Asana vs. Jira – The Most Eye-Opening Comparison Of 2022

Choosing between Asana vs. Jira, two excellent project management software, can prove to be quite a predicament, so I’ll help you determine which will fit your workflow best in this comparison.

I’ve already tried and reviewed a couple of project management software previously, such as Asana vs. Basecamp and Asana vs. Slack, to find out which will fit my online business’s workflow best. Rest assured that at the end of this article, you’ll find out which one to choose.

To help you make an informed decision, I’ll show you both of their key features, pros and cons, pricing, and more.

No need to wait further. Let’s dive right in.

1. Asana vs. Jira At A Glance

As two of the go-to project management software by many, let’s look at this Asana vs. Jira comparison to see how they stack up against each other.

4.8	4.7
Best Overall. Flexible software fit for any kind of project for any business needs. Starts at $10.99/month/user.	Best for Accessibility. Platform designed for software development projects. Starts at $10.99/month/user.
Try Asana	Try Jira Software

2. Who Is Asana Best For?

Asana is perfect if you want to have the freedom to choose what kind of project management style you want. Its features allow it to be flexible, so no matter how you want to manage your project or how your team’s workflow goes, it will work for you.

Its flexibility and scalability make it a good project management tool for medium to large-sized businesses and cross-functional teams. It allows for efficient collaboration for the team and keeps tasks well-organized.

3. Who Is Jira Best For?

Jira is a popular project management tool for software developers and app developers since they usually apply the agile method in their projects. Jira works well with agile since it is a methodology centered around iterative development where requirements and solutions evolve through team collaboration.

Jira works perfectly on small collaborative teams, especially agile teams, and cross-functional teams because they can take advantage of its affordable pricing and still get all the essential tools and features for effective project management. Jira can also cater to medium to large-sized businesses as its plans are also scalable and can handle up to 10,000 users.

4. A Close Look At The Features Of Asana and Jira

Let’s look at this feature comparison between Asana vs. Jira and see which features make one outshine the other.

Features
Board View
Calendar View
Task Dependencies
Workload Management
Reporting Feature
Open DevOps
Built-in Roadmaps
Third-Party App Integrations
REST APIs
Get started	Try Asana	Try Jira Software

5. Key Features Of Asana

Like other project management tools such as Trello and Monday, Asana comes with features that allow you and your team to improve your collaboration and task management. Let’s have a look at the features that make that possible.

#1 Asana Project Management Solutions

Working on a project with your team can prove overwhelming when you try to keep track of all the tasks and deadlines. The group can take a hit on productivity because of unorganized tasks.

Ever wonder what the solution to this is?

Asana comes to you with its project management solutions that let you organize your projects. You can manage your tasks as lists or boards for your meetings, programs, and more.

Now, when you’re done creating tasks for your team, what comes next?

You can assign these tasks to your team members. You can even break down the task into smaller parts, called subtasks, so they become more manageable or give additional steps to help them complete it.

Wondering if there’s more?

Asana also lets you do the following:

• Milestones: Let’s you see your project’s progress
• Task Assignments: You can set tasks for each member so the team knows who’s responsible for each task
• Sections: Asana allows you to group tasks into sections
• Custom Fields: You can also create custom fields
• Set Date and Time: You can add start dates, due dates, and times on tasks
• Synchronization: You can sync your tasks across projects 
• Project Overview: Gives you and your team clarity and context, and a glimpse of your project details

• Project Brief: This is the section where you can add a discussion on the scope of work, backstory, and any other details that will help your team better understand the project.

• Attachments: If you ever need to add files relevant to your tasks or project, you can add files from your computer, Box, DropBox, or Google Drive to any task or conversation.
• Forms: Need to create easy-to-fill forms? You can also make one and create a formal submission process for work requests.

• Rules: You can also create custom rules that will automate common tasks to help lessen errors.

• Likes: Acknowledge, say thanks, or give a thumbs up with a like.
• Approvals: Remove bottlenecks when you streamline your approval process. Your team will know which works need approval, when, and how.

• Dependencies: You will know which tasks are ready to start and which ones are waiting on others with task dependencies.
• Custom Templates: You can choose from over 50+ project templates or create your own.

• Copy Projects – If you have repetitive and common workflows, you can save time by recreating or making a copy of them.

#2 Reporting and Project Views

Sometimes having just one visual representation of your tasks is ineffective and doesn’t give you the whole picture of the project and its progress. To address this, Asana gives you different ways to look at your tasks and projects.

Here are the different views you can look at your tasks and projects:

• List View: The list view allows you and your team to see what they need to do, their work’s deadlines, and which tasks need priority.

• Board View: With the board view, you can organize your tasks like sticky notes or a kanban board, giving you a more visual representation of your tasks.

