Asana vs Jira vs Monday vs Trello — Project Management in 2019
Comparing features, integrations, support, popularity… who should we choose?
In this post, we’ll be reviewing and comparing the big four project management tools for project managers and technical teams to see the strengths and weaknesses and enable project managers and team members make better-informed choices.
TL;DR: this article is a comparison article for the four top project management tools in alphabetical order: Asana, Jira, Monday and Trello focusing on metrics like features, popularity, integrations and support.
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Overview
1. Asana
Asana is a task management tool designed to help teams organise, track, and manage their work. Easily create projects, then create tasks to be completed within the project, you can also add your team members to specific tasks or projects. This would make you totally forget about using email as a communication tool within your team as all you need to share notes, receive notifications, add due dates and upload attachments to conversations ships with Asana, multiple workspaces are also supported. Asana also has an easy-to-use rest api.
2. Jira
Developed by the team at Atlassian, Jira is an issue and bug tracking tool for project management specially suited for agile teams. It helps teams members capture and organise issues, prioritise, take and manage actions, it ships with workflows to match your already existing processes. Jira’s user interface ensures seamless flow of information among team members, improving collaboration significantly, activity streams can be monitored and visualised in the dashboards or wallboards. These all make Jira a wholesome service desk experience platform for agile teams.
3. Monday
Monday is a visual project management and collaboration tool that helps transform the way teams work together. It is a simple, but intuitive, tool that enables people to manage work, meet deadlines and build a culture of transparency. Monday provides solutions to easily plan and execute tasks in projects, prioritising visual appeal for ease of use. You can manage projects, tasks, people, ad campaigns, bugs, issues, CRM, video production.
4. Trello
Trello is a visual collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, you will see what is being worked on, who is working on what, and where something is in a process. Trello boards are the most popularly used projects boards around, the ease of use is just like organizing sticky notes on your whiteboard. One great here is lack of ambiguity, every core feature is intuitive.
Features
These four big project management tools are very popular because they all have very important features that make them effective.
On similar features, Trello, Asana, Jira and Monday all have features that touch: APIs, dashboards, the handle mentions, automatic notifications, comments feature, time tracking, reports and visualisations and third party application integration.
On differentiating features:
- Monday.com has distinct features like user activity monitor, to-do-list, status tracking and reporting, project templates, multi-departmental projects, development tracking, campaign planning and bug tracking.
- Trello has distinct features like activity management, data importation, data synchronisation, desktop notification, employee management, filtered views, permission management, realtime data and a lot more.
- Asana has distinct features like tagging, projections, realtime updates, project planning, personalised profiles, personalised management, event management, deadline tracking, categorisation and many more.
- Jira has a few distinct features basically due to the fact that most of these other tools were built using jira as a yardstick. Some of these features are communication management, customisable reporting, development tracking, employee management, monitoring and timeline management.
Mainstream Popularity
There was no exact way to measure this, but we found very useful data insights on the getapp platform and financesonline.com which we are going to run with here. This breakdown does not take factors like year of inception as a yardstick for measurement.
1. Trello
According to reviews and social media following and engagements data, Trello is the most popularly used of the four tools we are considering. With over 8,000 reviews and 168,000+ followers on twitter.
2. Asana
Asana comes in close second in the list with more than 5,500 reviews and over 118,000 followers on twitter.
3. Jira
The third place goes to Jira, this is with over 4,600 reviews on getapp and over 30,000 followers on twitter.
4. Monday
Monday comes at the fourth position with over 1,400 reviews and over 6,000 followers on twitter.
Integrations
Here, we look at other third party tools or applications that have their support shipped with these tools. We measure this by how many productivity and communication tools are officially supported by these project management tools.
1. Jira
Jira is basically industry standard as almost all the project management applications have jira software support. With over 250 third party application integrations, other project management applications are measured by jira software support. Jira itself ships with support for almost every third party application.
2. Trello
Trello with over 200 third party apps integrations, with notable applications like the entire google office tools: docs, drive, spreadsheets, gmail and really crucial cloud storage tools like dropbox, github, communication tools like slack and even issue tracking tools like jira. Trello is the perfect middleware that ensures a seamless and frictionless integration of many tools from one central location. Reports say that Trello integrates with over 80% of third party applications in the project management and planning sector.
3. Asana
Asana with a little over 160 third party app integration, has built a solid mainstream name for itself by shipping with support for applications like mailchimp, microsoft office tools, evernote, zapier, airtable and even jira software among others. It is reported that Asana integrates with 70% of third party applications in the project management and planning sector.
4. Monday
Monday.com has about 15 third party apps integration, some of them are dropbox, google calendar, google drive, google analytics, microsoft excel among others. It is reported that Monday.com integrates with 20% of third party applications in the project management and planning sector.
Demographics of Customers
- Trello and Monday.com are both designed with freelancers, small and medium businesses and enterprise arrangements in mind.
- Jira and Asana are both designed with only small and medium sized businesses and enterprise arrangements in mind.
Freelancers would find using Trello or Monday.com more useful for them compared to the other two.
Support
We would categorise support in different phases:
- Documentation: Jira, Asana, Trello and Monday.com all have well documented getting started and further usage guides on their respective platforms and even frequently asked questions.
- Online and Mobile team: Jira and Monday.com have really impressive and responsive phone and online support teams. Asana does not have a strong phone support as well as Trello.
- How-to-use Tutorials: Jira, Asana, Trello and Monday.com all have a suite of written and video tutorials available online.
None of these four project management tools have a windows application client, but they all have clients for the web, IOS and andriod.
Pricing
Asana
Asana has three pricing tiers:
- Premium: designed for small teams, here a single user pays $9.99 every month (this is billed annually) or $11.99 per month (billed monthly)
- Business: designed for company-structured teams, here a single user pays $19.99 every month (this is billed annually) or $23.99 per month (billed monthly)
- Enterprise: if your team would need more than the business tier offers, then you would contact the sales team to access a custom package that works for you.
Jira
Jira has two standard cloud based pricing tiers:
- 0–10 people: here, up to 10 users can use Jira for $10 every month.
- 11–100 people: once the team is up to 11, each user pays $7 every month.
- 101+people: when the team is above 100 team members, then you would have to contact the sales team for a suitable custom package.
Monday
Monday has an extensive suite of tiers for all team sizes, let us see the rates for a team of 5 members:
- Basic: $25 every month.
- Standard: $39 every month.
- Pro: $59 every month.
- Enterprise: $118 every month.
These rates are basically differentiated from one another by features and limits. Each of these payments are billed annually.
Trello
Trello has just three tiers:
- Free: here is the free tier for individual use, friends and family.
- Business Class: designed for small teams, here every user is charged $10 per month billed annually or $12.50 every month billed monthly
- Enterprise: for custom fitted packages, contact the sales team.
References
- most of the data insights and review information are from the getapp platform.
- demographics data and popularity measurement information came from financeonline.com
Conclusion
This article has been a deep look into the main parts of these four main project management tools. We looked at features, support, pricing and every other thing that every project manager has to consider before adopting a new product. With this you can quickly weigh what exactly you want from a tool and what tool closely suits your needs. Hope it helps!
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