Asana vs Pivotal Tracker

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.

While not perfect kanban, Pivotal is somewhat flexible in that you can mark sections of stories. So rather than (or in addition to) a normal sprint, you can put a marker in to define all cards above that point as part of something, for example a release. Further, you can override the auto tracker and define how many points in a sprint. So there is some degree of flexibility which sometimes you don’t find in “purist” agile or scrum tools.

Pivotal Tracker has a Kanban feel to it, but takes a more opinionated “Agile” approach to feature management: It encourages items in the flow to be user stories with effort points associated to them to allow Pivotal to calculate your team’s velocity.

If you agree with the workflow, Pivotal offers a ton of functionality not provided by more generic tools like Trello. You can see your team’s velocity over time, organic smaller Stories into “Epics” (huge features) etc.

Easy to create features/bugs/chores with embedded files (screenshots, docs, videos).