Speaker 1: So many tools, so little time. If you're here because there are way too many project management tools out there and you have absolutely no clue what the differences are and which one is the best fit for you and your business, hello, my organized friend. While working as a freelance digital business manager for the past five years, I've used all the big name, cool kid tools to manage dozens of freelancers, contractors, and multiple six figure projects and digital product launches, all that good stuff. And in this video, I thought we could dive into three of my all-time free favorite project management tools Asana, ClickUp, and Trello. We'll chat about my favorite features of each tool, which tool I would recommend for you, depending on what your priorities are in a project management tool. Hey, my name is Daya Freelancer, digital business manager, and most recently, entrepreneur. And as always, you can find sections on the play bar below if you want to skip to a certain part of the video. Your time is precious, so take what you need. And if you want to watch this on 2X, I will not be offended in the least. Okay, let's dive in. First up is Asana. So Asana is a cloud-based project management tool that allows you to manage, collaborate, communicate, organize tasks, projects. It is especially great personally, I think, when handling multiple projects at a time, which for most businesses is always. So Asana is my ride or die. Honestly, it's the one I've used most often for clients. It's one of the ones I always go to when I make recommendations for project management tools. It's user-friendly, easy to get started with, has a great free plan. I have many clients who only use the free plan and don't pay for it at all. In Asana, you can set up different teams according to different areas of your business, such as a marketing team, admin team, finance team, depending on how large your team is. In each team, you can then set up projects and tasks according to deadlines that occur. So yeah, you can do recurring tasks in Asana. You can recur things monthly, weekly, or just have it happen one time. So like most project management tools with Asana, you can break down a project into specific tasks, and then you can break those tasks into sub-tasks, which I really love because sometimes a task in a project is a relatively big task and there are multi-steps that need to occur for that task to be done. So for example, write a blog post is not a very specific task, right? Write a blog post can be a task under a project, but the sub-steps within writing a blog post could be things like first draft, first draft review, implement revision round, rough draft finalize, all the way up to like uploading, formatting, images for that blog post, all that good stuff can go into the sub-tasks so that it doesn't clutter up the main project view. But yeah, once assigned to a team member, team members can mark each task complete as they go, allowing you, the project manager, if you're the project manager on the team, to see the progress. The beautiful thing about Asana is that you can also actually integrate it with your other team tools, such as a time tracker to track where the hours on the team are going, Slack for team communication, Google Drive to share files, Google Calendar, so you never miss a meeting again. So there are lots of great integrations available for Asana. Asana is really ideal, in my opinion, for solopreneurs and teams. One huge benefit about Asana is that it's really easy to learn. In my opinion, it's one of the most user-friendly, most low learning curves of the project management tools to learn. So even your non-techie clients can get the hang of it if you just show them a little bit around the interface. The interface is very simple, easy to understand for anyone new to project management. Some might even say it's overly simple and too rigid, but that's kind of a preferential thing at that point. And if your client says something like, but what if no one checks Asana? How will the team know what is due and when? You can assure them that Asana has reminder tools that pings all assignees of a task or project's upcoming due date by email. It's awesome if you wanna make sure people are getting updated. If they're not in the habit of checking Asana yet, those email notifications can be really awesome. So not only do they get email notifications sent, but you and the rest of the team won't have to go foraging through your inbox for hours just to find project details. Asana also offers a lot of workflows to automate recurring tasks. It's very intuitive with different task displays, supporting custom fields, forms. There's also the option to build custom rules and approval workflows, which is really awesome. So once something is approved, then it triggers everything else. Although Asana has tons of features, lots of the common project management ones, some of Asana's best ones on the free plan are projects to organize your work into shared projects. So normally I'll have things like marketing, admin, product delivery, that kind of stuff, just to, if you have people working in different areas of the business, that can be really useful because then they can know that most of their stuff is within that one project. Tasks and subtasks, so to break up a task into smaller pieces, like I mentioned, to make it a little bit more manageable. Attachments to easily upload files from your laptop, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive to any task or conversation so your team members never have to search for the info that they need. If you are running a bigger team, you definitely should check out their premium features. They're pretty great. So some of my favorite premium features are things like forms to capture