• Timeline View: In this view, you can see how the project maps out over time and see the relationship between tasks. You can manage dependent, overlapping, and unscheduled tasks and keep track of your work regardless of changes.

• Calendar View: The calendar view gives you a view of the tasks on a calendar and provides you a clearer picture of the work’s deadline. This view also lets you quickly recognize the holes and overlaps in your schedule, allowing you to make necessary adjustments.

• Workload Management: Asana’s workload management is something we all love. This feature promotes balance and helps you and your team avoid burnout. 

It gives you a real-time overview of each of your team’s work distribution across projects. Now that you know which team member has their plate full, you can redistribute tasks to ease members who have too much work.

I love Asana’s Workload Management as I rarely see a similar feature with other project management software. This feature is a welcome one as it helps me monitor my team’s workload and see which ones are having too much on their plate, allowing me to adjust their task distribution accordingly so I can lessen their work burden

Burkhard Berger

• Portfolio: This view allows you to monitor all of your projects in one place, letting you see the members responsible for each specific project. 

This feature enables you to have a high-level overview of your project’s progress and, at the same time, helps keep you and your team updated. You can also share your portfolios with the stakeholders, so they know the current progress and status of the projects.

• Dashboard: With the dashboard, you get real-time project information and insights. You can choose which charts you want to see to track the progress and pace of your projects.

Having all of these different ways to view your tasks and projects, you can have a more precise and better understanding of your team’s work. 

But is this enough?

Asana knows that there’s more to it than just different views; that’s why it gives you a reporting feature where you can track your teams’ progress and workload. It provides you with real-time charts and visual highlights.

What do these charts and visual highlights do?

They share work status for projects. Also, they help you recognize the problems that may arise. 

This is super important

Because once you know this information, you can make decisions that can help keep work on track.

Is this all you can do with the reporting feature?

Not at all.

 With the reporting feature, you can also:

• Write updates
• Customize reports with charts

These highlight the key takeaways and prompt action to ensure that all team members are on the same page.

#3 Third-Party App Integrations

Do you have tools that you and your team are already using in your workflow? Or were you looking for some features, but it seems like Asana doesn’t offer them at the moment?

Worry not.

Because Asana lets you integrate with third-party applications that can help you with your workflow. 

You have access to 100+ integrations to tools you can use for team collaboration.

Are you wondering what tools have integrations with Asana?

It integrates with Google and Microsoft apps, communication apps, and more. Here are some of them:

• Zoom
• Microsoft Teams
• Slack
• MailChimp
• Dropbox
• Box
• OneDrive
• Google Drive
• Github
• Jira
• Unito
• Everhour
• Hubstaff
• Hourstack

What if the tool you’re using is not on the list?

You can build your custom integration with Asana’s open API. Its robust REST API allows you to automate and fully integrate your tools. 

#4 Asana Mobile App

Out on an errand but worried that you’re missing essential updates? 

Or, are you a busy bee who loves to remain up to speed? 

Asana’s mobile app is here for you.

With this application, you can see your tasks in a list or board layout. You can even add assignees, due dates, files, and more and receive notifications on changes and progress on your projects, tasks, and conversations.

That’s not all.

With the app, you can also:

• Organize tasks and projects
• Manage to-do lists
• Receive updates from teammates
• Add tasks for to-dos, ideas, requests, and reminders

#5 Asana Communication Features

Most of the time, miscommunication is the primary cause of project delays. 

That’s why having effective communication within your team is crucial to your project’s success.

This is where Asana’s communication features come in.

The communication features allow you to build and maintain good rapport and communication with your entire team so that everything is clear and adequately communicated with everyone.

How does Asana do this?

You can leave a comment directly on a task to clarify and discuss task instructions and @-mention your teammates or other tasks and projects. 

Besides these, you can also add your teammates as followers, so they get notifications about task updates.

But that’s not all.

You can also send private messages to people, projects, and teams. Discuss with your team your project’s progress or keep everyone updated in project and team conversations and announcements.

6. Key Features Of Jira

Jira is another Atlassian product, the same company that made the project management tool Trello, in our Trello vs. Asana comparison. Here are the features that Jira has that make it loved by software developers.

Jira started as a bug and issue tracking tool for software developers that ultimately evolved into a platform that covers the project management basics. To bring out Jira’s best, use it with the agile method.

Burkhard Berger

#1 Agile Framework Boards – Scrum and Kanban

Is your team using the agile methodology and looking for ways how to implement it efficiently? 

Scrum boards and Kanban boards are the usual agile frameworks, but not all project management software offers this.

But Jira does.

These boards are two of Jira’s notable features. These two allow teams, especially software development teams, to manage their projects the way they work.

So, what is Scrum?

The scrum framework enables teams to manage complex projects by creating a culture of collaboration. 

So, what does Jira’s Scrum board look like?

