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Airtable and Asana are two of the best project management software solutions on the market. Both of these tools can help your teams keep track of deliverables while offering several other useful features for managing projects and their subtasks.
SEE: Hiring kit: Project manager (TechRepublic Premium)
However, Airtable and Asana each offer very different strengths that will appeal to different user bases. When you need to make a decision about which tool to add to your tech stack, this guide is here with a comparison of Airtable vs. Asana across key features, costs and capabilities.
Jump to:
- Airtable vs. Asana: Comparison chart
- What is Airtable?
- What is Asana?
- Standout features of Airtable
- Standout features of Asana
- What is the cost of Airtable?
- What is the cost of Asana?
- Do Asana and Airtable work together?
- What are the main differences between Airtable and Asana?
Airtable vs. Asana: Comparison chart
| Features | Airtable | Asana |
|---|---|---|
| Templates | Yes | Yes |
| Enterprise-level integrations | Limited | Yes |
| Reporting tools | Yes | Yes |
| Collaboration tools | Yes | Yes |
| Time tracking | Yes | Limited |
| Interface customization | Yes | Yes |
What is Airtable?
Airtable is a cloud collaboration and document collaboration project management solution. It’s a spreadsheet-database hybrid, though it offers far more functionality than your average spreadsheet. The fields in Airtable can be changed to different format types, such as checkboxes, phone numbers and dropdown lists. Fields can also reference file attachments such as images.
Read our in-depth Airtable review.
What is Asana?
Asana is a web and mobile project management platform designed to help teams organize, track and manage their work. Asana can manage projects, campaigns, creative work, requests, productivity, Agile projects and more. It is a particularly helpful platform for cross-functional teams, especially with its wide variety of collaboration tools and project view options.
Read our in-depth Asana review.
Standout features of Airtable
Templates
Airtable offers a wide variety of templates for nearly any kind of business or personal project. Templates range from facilities management templates and marketing promotion plans for complex business projects to a grocery list template and a camping trip planning template for personal planning. The variety of Airtable templates shows new users the flexibility of the platform, while also making it easy for users to do all of their project planning in a single place.
Apps and integrations
Because of the flexibility of Airtable’s tools, it’s designed to be used by every department at the company. You can add functionality from several apps including Google Hangouts, Slack, JSON Editor, Shoptable, Jira Cloud, HootSuite and GitHub. The wide variety of integrations means that developers, marketers, human resources specialists and administrative employees can all work cross-departmentally without a mess of email threads.
Interface Designer
Interface Designer is a beta tool that lets teams build no-code apps directly from their Airtable data. Interface Designer tools help teams create and share workflows, reports, visualizations and custom tools designed for individual teams.
Reporting tools
Within Airtable, the apps, developer tools and interactive interfaces all work together to create dynamic reports with charts, graphs and metrics. Choose from premade visualizations that draw data from the projects within Airtable, or build custom reporting tools with the Airtable application programming interface and software development kit. Each of the reporting dashboards is interactive, giving users the ability to drill down or combine information.
Standout features of Asana
Views and reporting
Asana is built to organize processes around work using workflows, approvals and task organizers that help teams quickly and easily know where project work stands and what’s getting done across their entire business. Because Asana’s focus is on organizing work and not reporting, the reporting tools are much more limited than you’ll find in Airtable. However, Asana does provide integrations with powerful visualization tools and business intelligence programs like Microsoft Power BI and Tableau, so teams can export their project data for reporting.
Admin controls
Within Asana, there are granular administrative controls that help teams create and manage settings to be sure everyone has access to the right information without any unnecessary administrative permissions. Asana administrators can create teams based on departments, job functions, projects, or other operational and team designations.
Communication and collaboration
Because Asana’s tools are built primarily for task and project management, its collaboration tools are extensive. Users can communicate clearly with teams, staff or stakeholders through a shared calendar and messaging tools. They can also comment directly on a task, get alerts, send messages and discuss projects with everyone on the team. The addition of approvals and automatic workflows keeps tasks running between stakeholders without extra emails.
Success and support
Support for Asana customers is extensive and multilevel, tailored to the level of support your team needs. Asana support is offered at three different levels:
- Help: Includes articles you can read through to find your own solutions to common problems.
- Premium: Gives you access to educational resources like webinars, recorded trainings and a customer forum from the company’s customer success team
- Enterprise: Gives you a dedicated customer success manager to help you transition into Asana. This package can also come with custom training.
What is the cost of Airtable?
Airtable has four main pricing packages: Free, Plus, Pro and Enterprise. All paid plans are billed annually.
| Package | Cost | Key Features |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 |
|
| Plus | $10 per user per month |
|
| Pro | $20 per user per month |
|
| Enterprise | Contact sales |
|
What is the cost of Asana?
Asana has four main pricing packages: Basic, Premium, Business and Enterprise. Customers have the option to pay on an annually-billed or a monthly-billed plan.
| Package | Cost | Key features |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 |
|
| Premium | Billed annually: $10.99 per user per month Billed monthly: $13.49 |
|
| Business | Billed annually: $24.99 per user per month Billed monthly: $30.49 |
|
| Enterprise | Contact sales |
|
Do Asana and Airtable work together?
Asana and Airtable are most often used independently of each other, as many of their project management features overlap. However, it is possible and sometimes beneficial to use Asana and Airtable together.
SEE: How to evaluate project management software (TechRepublic)
Interested users can integrate Airtable and Asana through integration-platform-as-a-service solutions like Zapier, though there are no native integration options available. Through this integration, users can add Asana tasks to Airtable, automate processes and workflows, and optimize document sharing and file management among project team members.
What are the main differences between Airtable and Asana?
While both Airtable and Asana offer robust functionality for project management, Asana tends to have broader applications throughout an enterprise because it focuses more on core task and project management functionalities. Asana outsources many of the more difficult reporting, dashboarding, visualization and app-building features to integrated apps. For companies that already have dedicated BI, customer relationship management and development tools, Asana is a good choice to exclusively manage and organize projects.
Airtable is slightly less expensive than Asana, and may be better for small-to-midsize businesses and individuals, especially those who are hoping to build apps, dashboards and business tools off of the basic spreadsheet-style functionality.
These tools provide task management features through a variety of visualization types, integrations with major business work apps and a mobile app for work management on the go. How work gets done in Airtable versus Asana is what really sets them apart. When making a decision between Airtable and Asana, you’ll want to choose the project management option that best fits your team’s work styles, your current tech stack, and any industry-specific compliance and security requirements you need to follow.
Read next: The 10 best project management software and tools (TechRepublic)
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