the right details for any project brief or requests, and you can easily track all the submissions of that form in one place in Asana. Project conversations to discuss a project's progress. Goals to set, track, and manage business goals. Portfolios to organize strategic initiatives and monitor the status of all your projects. And teams, so creating teams to organize your projects and connect your team members, those are some of the awesome premium features. So Asana structures work in the layout and view that work best for you, and I love that. I love that you can have different views for the same projects. You'll see that's one of my favorite things and the thing I look for in a project management tool. You can manage tasks by viewing them as a list, which is what it sounds like. It's a list of all the tasks you can view on a calendar, which is when you have all your tasks shown by their due date on a calendar, and a kanban board, which is when you have columns and your tasks are sorted by status, for example. And you can drag a task from this column to the next column, to the next column as you progress. So the first column might be like, not started yet, and then it'll be like, in progress, and then it'll be like, finished, you know? And you can drag it so that you can get a really good overview of the status update of the project. Besides the more than 50 pre-made templates Asana offers, one of the main benefits of their templates is the ability to create your own, giving you full customization, full power, to manage a project tailored just for your team. Asana's free version gives you up to 15 users for the team, so it's really great for small teams, for solopreneurs who are just hiring a few people. And the free version excludes some of the cooler perks, but it's still a really great option. It's really the default that I go to that I recommend most business owners start with. All right, so some cons of Asana. This is me being very, very picky. The first one is potential email clutter. You can change this easily in your notification settings, so just make sure that your team is aware of this, because I've had team members complain that they're getting like dozens and dozens of emails, like every single time somebody commented something or clicked something or took an action in Asana that they would get an email update. So just make sure your team is aware that they can kind of adjust that, and to make sure that they only keep the things that they actually need to be updated on available in the email notifications. The other thing is, in Asana, you can't assign tasks to multiple users, so that could potentially be an issue if that's something you do often. Another thing, as previously mentioned, if you're looking for a more robust project management tool with more features and capabilities, then you'll be happy to hear about our next contender. But yes, overall, Asana is a great default project management tool. It's jam-packed with features. It takes almost zero onboarding, in my opinion, to get started. I recommend this, Asana, for those of you that have a smaller team, wanna get started ASAP without much fuss, without much learning, and have a medium level of complexity for your projects. So, let's dive in. ClickUp is next on my list. I love it. I'm not gonna downplay this. I am a big, big fan. ClickUp, in my opinion, really stands out for its features. They're very comprehensive. So, some of my favorite features are the everything view, so a bird's eye view for all tasks across every level of your organization. I love a good big picture. As a business manager, I always like to see the big picture before I dive in, so I love that. Multiple assignees, so you can assign tasks to various team members. This is super cool if multiple people are working on something together. That's really useful. User groups to create groups of people to assign tasks to. So, when you have a task you need to assign to multiple people, you can just create a group like marketing or social media or Instagram team instead of assigning the task to every team member individually. Recurring tasks, right? Super awesome, super basic thing that I look for in a project management tool. To save time by automating workflows, which is super handy for tasks you have to do on a weekly or monthly or quarterly basis. Real-time editing to ensure everyone in a workspace can comment, edit, and work on tasks at the same time without any overlap or overwriting of each other's information. You can kind of think of it as like Google Docs when you're all typing in the same doc at the same time and it's not like, oh, my version is like over saving, overwriting yours. And templates, so ClickUp's got them. Yeah, ClickUp has many, many checklists, status templates to pick from, everything is customizable. So using one of their templates is a no-brainer. What I love to do personally is start with a template and then tweak it to fit my needs. And then I don't face that like dreaded blank page syndrome, not sure where to start syndrome. When you can start with a template, it feels like, oh, some of the work is already done. It's not quite what I want, but I can just work off of that. And just like Asana, ClickUp offers different views of your tasks, either as list, board, calendar, or a Gantt chart, for example. So you can kind of see how things are staggered for your project and the timeline breakdown. I will say that ClickUp has a tougher learning curve, for sure. It takes longer in my experience to get clients and teams on board with ClickUp versus Asana or Trello. So ClickUp's interface takes a little getting used to as you learn the purpose and functions of the different levels. There are more things to click on. As I say, in Asana, there are fewer options