Asana vs. ClickUp: Which Project Management Tool Is Right for You?
Your team has had enough. Whether you’d been using spreadsheets to track projects, email to follow up on tasks, or even paper, you’re at the end of the road. It’s time to pick a project management tool. You’ve done a bit of research and narrowed it down to two options you think your team will like. Now it’s time to decide. Asana vs. ClickUp. Which one wins?
Here’s our breakdown of each tool, including features, pricing, and integrations.
What is Asana?
One of the first names in the project management space, Asana has been around in one way or another since 2011. Asana targets project managers pretty exclusively, and all its features are geared towards that audience. That includes templates, automations (called rules), goals, and more.
Asana has over 126,000 paying customers, including companies like Amazon, Spotify, PayPal, and Urban Armour.
What is ClickUp?
ClickUp bills itself as the one app to replace them all, and it’s a serious contender in that category. It’s not just a project management tool; it’s a whiteboarding tool, a word processor, a chat tool, and more, all in one package. All of ClickUp’s features point back to that promise: needing fewer tools.
ClickUp has 85,000 paying customers, including companies like McDonald’s, Zynga, and the MLB’s San Diego Padres.
Asana vs. ClickUp: Features
When comparing project management tools, it’s important to focus on the details. That’s because, at face value, sometimes these tools only seem to look different, while broadly achieving the same goals. However, when you use them for a while, you’ll notice differences that can either make or break the tool for you.
Task management
Broadly speaking, a project management app’s task management system needs to do two things. First, it needs to be robust enough to satisfy the most detail-oriented project managers. That means being able to build relationships between tasks that represent the way you work, cover dependencies, and manage approval from stakeholders. Second, the system has to be simple enough that anyone on your team can adopt it.
Both Asana and Clickup’s task management systems strike a great balance between these two requirements. Learning the basics can be done relatively quickly, but hardened project managers can build intricate subtask hierarchies, use custom fields to tailor the tools to their projects, and represent dependencies.
Which system you prefer will largely be subjective.
Customizability
One of the main differences between the two tools is customizability. Asana has some features which make it a more advanced project management option for hardened project managers, but its rigidity is one of the main complaints its customers have.
Asana has a number of views, which let you display your tasks in a number of different ways. You get Kanban boards, Gantt charts, lists, and more, but that’s where the customizability really stops. Using Asana means learning how Asana works, and learning how to work within those boundaries.
For users who want to tailor their tool to their projects — and not the other way around — ClickUp is a great choice. The tool is known for its customizability, which goes beyond different views and templates.
Extras
By extras, we’re referring to all the things each tool can do that don’t fall within pure project management. There’s a clear winner here: ClickUp.
That’s because Asana is single-mindedly focused on project and task management. Every single one of its features is dedicated to keeping your projects on track and on budget. That focus means it has a slight edge on the project management side, and some teams prefer its task management to ClickUp’s. But what about everything else that does into completing a project?
ClickUp aims to be your home base for all kinds of work. Its Docs feature means you can work on blog posts, briefs, and more without leaving the app. Its whiteboards eliminate the need for a dedicated tool like Miro, and it even allows you to send and receive emails without leaving ClickUp.
This saves tons of time you’d spend moving work from other tools into your project management tool, and it’ll save money on those extra tools, too.
Asana vs. ClickUp: Pricing
One of the most important questions when trying to pick between tools is “how much is this going to cost me?” Let’s dive into each tool’s pricing plans. Note that, on top of their regular plans, both tools provide custom Enterprise plans with custom pricing.
Asana
Asana’s plans are as follows:
- Basic: Asana’s Basic plan is free to use for up to 15 people and has few limitations. There’s no limit on the number of projects or tasks you can create. You have unlimited file storage and access to most of Asana’s views.
- Premium: For $10.99 per user per month, you get features that let you get in the weeds of project management. You can add custom fields to your task, build dashboards, build automations, and more.
- Business: This plan costs $24.99 per user, per month, and is catered to larger teams. Features like portfolios, goals, and workload are made for leaders who want a bird’s eye view of how their teams are doing.
ClickUp
Here are ClickUp’s pricing plans:
- Free: ClickUp’s Free plan is pretty similar to Asana’s. The key differences are that this plan can support an unlimited amount of users but only allows for 100MB of storage.
- Unlimited: For $5 per user, per month, the Unlimited plan gives you unlimited storage, integrations, dashboards, Gantt charts, and more.
- Business: At $12 per user, per month, this plan takes the features of previous plans and kicks them up a notch. That means stronger automations, custom exporting, and advanced time tracking, among other things.
- Business Plus: This plan will set you back $19 per user, per month. Most of the extra features here at aimed at admins working with multiple large teams. This includes custom role creation, custom permissions, and access to ClickUp’s API for building custom integrations.
As far as pricing is concerned, you’ll usually pay less with ClickUp. That said, there seems to be a bit of a middle ground here where Asana’s Premium plan might cover more businesses than ClickUp’s Business plan. That means that, depending on your situation, you might actually get a better deal with Asana.
Asana vs. ClickUp: Integrations
For many people in your organization, your project management tool is the hub of everything else that’s going on. While more specialized roles, like salespeople or developers, might spend most of their time in a different tool, that’s not the case for everyone. So as the hub of all this work, your project management tool of choice should integrate with as many of these specialized tools as possible.
Asana
Asana has over 200 integrations, which it calls “apps,” that connect with a wide variety of tools. They include email clients like Gmail, communication platforms like Slack and Teams, and more. A few of them are even made by Asana. These integrations are available with all plans.
ClickUp
On the other hand, ClickUp boasts over 1000 integrations. Think of any tool that’s part of your stack, and there’s probably a ClickUp integration for it. These integrations are available with all ClickUp plans.
If you’re going for volume, ClickUp’s the winner here.
Asana vs. ClickUp: Which is best?
It’s the big question, isn’t it? Is there a clear winner in the matchup between ClickUp and Asana? While that answer will vary depending on your situation, ClickUp seems like it might be a better option for teams that want a customizable platform with enough add-ons to replace some of the other tools in their stack.
That said, the rigidity of Asana can be an advantage. For larger organizations that need all their projects to look relatively the same, the standardization Asana brings to the table can be more valuable than an included chat tool.
Still not convinced? Check out our comparisons of ClickUp and Trello, ClickUp and monday.com, or ClickUp and Jira.
Don’t want to choose?
When it comes to your tool stack, there’s a way you can have your cake and eat it too. It’s called Unito.
Unito is a no-code workflow management solution with the deepest two-way integrations on the market for some of the most popular tools out there. Tools that include Asana, ClickUp, Trello, Jira, Airtable, and more. With a Unito integration, you can sync data in both directions across all these tools, meaning everyone can work from the tool they love most.
Prefer Asana but you’re stuck working with a team that loves ClickUp? Or maybe you’re a ClickUp fan collaborating with external clients that won’t leave Asana? Either way, you can use Unito to send tasks back and forth between tools, meaning no one’s missing an update. Here’s how Unito customers are making this happen: