Asana vs Todo.txt

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.

Todo.txt can be edited in plain text and then displayed with neat styles.

Because todo.txt is just a todo standard with various compatible apps to edit it, you can update it from any device as long as it can edit text and you can access your todo.txt file

It's convenient to be able to access your todo list quickly via your programming environment so you don't have to switch contexts, and to have a separate todo.txt file per project.

Todo.txt lists can be edited in virtually every text editor ever made and accessed on devices that support Dropbox. The user community has also created a number of apps for dozens of platforms.

You can edit your lists using the command line (e.g., Terminal) via a supplied bash script.

You have full access to the underlying programming rules, and therefore total control over your task lists.

Has been extended to include most things people want, including a multiple of interfaces and app for all platforms.

Todo.txt automatically and seamlessly syncs through Dropbox.

The community has developed a wide range of apps that interface with the basic file structure. These apps vary in how much they accomplish, how much hand-holding they do, their level of glitz, etc. They range from plugins for an editing app like vim to stand-alone, platform-specific GUI's. So YMMV depending on what you use. (todopy is particularly nice, a Python program that has a "console" mode which provides a keyboard-driven GUI.)

Does one thing: to do lists

It runs on MacOS, Android, and Python (in the Mac's Unix CLI) -- all for free.

At a bare minimum you just need to be able to edit text, but there are many apps and advanced interfaces you can install on many devices to supplement your to-do list editing.