As marketers and business folk, there is probably no end to the number of design projects that you need to oversee. If we’re being real, it’s hard to stay on top of things and track everything when it comes to visual content like design projects. It just doesn’t work.
That’s why you need to use design project management software. Yes, there are design-project-friendly tools that you can use to manage your work efficiently. Out of all these design project management tools, the biggest names are…drumroll, please…Trello and Asana.
Both are project management software that helps thousands of users across the globe. Our goal with this Trello vs Asana showdown is to present to you which is the best for design project management.
The right tool will make a difference to your workflow and potentially increase your productivity. And isn’t that what we strive for?
So without further ado let’s begin this Trello vs Asana showdown.
Trello and Asana have both been around for a long time.
Trello was founded and created in 2011 by Fog Creek Software. But was considered a separate company in 2014 to being sold to Atlassian in 2017.
Asana on the other hand was founded 3 years before, in 2008 by Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein.
Trello and Asana are 12 and 15 years old respectively. That helps instill confidence in both of these tools. As you can imagine, they’ve had years to perfect their systems.
So let’s move on ahead in this Trello vs Asana showdown.
This is the first segment we will cover as it would serve as a good base to decide the winner between the Trello vs Asana battle.
Both Trello and Asana provide free plans.
But if your design projects and tasks are complex you won’t be able to keep using the free plans for long. Eventually, you’d have to consider switching over to paid plans and that’s the case for both Trello and Asana.
Standard – $5/user/month, billed annually
$6/user if billed monthly
Premium – $10/user/month, billed annually
$12.50/user if billed monthly
Enterprise – $17.50/user/month, billed annually at $210 per user*
*This pricing is for 50-250 users. As the number of users increases, the cost per user decreases.
For a customized overview please head over to their pricing page.
Standard – $10.99/user/month, billed annually
$13.49/user if billed monthly
Advanced – $24.99/user/month, billed annually
$30.49/user if billed monthly
Enterprise – Custom pricing
Enterprise+ – Custom pricing
To compare features within the Asana plans, you can visit their pricing page.
The UI is probably one of the most important parts users are concerned with when choosing a design project management tool. You’re looking to simplify design project management, not to tackle an entirely difficult software.
So in such terms, both offer great UIs.
Trello offers a simple and clean UI but is highly interactive and intuitive.
Here’s a look at the dashboard once you’ve set up your account:
Asana is a bit more complex than Trello, nevertheless, it’s clean and uncluttered.
Here’s a look at the Asana dashboard:
The thing with both PM tools is that they’re both customizable in terms of project view. And that’s something you would anticipate with a design project management tool because design projects often involve complex workflows and collaboration, requiring robust yet versatile tweaks to streamline processes and enhance productivity.
The free and Standard plans offer only a Kanban view of your projects. On the free plan, the Kanban view is limited to only 10 boards but offers unlimited cards.
The Premium and Enterprise plans offer the most types of customizable project views from Calendar to Gantt chart (Timeline), to Table, Map, and Dashboard views.
Unlike Trello, Asana gives more project view styles in the free plan offering List, Board, and Calendar view styles. They offer the Gantt chart (Timeline) view in both the Standard and Advanced plans and Portfolio views only in the latter.
You’ll be happy to know that both Trello and Asana offer a lot of useful features in their free plans that you can use to manage your design projects.
As far as features for a design project management tool go, both offer compelling free features that would work well for simple design project management tasks.
Here we discuss the overall project management features of both software so that we can fairly decide the winner in this Trello vs Asana battle.
One important project management feature is that Asana lets project managers oversee projects simultaneously without the need to keep multiple tabs open like in Trello.
The My Tasks option on the Asana homepage helps you organize and filter tasks by task name, due date, projects, task visibility, and collaborators. It aggregates tasks from all the user’s projects into one central list, eliminating the need to switch between different project pages to manage to-dos.
This can be a very useful feature for managing design projects as it allows you to check many details about your ongoing and approaching design projects.
Asana also lets you assign tasks to individuals.
On the other hand, Trello works a bit differently than this. Trello does not have one central place to manage your tasks like Asana. With Trello, you can only tag members as part of a task, who are then notified about changes within a particular “card”. You can further be notified about changes to Trello lists and separate cards by enabling the Watch option (the eye icon shown below).
If not, you have to have multiple tabs open and move between boards and cards to view the changes and progress.
If you’re big into communication between your design team and project managers then Asana is a better choice because Asana provides in-app direct messaging. From the Inbox tab, you can view all your notifications and messages. By clicking “Send message” at the top left of your inbox, you can open an email-like interface to send direct messages to individuals or entire teams.
Trello on the other hand relies solely on the comment thread for communication between team members.
Moreover, you’d have to use a separate tool for streamlined communication. For some, this could be a deciding factor in the Trello vs Asana debate.
Trello provides over 100 app integrations and more than 200 Power-Ups, while Asana offers over 200 app integrations.
