Asana vs Mattermost

Asana has fantastic mechanisms for dealing with team collaboration. Not only can tasks be assigned to team members, but Asana lets users follow tasks and use hyperlinks to refer to team members within a task.

The Asana task workflow within a project is broken down into "Today," "Upcoming," and "Later." The tasks themselves have the status of either done or not done. There is also a subtask feature to group tasks together. Tasks can be assigned to other team members and are stored in the "Inbox" view for processing. This replaces email for some team communication.

Teams can have private (only visible to project members) and public (visible to anyone in the team) projects. Each member can also have their own personal projects.

Tasks can be viewed in list and calendar views. It's possible to display only the tasks assigned to the user or tasks organized by project or team. Single tasks can exist in multiple projects. Lists of tasks can be divided into sections and organized in many different ways – tasks that still have to be done, tasks that have been completed, by due date, by assignee, by popularity, etc.

Expanding a task will allow adding things like subtasks, tags, and attachments, as well as comments. Users can also subscribe to a task via RSS from this view. There's a separate view specifically for attachments.

Search lets you find what you’re looking for quickly.

The tagging system enables project managers to easily filter tasks.

There are many videos, tutorials, and reference documents to help you get up and running.

Asana provides a list view and a Kanban view which can be selected if a new project is created.

Keyboard shortcuts all involve the Tab key, so it is unlikely that they will interfere with shortcuts that have already been established.

It's possible to have tasks appear in a Slack channel.

You don't need to rely on someone else's servers, you can host Mattermost on your own server.

With Docker set up, you can install Mattermost with the following command:

docker run --name mattermost-dev -d --publish 8065:80 mattermost/platform

For other cases, installation instructions can be found here.

Almost all features of Slack are available in Mattermost.

You can download and use it as free for self-hosted server.

Yes, it supports markdown.