It gives a visual display of the project’s progress during the development cycle. Knowing that there’s a lot of work to be done, unites them allowing them to focus and speed up the process.

And what can you do with the scrum board?

You can use the scrum board for:

• Increasing communication and transparency
• Promoting sprint planning and iterative development
• Improving team focus and organization

What can you do with Jira’s Kanban board?

Jira’s Kanban board helps teams track their tasks’ progress, improve tasks’ cycle time, and increase the team’s efficiency. Aside from being a task board, It can also function to:

• Promote transparency by having a single source of truth
• Optimize workflows by visually depicting work at various stages
• Easily spot bottlenecks

Scrum and Kanban are good to have, right?

These two frameworks are what make agile teams work efficiently and successfully. Jira helps you achieve these by providing you with tools that promote and cultivate these frameworks.

#2 Automation with Jira

Is your team’s daily workflow repetitive, and time-consuming? 

Are you looking for a way to cut down some time with these tedious processes?

You can save time and be more efficient with Jira’s automation.

It allows you to automate any task or process to take work off your team members’ plates. You can also boost your team’s productivity as you convert the tedious manual work into efficient automation, allowing your team to focus on more critical tasks.

Great, isn’t it?

You can do all that with just a few clicks! There are already built-in rule templates to help you get started quickly.

What else can you do with automation?

You can also connect your third-party tools to any workflow with automation. 

And if you have Jira Premium, you can confidently automate at scale across multiple projects with the global and multi-project automation rules.

Now, isn’t that convenient?

You can do all this time-saving automation quickly and easily, and it doesn’t even require any coding and scripting.

Just a few clicks and you’re done!

#3 Jira Roadmaps  

Everyone needs to see the bigger picture.

Seeing this ensures that your team’s plans and clients’ needs align with it.

You can do that with Jira Roadmaps.

With this feature, you can plan smarter, communicate better, and release more predictably.

There are two road-mapping solutions to help you meet your targets and achieve your goals: basic and advanced.

Let’s start first with basic roadmaps.

It’s available to all Jira plans, and it helps individual teams in the following ways:

• Plan and track their tasks and plans for the future
• Ladder or lay out your team’s work
• Plan and track your progress on the bigger picture for a single team
• Map dependencies within your team so you can account for them when making plans

Now, let’s head on to advanced roadmaps.

Unlike the basic one, it is only included in the premium plan and above.

Here’s what an advanced roadmap lets you do:

• Help multiple teams to collaborate, track the big picture, and more, and only works for company-managed projects
• Ladder or layout work from multiple teams or projects up to a goal with unlimited levels of hierarchy
• Plan and track your progress on the bigger picture across multiple teams
• Track dependencies across multiple projects and teams so you can get ahead of dependencies and blockings
• Plan with team capacity in mind with keeping goals on track by taking into account whether your teams can still handle the additional workload
• Create multiple versions of your roadmap to take into consideration different options

#4 Jira Agile Reporting 

Reports are awesome. At a glance, they show your team’s progress.

With this feature, you can give your clients and stakeholders valuable updates with real-time insights provided by Jira. You and your team can now make data-driven decisions with dashboards, agile reports, and more.

So, what kinds of agile reports can you get?

Well, you can get critical insights for Scrum, Kanban, and any agile methodology. Here are the data-driven insights for scrum:

• Sprint Report: This report lets you determine overcommitment and excessive scope creep and understand completed work in each sprint.
• Burndown Chart: The burndown chart allows you to track your progress towards sprint goals.
• Release Burndown: In this report, you can monitor and track the projected release date for versions allowing you to take action if your team is falling behind schedule.
• Velocity Chart: With the velocity chart, you can track work from sprint to sprint. This helps teams to determine work progress speed and allows you to make better estimates of the work your team can achieve realistically in future sprints.

Now, here are the reports for kanban:

• Cumulative Flow Diagram: With this diagram, you can see blockings easily by looking at the number of issues that increase in any given state. 
• Control Chart: The control chart helps you determine future performance with cycle and lead times for your product, version, or sprint.

Aside from scrum and kanban reports, you also get work management reports such as:

• Average Age Report
• Created vs. Resolved Issues Report
• Pie Chart Report
• Recently Created Issues Report
• Resolution Time Report
• Single Level Group By Report
• Time Since Issues Report
• Time Tracking Report
• User Workload Report
• Version Workload Report

A lot of helpful reports, right?

Aside from these reports, Jira also gives you dashboards that let you organize projects and track achievements in one place. It has built-in gadgets that let you easily customize your dashboard depending on what you want to see and how you want to use it.

#5 Jira Cloud Mobile App

These days, everyone’s on their phones. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Like Jira, it has a mobile app that’ll ease your mind. You no longer have to hop on your computer to stay up-to-date.

You and your team can now manage all aspects of your team’s work in real-time from the convenience of your smartphones.