Trello’s Power-Ups make it a customizable design project management software. For example, the Power-Ups feature lets you connect apps like Google Drive, OneDrive, Comment On Image, and Zapier helping you handle design-related tasks more efficiently.
Asana also offers integration with Google Drive, OneDrive, and Zapier, plus, with design-related apps like Adobe Creative Cloud making it slightly more appealing than Trello for design project management.
Trello offers AI features like the Atlassian Intelligence feature where you can generate, and summarise text content. Other AI features can be integrated with the use of Power-Ups. This feature is only available in the Premium and Enterprise plans.
Asana includes built-in AI features offered in all its paid plans. They deliver a comprehensive AI experience with advanced project management and workflow capabilities.
Trello offers an automation feature called Butler, built into every Trello board. With the use of Butler, you can automate workflows and tasks on your boards. The good thing is Butler is available in all plans including the free plan with limited usage.
But compared to Trello’s Butler, Asana’s automation builder is quite easy to use. It doesn’t come in the free plan, however. It’s offered in the Premium plan with the ability to automate an unlimited amount of workflows which could help you automate many design project-related workflows.
Trello offers a couple of templates that you can use to set up your workspace. But there’s nothing special about them. You’d have to edit them a lot to suit your design project management tasks. And since Trello is primarily a Kanban view project management tool there aren’t that many changes that you can make to the templates.
Asana on the other hand is much more customizable than that. Each template recommends the most suitable primary view as either a Calendar, Board, List, or Timeline for various project types. It also includes proposed automation workflows and app integrations making Asana’s templates more intuitive than those of Trello’s.
To make a fair comparison between Trello and Asana, it’s essential to highlight who each software is best suited for. And we’ve covered enough info to make a couple of statements.
At first glance, we can conclude that Asana is pricier than Trello.
Trello’s Starter and Asana’s Standard plans are the most basic paid plans and there’s a $5 difference.
And there’s quite a jump between Asana’s Standard plan and Advanced plan. Trello’s equivalent to the Advanced plan which is the Premium plan is only priced at $10 per user – incidentally it’s in the same price range as Asana’s Standard plan. So there’s a huge difference between Trello and Asana’s pricing schemes.
But Asana does offer more robust features than Trello in all of its paid plans.
However, if you have a limited budget and need a simple tool to manage your design projects then Trello is hands down the clear choice. Because it can help you manage those design projects with ease.
But if you’re working with larger teams with many designers and project managers and you also have a budget to splurge then we believe Asana is the better choice.
Trello works alright for teams but Asana is clearly the winner for larger teams. Trello is also less preferred for teams because it has certain limitations even with its mighty Power-ups option.
Even in terms of collaborative features, Asana is in the lead with its in-app communication features.
It finally boils down to whether you want a feature-rich project management platform for a bigger buck, or if you want an affordable one with just enough features to help manage your design projects. That would settle the Trello vs Asana battle for some users.
Trello and Asana are both 2 of the most used project management software, not just for design-related projects but for all sorts of project types.
Another way to settle the Trello vs Asana debate is to look at their user base, ratings, and reviews.
According to Asana’s third-quarter fiscal report for 2024, they have over 147,000 customers and millions of users across the globe in 200+ countries and territories. They have high-profile clients like Amazon, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, and T-Mobile, and the tool is used by 85% of Fortune 500 companies as of December 2023.
Asana has a rating of 4.4 stars from 10,159 reviews on G2 but a mere 2.3-star rating out of 187 reviews on Trustpilot.
Here are some reviews left by users:
Most of the reviews on both platforms are happy with Asana’s features but there are quite a few reviews on Trustpilot that complain about pricing issues and poor customer support.
Alternatively, Trello is used by over 2,000,000 teams around the world including leading brands like Visa, Coinbase, John Deere, Zoom, and Fender. Trello is also used by 80% of Fortune 500 companies.
Trello has a rating of 4.4 stars from 13,570 reviews on G2 and a 3.5-star rating out of 170 reviews on Trustpilot.
Here are some of the reviews by users to consider:
According to the reviews, users have found Trello to be incredibly monumental in helping manage projects but they also mention there is room for improvement with advanced features.
Both Trello and Asana offer unique strengths and weaknesses. When it comes to features, Asana leads the pack, but Trello is more affordable. For those who prioritize customer feedback, Trello boasts more positive reviews compared to the mixed feedback for Asana.
So like we said before you can settle the Trello vs Asana debate when you consider them alongside your unique design project management needs.
But one thing we do know for sure, you need to use project management tools for your design projects.
The pandemic changed things for how work is done. A lot of the workforce now prefers remote working to physically meeting in offices. Thus the demand for project management tools has increased. According to statistics, 91% of remote teams report using virtual tools to manage projects. Probably because it increases productivity.
A lot of unlimited design companies use Trello and Asana as their design project management software. But there are others like Design Pickle, KIMP, Penji, and No Limit Creatives that use custom design project management tools.
You can read more information about these companies here.
