When it comes to project management and workflow management tools, Asana and Jira are among the most favoured. There are good reasons for this. However, how do they compare against each other? If you want to decide which of the two you should use for your project management needs, we recommend you read the following before making a decision.

Tasks

Asana affords simplicity in terms of creating and tracking tasks. You can create and name a task with just a couple of clicks. Once you do that, you can easily assign the task to a team member or team member. Setting deadlines and altering the approval status for tasks are also easy- thanks to the highly intuitive design interface. You can also set the priority for a task- as high, medium or low. Add to these the fact that you can create sub-tasks under a task, and it is extremely hard to stay disorganized with your tasks with Asana.

This is especially useful if you work with a large team, with different team members working on multiple tasks.

Projects

As for projects under which the tasks are created, Asana gives you various templates to choose from- these include Marketing Strategy, Creative Requests, Marketing Project Plan, Editorial Calendar, Event planning and more. You also have the option to start with a Blank Project.

This makes Asana a powerful tool for project management. However, one significant element that’s missing in Asana-and one which is an advantage for Jira- is sprints.

Sprints

Many projects finish on multiple sprints. Indeed, there are certain projects a company might run through multiple iterations to finish. Sometimes, a project could be running over a protracted period of time deliberately- for instance, when an app goes from one version to the next. In such cases, multiple sprints are all but guaranteed. For projects involving sprints, Jira could be a good option.

But having said that, it should also be noted that Jira’s interface is comparatively more complex than Asana. For instance, In Asana, to move a task from one section- say, Planning, to another(like Under Review) you need just drag and drop it. The equivalent solution in Jira is a tad more complicated. These could cause hiccups in how you use the tool, especially during the initial phase. But Jira does provide certain features like a roadmap and project pages which Asana doesn’t.

Which one is the better option?

The differences in interface design and the feature lists are palpable enough in Asana and Jira. But except for in very particular cases, team leaders and Managers could put either of the tools to good use for their purposes. But pricing is a significant factor when it comes to the two systems as they offer quite disparate offerings in similar-sounding plans.

Let’s start with Asana.

Asana comes in three separate plans. One is the Basic plan- which is free of cost. The second is Premium which pushes you back by $10.99 per month and then there is the Business plan that will cost you $24.99 per month.

The Basic plan, though free supports unlimited tasks, projects, messages and activity logs. You also get unlimited file storage- with a cap of 100MB per file. That’s quite a generous offer considering you get all of that for free. One drawback is that the Basic plan only supports up to 15 team members. If your team size is bigger than that, you would need to upgrade to the Premium plan. Organizations of considerable sizes would do well to take up the Business plan.

Now, let’s contrast these features with Jira.

Jira comes in four different plans- Free, Standard, Premium and Enterprise.

The Standard model is $7 per user and the Premium plan is $14 per user. With the free plan, the maximum number of users that can be supported is ten, and the features it offers are also limited compared to Asana’s offering. So, if you have a small team size and are planning to use a free plan, you should definitely go for Asana.

The Standard plan supports 20,000 users and has an abundance of features. For instance, you get 250GB of file storage with the plan. You get support for just a single project with this plan though. To include more number of projects, you would need to upgrade to the Premium plan. The Enterprise plan would serve big businesses well.

Do these tools lack something crucial?

You can easily tally the pros and cons of Jira and Asana in relation to the price and your requirements. But there is one crucial feature which both these tools lack, which you should also consider when contemplating using a project management software: the ability to predict the project delivery date accurately.

Many figures need to be accurately gauged in order to get the right prediction- for instance, the exact duration that a team member spends on a task, without considering the time they spent on breaks. I’m Productive is a tool that helps you achieve such accurate predictions, in addition to serving you as complete project management and workflow management tool. To achieve precise project delivery time prediction, it employs powerful artificial intelligence.

To learn more about how I’m Productive can help you deliver your projects on time, please visit their website.

Please note that the prices and features listed here are based on information available at the time of creating this post. Do check such parameters for yourself on the websites of the respective service providers before making your purchase.