Difference Between Asana and Smartsheet

If the current COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s how to efficiently navigate the complex and ever evolving corporate landscape. The business community has realized the potential of remote working considering employees safety is of utmost importance. This new work-from-home routine is a new experience for many and while some are thriving, some find it difficult to adapt. But, how do you coordinate in this new remote working landscape and how to make sure that you and your fellow team members are working efficiently without any redundancy? And what is something goes wrong? Luckily, task management tools such as Asana and Smartsheet have made it easy for people working remotely to coordinate, manage and track their work online.

What is Asana?

Asana is one of the most popular and widely used task management and online collaboration tools that help you organize your work around a project, so that your team knows what to do and how to do it. Asana is a project management system that keeps all your project related stuff organized in one place, from finished tasks to work that needs to be done and everything in between. It gives you a complete picture of everything, from ongoing processes like managing an editorial calendar to deadline-based tasks such as a product launch, or tracking your progress from start to finish, and so much more. With Asana, you can plan your long term goals like what you’ll be working on for the next couple of months or what are the big projects coming up, so it basically charts your complete workload for the coming weeks and at a very granular level.

What is Smartsheet?

Smartsheet is a software as a service platform for collaborating with colleagues, managing projects, tracking project progress, and sharing documents. Smartsheet is a work management and collaboration tool developed and marketed by Smartsheet Inc. It is a workspace productivity app and planning platform that provides an easy way to put everything project related in one place so everybody knows what’s in the pipeline. It makes sure everybody is on the same page and everybody works efficiently without any redundancy. It is a platform for achieving your common business goals whether you’re tracking a project or automating an organizational wide business process. Smartsheet aligns your people with your technology so that your business move faster and your product deliver expected business value considering the needs of the client. It helps your team achieve better productivity by automating workflows for your team and managing information in multiple views, empowering better collaboration.

Difference between Asana and Smartsheet

Tool 

– Smartsheet is an easy-to-use work management platform with built-in collaboration tools. It stems from Google Sheets; in fact, Smartsheet is like Google Sheets with project management capabilities wherein you can use all the formulas you use in the Sheets or Excel and then combine it with assignee, tasks, sub-tasks and everything that comes with it. Asana, on the other hand, is a full-fledged work management and collaboration tool used by business of all sizes. It offers some powerful task management capabilities right out of the box to help teams plan, organize, track and manage their work.

Hierarchy

 – One key element of Smartsheet is rows which allow you to build hierarchy and help you organize tasks and prioritize information in your sheet, check their status or other important information. This helps your team find easily what needs to be done. Hierarchies consist of parent rows and child rows or tasks and subtasks. Tasks can be grouped together by phase, making it easy for you to track and manage the project. Asana, on the other hand, lacks any defined options to establish a project hierarchy.

Pricing

 – Both Asana and Smartsheet have a similar pricing structure; the more you pay the more features you get. Asana is free for teams of up to 15 members and the paid plan is divided into three tiers: Premium, Business and Enterprise, The Premium Plan costs $10.99 per user per month for the annual commitment while the Business Plan costs $24.99 /user/month when billed annually. Smartsheet offers two plans: Individual plan which costs $14 per month and the Business plan which costs $25 per user per month. Smartsheet Enterprise and Premier Plans fall under the “contact us” category.

Ease of Use

 – Asana is great for collaborating with small teams and it has some powerful task management features to make it easy for you to organize everything in one place. Asana is simpler to learn and master and is flexible to work around. It does not overwhelm you with an abundance of tools and features, and it keeps everything simple – from assigning tasks to setting priorities, managing calendars, and more. Smartsheet, on the other hand, is great for budgeting and everything connected to it and anything that involves use of formulas.

Asana vs. Smartsheet: Comparison Chart

Summary

In a nutshell, if you are a small team of let’s say 15 members or so, you’re better off with Asana because it offers everything to help you and your team plan, track and manage projects. Asana is built for everyone, not exclusively for spreadsheet users, and you can create your own workflow to your liking and preferences. And the best thing about Asana is its simplicity. Smartsheet is also a flexible workspace collaboration tool which is ideal for complex analytical data and budgeting and creating formulas, considering it’s a Google Sheets-like tool with project management capabilities.

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