With the mobile app, you can:

• Manage boards and backlogs. You can create, edit, and update any project aspect and ensure that work is running smoothly.
• Create and edit issues. With the mobile app, you can update work items with all the relevant information, add files and images, respond to comments, and more, even when you’re on the go.
• Stay up-to-date. You’ll never miss any updates with real-time push notifications showing your activity on all your projects.

7. Asana vs. Jira – Pros And Cons

Both project management software has their lapses and strengths. Let’s look at this Asana vs. Jira pros and cons to understand better what these two have in store.

Let’s get started with Asana’s pros and cons.

Asana:

Pros	Cons
Workload monitoring features	Absence of financial management features
Great with individual and team task management	No personal view
Excellent user interface
Free plan is good for up to 15 team members

Now, here are Jira’s pros and cons.

Jira:

Pros	Cons
Excellent free plan	Limited features geared on non-software development/agile methodology
Affordable pricing	No financial management features
Easy to use
Great for software development teams

8. Where Do I Get The Most For My Money?

It’s usually the pricing that becomes the defining factor of whether one will purchase a particular product.

Let’s have a look at this Asana vs. Jira pricing comparison and discover which one will give you the most out of your money. Which of the two is the better investment?

Asana Pricing Plan

Asana currently offers four pricing options.

• Basic ($0/month): With Asana’s free plan, you get unlimited tasks, projects, messages, activity log, and file storage (100MB per file), up to 15 users, list, board, and calendar view, assignee, and due dates, project overview, and brief, and 100+ free integrations.
• Premium ($10.99/month per user if billed annually or $13.49/month if billed monthly): This plan has all the Basic plan features plus a timeline, dashboards, advanced search and reporting forms, rules, custom fields, milestones, admin, console,  unlimited free guests, and private teams and projects.
• Business ($24.99/month per user if billed annually or $30.49/month if billed monthly): The business plan includes everything in the premium plan with the addition of portfolios, goals, workload, lock custom fields, forms branching and customization, approvals, custom rules builder, proofing, and advanced integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, and more.
• Enterprise (quote-based pricing): This plan comes with all the features in the business plan plus SAML, user provisioning and de-provisioning (SCIM), custom branding, block native integrations, attachment controls, data export, data deletion, and priority support. If you’re interested in availing of the enterprise plan, you need to contact Asana’s sales support for a quotation.

Jira Pricing Plan

Jira Cloud has four pricing options and the cost per month varies depending on your number of users. The pricing is as follows:

• Free ($0): The free plan is perfect for small teams of up to 10 users. In this plan, you have a size limit of one and 2GB of file storage, and you get scrum and kanban boards, backlog, agile reporting, customizable workflows, apps and integrations, automation for a single project, basic roadmaps, and dependency management, and more.
• Standard ($7 per user per month): The standard plan is great for growing teams. This includes all features of the free plan, except you, can now have up to 10,000 users and have 250GB file storage, you have additional admin controls such as project roles and advanced permissions, you can now also audit logs, and more.
• Premium ($14 per user per month): The premium plan is excellent for organizations scaling how they collaborate and track work. This plan has all standard plan features plus unlimited storage, global and multi-project automation, advanced roadmaps, dependency management, capacity planning, project archiving, and more.
• Enterprise (For 801 or more users: starts at $122,250 per year): The enterprise is fit for enterprises with global scale, security, and governance needs. This plan comes with all premium features except that your site limit is unlimited, and you get data residency and centralized per-user licensing.

9. Conclusion – Which Is Better: Asana Or Jira?

Now that this article is coming to an end, it’s time to decide which is better Asana vs. Jira. 

I’ll give Asana the crown since it has more advanced features and flexibility perfect for any project management style. Meanwhile, Jira’s strength stems from being more for teams using the agile methodology.

But, this doesn’t mean that it’s not a good tool. In fact, it’s great for some people.

If you’re a software development team and use agile, you’ll find that it will be a perfect fit for your team. Jira perfected its features with the agile method in mind, and it also has excellent integrations with most of the tools you use in software development like Github and more.

10. Asana vs. Jira – FAQ

I will now answer four of the most frequently asked questions about Asana vs. Jira.

Is Asana better than Jira?

Asana is better than Jira because Asana’s tools and features are more flexible and customizable to any management style than Jira, which works best if you’re using the agile method.

Is Asana a scrum?

Asana is usable by all kinds of teams, so even Agile teams can easily tailor Asana to their needs, including scrum practices.

Why is Jira so popular?

Jira is popular with agile teams because of its well-managed workflow mapping and issue-tracking features. It also has scrum and kanban boards and generates comprehensive reports.

Who uses Jira?

Over 3750 companies use Jira in their tech stacks. These companies include Pinterest, Twitter, and Udemy.