Speaker 1: Hello my name is Paul Miners and welcome back to another Asana training video. In this video I want to talk about how Asana compares to other project management tools. This video is really intended for newer users if you are still shopping around looking at different project management tools not sure what to get then hopefully this video is useful to you. If you have any questions please feel free to leave me a comment below and if you do decide you want to use Asana and you want one on one help with setting up your account onboarding your team and really getting the most out of this tool then definitely check out the link in the description below to learn more about my Asana consulting and training packages. Now before I get into this video I just want to explain who I am if you've never been to my channel before my name is Paul I am an Asana certified pro I have a business where I help people to use Asana and set it up in the best way for their business. Now I actually don't use any other project management tools I don't consult on anything else because I've personally been using Asana since 2012. For a pretty pretty long time now and I absolutely love it it does what I need brilliantly. So whatever I'm going to say you know take it with a bit of a grain of salt I don't have the most experience with other project management tools I'm speaking more from what I know about Asana and what I think it is really good at and what I've been told by clients and how they've experienced other project management tools. Now the first way I think Asana is really unique and this might sound a little bit cliche is that it is really intuitive and easy to use. But this is the most common thing. That comes up with clients who work with me who have come from tools like Monday Trello Basecamp Notion some of these other productivity tools is that Asana is just the easiest to use and especially if you're going to be using it within a team you really want to pick a project management tool that is easy for your team to adopt because not everyone is tech savvy some people struggle to adopt new tools. So it really can't be understated how important the ease of use of the tool is. And so it is one of those things you really have to explore. So if you are shopping around definitely sign up to a trial with Asana start setting up a few projects and creating tasks and milestones and things and I think you'll quickly see that actually creating tasks customizing it is very simple and easy to do. Now as a company Asana has been around since 2008 it was invented by Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz both of whom were early employees at Facebook. In fact Asana was developed while they were at Facebook. And they were trying to create a really powerful and easy to use tool for their team. Since then the company has grown quite a lot. They have hundreds of employees around the world. They have offices spread out around the globe as well and it's an extremely well funded diverse company. They actually win awards for their workplace culture and diversity. And the Asana team do a fantastic job. They have great support and they release new features pretty regularly. They have a good rate of development in terms of listening to you. They have a great team of day to day users and shipping out new features. For the last few years we've had new features come out at a pretty nice consistent pace which is great because it's nice to be using a tool where the team is really looking after us giving us new features pretty regularly and the tool is always getting more and more capable and more and more powerful. One of Asana's strengths is that it's not just a task or project management tool like Monday or Trello which you know they're all pretty good at simple task and project management. But Asana is really looking at how can they create a product which is helping you to run a great a better business. So recently we've gotten features like goal planning because what good is project management if it's not helping you achieve some kind of goal or move your company forward. So now we can actually do goal planning here in Asana. More recently we've gotten things like reporting so we can actually set up dashboards and track our time and other metrics related to project management. We can create things like portfolios which is kind of like a dashboard for multiple projects and we can see when those projects start and finish. You can see the milestones related to those projects and so it really helps you to visualize what you have coming up not just this month but for the next few months or even potentially the next few years. This is something my clients ask me about all the time is how can I use Asana to forecast the work we have coming up so that we can work out when we can take on more projects or more clients in our business and I think using things like this portfolio view is a really powerful way to do that. And so this is the thing that I think is quite unique to Asana. Other tools like Monday and Trello they have other great project management features as well but they don't give you that really easy long term view that I think Asana does for your business. A lot of other project management tools that I've had a look at are quite restrictive in terms of how you can set them up and view your tasks and projects. Asana on the other hand is really versatile so we've got this pretty traditional list view. If you've seen tools like Monday this sort of list or almost spreadsheet layout and so I can set up tasks as rows and I can add extra columns if I want to track other bits of information related to my tasks. But if I don't like the list view or if I want to look at things differently you also have the board layout. This is very similar to anyone that's used Trello. This board or Kanban layout is becoming quite popular. So we've got that board layout I'm simply looking instead of going rows for tasks we've got columns for tasks. Now we also have the really useful timeline or Gantt chart view. This is particularly useful for projects where you have an end date that you're working back from and in Asana we can set up things like milestones. We can set date ranges on our tasks and we can link tasks together with dependencies. And there's also the calendar view as well. If I just want to look at a simple monthly calendar I can do that and I can move my tasks around in this view. So the point is I'm not restricted to using Asana one way because different projects will require a different view. Sometimes a project I really like using this timeline view so I can visually