Kanban Tool vs Asana
When comparing Kanban Tool vs Asana, the Slant community recommends Asana for most people. In the question“What is the best task management software for small teams?” Asana is ranked 2nd while Kanban Tool is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Asana is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Intuitive
You will probably figure out how it works in a couple of minutes.
Pro Time tracking reports
Great and seamless time tracking with best time tracking reports.
Pro Customizable and reassuring
Thanks to the visualization of work, it's much easier to see the progress of work. Boosts the confidence in what you endeavour upon and reassures each step of the process. The customization allows to fit a system right to the process you've planned, so that we don't have to match our work to an external way, but build our own.
Pro Good number of integrations
Kanban Tool integrates with: Zapier, WeWiredWeb, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, Google calendar, iCal, Outlook, flexible and well-documented API for external systems integration, RSS feeds for boards, Chrome extension for adding tasks, JIRA® integration (Chrome extension - Kanbanira), adding tasks and comments from email, export/import Excel/CSV.
Pro Simple customization
Kanban Tool provides a collection of power-ups that allow you to customize it to meet your needs. Especially, "Developer tools" are worth mentioning. With this power-up you can add custom scripts and stylesheets to your board.
Pro Scalable
No matter how big a team you work in, kanban tool fits nicely. Thanks to the ability to customize the boards, it's easy to match a board to the size of the process. The kanban tool has been growing with our process for the past 3 years, we started with 3 people and 2 boards, now we have 24 employees and 16 main boards with several process steps each and the system works just as well.
Pro User friendly interface
Pro Work statistics
You can clearly see on a graph how much of planned work have you done already. It's very motivating.
Pro Pleasant design
Pro Swimlanes and customization
You can very easily adjust the board layout to suit your needs and even add swimlanes to have all projects on the same Kanban board.
Pro On-site version available
Pro iOS app coming soon
Just been told by the Support Team there will be an iOS app soon.
Pro Powerful team collaboration features
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.
Pro Free for up to 15 users
Pro Simple workflow
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.
Pro CSV export and print
Pro Very polished interface
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.
Pro Tagging system allows easily filtering tasks
The tagging system enables project managers to easily filter tasks.
Pro Provides lots of help for getting started
There are many videos, tutorials, and reference documents to help you get up and running.
Pro Supports Kanban and list views
Asana provides a list view and a Kanban view which can be selected if a new project is created.
Pro Well thought out keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts all involve the Tab key, so it is unlikely that they will interfere with shortcuts that have already been established.
Pro Integrates with Slack
It's possible to have tasks appear in a Slack channel.
Cons
Con Not immediately self-hostable
To self-host, your server needs to have 10 or more users, and prices on self-hosting are not disclosed.
Con Search could be better
Search is not reliable.
Con Non libre/open source (propietary)
Con Mobile version lacks calendar
Asana's calendar is present in the web version but is conspicuously missing in the mobile app.
Con Unable to manage multiple workspaces
Each "workspace" or "team" in Asana is strictly isolated. You cannot see your personal tasks versus work tasks or collaborations together, you need to log in to a different profile.
Con No task dependencies in free version
Dependencies is only available only to Teams and Organizations on Asana Premium.
Con Can not use list view and board view for a same project
Asana can only choose one, either a list view or a board view.
Con Strange UX with strange workflow
Similar to task the manager in Todoist or Wunderlist, but not too complex for under four members.
Con UX Design is overly opinionated
The workflow is not very customizable, which forces you to use a flow that may not be your preferred or best option.