to click on, which I find a lot of teams, if they're using a tool for the first time and they log in, there are like too many things, options, distractions. They get very overwhelmed because they don't know what everything leads to. So it's also harder to find things. So with ClickUp, I feel there's a lot going on in the interface. So that's just something to keep in mind. So with ClickUp, just consider that it may be harder to get people on board to using it. You may have to create more training materials to educate your team on ClickUp, like walking them through the interface, maybe doing it live on a call, that kind of stuff. Another con of ClickUp is they actually have limited options for native integrations. So especially compared to Asana or Trello, it's only a fraction of the common major integration. So ClickUp, for example, has no native email marketing integration tool. So if you are using ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, MailChimp, you'll have to go through a third party like Zapier to send tasks into ClickUp. But on a positive note, where ClickUp really shines as well is pricing. ClickUp has got the goods or shall I say free goods. It has honestly a great free version with unlimited tasks and unlimited users included. So that's really amazing. Like ClickUp is my go-to tool if you need more heavy duty project management and you're not afraid of a bit of a learning curve. So if you're not afraid of that, I recommend ClickUp. Also, if you're a small team on a tight budget, this is a good option. This could be your winner simply due to the price and the all-in-one package they offer. So as long as a client's not too afraid of the tech maybe barrier and the team is more so digitally savvy, they are comfortable using project management tools, maybe they've used Asana in the past, then I will maybe pitch ClickUp if I notice that there's some things missing in Asana that we could do in ClickUp. Trello is kind of what I think of the grandpa of project management tools. That's how I imagine it because it's one of the first project management tools I was introduced to when I first started working online. It is primarily recognized by the very recognizable Kanban view, which are those columns where you can drag individual task cards back and forth. I'm not gonna lie, sometimes simple is best. Sometimes whatever gets the job done is the best tool for the job. Trello is really amazing for getting a clear view of what's being worked on, who's working on what, how far along projects are. Some of Trello's best features are labeling tags and comments to help you better organize your boards, colorful card covers. Those of you that know me know I love color coding, so that always gets me a plus point. Advanced checklist to break projects down into smaller tasks, you can open up a card and there are checklists in there that you can work through. Butler is awesome to set up automation, rules, commands to cut down on repetitive work. Now, cons of Trello. Trello did roll out different views, so now they offer timeline, table, calendar views as well, very similar to Asana and ClickUp. But the main point is that these additional ways of viewing your to-dos are only on their paid plans. In the free plan of Trello, you can only organize your work on Kanban boards. The workflow is based on, yeah, like I mentioned, dragging tasks from one column to the next. It might feel a little bit limited, but that's kind of the trade-off, right? It's very simple and straightforward to use, so it has its time and place, I will say. Although Trello doesn't have built-in task dependency management, the ability to view and leave comments on EAPS boards is a pro. Like Asana and ClickUp, Trello also has lots of templates to get you started, so you can always start with those. They're highly customizable. Some great templates examples are things like business, project management, remote work, sales, personal goals, they've got like all the kind of standard default templates that people can offer. And when it comes to integrations, also known as power-ups, Trello has everything you want and more. They're like, all the basic ones are covered, Google Docs, Google Calendar, MailChimp. There's a whole list of other integrations made by and for Trello to make your workflow even faster and seamless. And as for pricing, Trello has that free plan, which like I mentioned, includes that board view. However, depending on your needs, Trello can be, I will say, a little too limited sometimes to handle your full project management needs if you have a higher level of complexity. And having many cards can get a little chaotic, so I would recommend it more so to only individuals or very, very small size teams that have very few simultaneous projects. So if tech overwhelms you quickly or you get frustrated when there are too many options, buttons, features in a tool that you don't need yet, then yeah, Trello could be your best bet to try first. Trello is the perfect project management tool for simple types of projects. You can just sign up, create a board, and you're ready to go. So it's great if you wanna create anything personally as well, just for you. Now, one final tip, as you can imagine, there's no magical tool that's best for everyone. There's no universal best tool. There's only what works best for you and your current situation. And really the only factor that matters is, is this tool helping you get work done? If yes, then it's a good tool for you. All right, have you tried any of these tools? Asana, ClickUp, or Trello? Did you like it? Let us know in the sharing comment circle below so we can all benefit from your infinite wisdom. As always, thank you so much for watching and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye.