything more advanced, you can use Asana's new AI Studio feature, which lets you create complex workflows with natural language. Just type something like "when design is approved, create review tasks due three days later" and it sets everything up for you.

You can also use AI Studio's Guidance for AI dialogue to add custom instructions for the AI to follow each time the rule runs. (You can even select the AI model you prefer to use.)

monday offers hundreds of prebuilt automations (e.g., "Every day, if [date] has passed then archive item"), including AI-powered options that let you dynamically extract data or add information to fields. monday's main option for custom workflows is a delightfully simple "when this, then that" automation builder.

For anything more complex, you can use monday's new workflow builder, which also offers a "build with AI" function. It feels less polished than Asana's AI Studio, and it's only available on the Pro and Enterprise plans. In my tests, it did a fine job of setting up the workflow's structure (which is the most time-consuming part), but it didn't automate the process of mapping specific triggers and actions to a particular project.

While Asana and monday both put their automation features behind a paywall, Asana offers unlimited automations if you sign up for any paid plan. monday is less generous: the entry-level Basic plan doesn't offer automations, the Standard plan caps you at 250 automations per month, and the Pro plan increases that limit to 25,000 automation runs per month. Asana's higher tiers also come with more advanced features, like approval workflows and complex date-based automations, making it the better choice if you need sophisticated process automation.

Asana's AI features make more sense for project management

Asana has really thought carefully about how to make AI useful in project management: their AI features feel natural and helpful, rather than tacked on as an afterthought. For instance, Asana Intelligence can create entire project frameworks from just a project name—type in "Q4 Product Launch," and it'll build out a complete task structure with all the right milestones, dependencies, and timelines.

In addition to setting up projects and automations with one click, Asana AI has a whole suite of features for different project management applications:

• Smart Goals for refining objectives

• Smart Charts for AI-generated charts

• Smart Fields to automatically populate fields with data

• Smart Chat for sourcing information quickly across projects

• Smart Editor to write AI-assisted content through Asana

• Smart Summaries for condensing project updates with AI

Some of these, like AI writing and AI chat, don't sound particularly revolutionary. But Asana does a good job of integrating them into the project management process in a way that's useful. 

For example, Asana's Smart Chat works more like an intelligent project management assistant than a typical "Ask AI" bot. It can quickly pull data from any of your Asana projects and tasks—or trends across all of them—and give practical suggestions for improvement.

Even better, most Asana AI features aren't rate-limited as long as you're on a paid plan. AI Studio (the AI workflow builder) is one exception to this, but you can buy additional credits if needed.

monday's AI features aren't as comprehensive as Asana's, but they've come a long way in the last year or so. In addition to building workflows with AI, you can also access:

• monday sidekick, a digital assistant that helps you brainstorm ideas and organize your projects (currently in beta)

• monday vibe, an AI app builder for creating custom work apps

• AI notetaker, which takes notes during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet meetings and logs them in monday (requires AI credits)

• AI board suggestions, which are essentially Airbase-style field agents you can embed into your monday boards

• AI blocks, which add AI capabilities like data categorization and extraction to your workflows

• AI templates for AI-powered automations

Confusingly, some of monday's most exciting AI projects are hosted outside the standard app, don't necessarily integrate well with monday's work management OS, have separate pricing, and seem to be targeted at a much wider audience than project management.

For example, Agent Factory is a monday.com project focused on creating autonomous agents to handle different tasks, but it has its own pricing and focuses on 3rd-party apps like Gmail and Slack. Meanwhile, monday magic is a vibe coding app that lives on a different URL and seems to mainly position itself as a lead gen tool to pull people into the monday ecosystem.

And monday vibe, which is integrated natively into monday's current suite of apps, is priced at $100-$250/month—placing it out of reach for most users.

So, in short: monday has a lot of ambitious AI ideas that don't really integrate well together yet, and if you were to sign up for all of them your software budget would be astronomical. I'd love to see the pricing normalize and the features come together as a cohesive AI suite. For now, Asana AI is more practical and economical for project management, especially since most use cases no longer require you to keep an eye on your AI credits.

Asana has a stronger free plan and offers more on its paid plans

monday's entry-level Basic plan, at $12/user/month, offers basic project management but doesn't include automations or integrations. Upgrading to the Standard plan, at $14/user/month, adds key features like timeline views, automations, and monday AI, while monday's Pro plan ($24/user/month) gives you time tracking, dependencies, and much higher limits for automations and integrations.

Asana's offers two plans to choose from. The Starter plan, at $13.49/user/month, includes unlimited automations, Asana AI, and basic reporting. Asana's Advanced plan, at $30.49/user/month, adds time tracking, goals, approvals, and advanced team features like workload capacity.

Neither app caters to solo users: monday requires at least three users for any paid plan, while Asana requires at least two. So if you're a solopreneur or freelancer looking for ways to manage your own tasks, you'll need to stick with the free plan unless you're willing to pay for more seats than you actually need.

If you're working with zero budget, Asana wins hands down. Its free plan is surprisingly generous: unlimited projects, tasks, and storage for up to two users, plus three project views and 100+ free integrations. monday's free tier feels pretty limited in comparison, with just three boards, no integrations, and basic columns.

Both apps have strong integrations and integrate with Zapier

Asana connects with 270+ apps, while monday connects with 200+ apps. The apps they connect with—like Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams—are similar. One difference is that monday's entry-level Basic plan doesn't include integrations at all.

While Asana integrates with slightly more tools than monday, both tools integrate with Zapier, which opens you up to the thousands of software connections that Zapier supports. That means you can automatically create tasks in Asana or monday based on events in other apps, and send information from Asana or monday to all the other apps you use. Build fully automated, AI-powered systems across your entire tech stack.

Learn more about how to automate Asana and how to automate monday.com, or get started with one of these prebuilt workflows.

monday vs. Asana: Which should you choose?

If you're still weighing your options, here are some final thoughts to help you decide.

Choose monday if you want complete control over your project workspace. Its extensive customization options, 50+ dashboard widgets, 15+ views, and powerful folder organization make it a good choice for teams managing multiple complex projects across different clients. Paired with monday's workdocs and robust reporting features, you get the flexibility to build exactly the system your team needs.

Choose Asana if you're focused on streamlining your projects with automation and AI. With intuitive AI features, a sophisticated workflow builder, useful collaboration features, and a generous free plan, it's a practical choice whether you're managing product launches, marketing campaigns, or cross-functional projects.

Related reading:

• ClickUp vs. monday: Which PM tool is best?

• ClickUp vs. Asana: Which is better?

• The best free project management software

• Pipedrive vs. monday: Which should you use?

This article was originally published in June 2019 by Emily Esposito and has also had contributions from Hsing Tseng. The most recent update was in December 2025.