see when different things start and finish. Other projects work really well in the board view if they're more visual and have a lot of attachments and images like you can see here. And so Asana gives me the freedom and the flexibility to set up a project however I like. Asana is also very customizable without being too cumbersome or difficult to use. And so here in the list view you can see I've got some extra columns here. Customize this project and add new fields if I want to track my time, if I want to add a status column in here, priority, track costs. I can set up many different types of fields so I can customize my project however I need it to be set up. You can also do things like set up templates whether that be a task template like I've created here. This is a template for how we should be planning a meeting. I can also create a project template. So if I start a new project. I can use a template and I've got here for example a client template ready to go. Asana can also be customized with rules which is kind of like automation. So we can set up rules where if a task is created and it's assigned to this person move it to this section or when it's completed post a comment. There's all sorts of really powerful things I can do with rules. And you can even create forms that link into Asana projects as well. So if I want to create a new project. So if I want to create a simple form for submitting in this case an invoice into Asana or in a different project I have one here for submitting design requests into Asana rather than having to use a third party service, some kind of form service, I can set that up in Asana and have form submissions come in here as well. So there's lots of little features like that, little ways that we can customize our projects and really personalize how Asana is used to manage you know my business and my workflows. And another point I'll make on this topic is that I think Asana achieves a really nice balance between being something that's simple and easy to use if you want it to be. But you can customize it and it can become quite a powerful tool and it can really sort of grow with you without becoming too complex. And having met the team in San Francisco a couple of years ago chatting to their product managers I really understood that they're always thinking about how do we balance keeping it simple and easy to use. But giving people the power. These power features that people are requesting as well. And I just having seen some new features coming out over the last few years I can really see they're striking that balance really well to make it powerful but not too cumbersome to use. In terms of pricing Asana is pretty similar to the other popular names that you've probably heard of like Trello and Monday and Basecamp. They're all sort of operating in that sort of $10 to $20, $30, $40 sort of range. So as you'd expect there is a basic plan that you can start with. Asana is really generous. You can have unlimited tasks and projects in the basic plan so if you're an individual you can probably just use the basic and that might be all you need. Most of the teams that I work with they go on to at least premium. If you have more than 15 members in the team you're going to be required to go on to premium anyway and so you're looking at about that $10.99 per month if you are billing annually for that. Which is pretty comparable to Trello here I think is about $10 a month or actually $12.50 if you bill annually so slightly more expensive. Monday. They have a few extra options here but you're sort of looking at basic to standard again being around that $8 to $10 per month. Basecamp is pretty different, quite unique. They actually just have a flat $99 a month flat fee whether you're a one person team or a 10 or 100 person team it's just $99 a month. But Asana, Trello, Monday all pretty similar. A lot of clients that I'm working with now are upgrading to business so that they unlock the full suite of features of what's available in Asana. Things like goal planning. Portfolios. Extra customisable rules and things like that. So you're looking at more like $24.99 per month if you bill annually or $30 a month if you bill monthly. Which again, Trello don't have a more expensive plan. Monday kind of gets up to more that $16 or $48 a month billed monthly as well. I mean with price obviously you need to shop around and look at what are you looking for. And you need to balance the features that you require with the price you're willing to pay. And I can say speaking on behalf of my clients who use Asana really well they've all told me that they're more than happy to upgrade to the business because they get so much value from this tool. And that's what I'd really like to finish on is that the role that Asana can play in your business is that it really can become sort of the operating system in which your business runs. A lot of people that use Asana really successfully. It's basically the tool. Their team spends most of their time in. It's not just a tool for managing your tasks and your projects. You can actually contain all of your notes and even attachments and documents in Asana. And you can actually use it to communicate internally as a team as well. So it's actually replacing tools like Slack or email at least for internal communication. And so the really nice thing about that is when you sit down to work on a task or you're looking at a project you've got everything that you need in one place. You've got the tasks. The notes. Attachments. And your communication. And everything in front of you ready to go. You don't have to switch between multiple tools to go and find your work. And so I think Asana does this really well. Trello does have some communication tools. Monday I'm actually not so sure. I haven't really spent much time with it. But with Asana you can comment on tasks down the bottom here. You've also got messages areas within each project. And you can even just private message people on your team as well. So there's many different ways that we can communicate in Asana. So I hope this video has been useful. And I hope it's helped you to understand a little bit about why I think or how I think Asana is a little bit unique and a bit different to other project management and task management tools. Obviously I'm a little bit biased. I'm an Asana certified pro. So I think Asana is the best. But anyway as you continue to do research into other project management tools I hope this video is useful. If you have any questions please feel free to leave me a comment below. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video.