Asana VS Jira Comparison: Which is Right for You?

Asana and Jira are two of the most well known and powerful project management tools in the market, and often compared when project managers are looking to choose the right tool for their teams.

Both project management software are great for the job, but come with different approaches to task management.

Choosing the right one for your team will boost productivity, project monitoring, and ensure goals are met on time!

Should I use Asana or Jira?

Asana is great for traditional project management, marketing projects, and cross-functional teams. If you don’t have a strong dev team, it’s an easy to learn and use tool that will help you manage projects from the inception to the delivery.

Jira is the choice of organizations with strong software development teams, who want to customize the tool to the exact needs of the project.

What is Asana

Asana is the swiss army knife of project management, suitable for a variety of use cases and cross-functional teams. 

It allows users to create tasks, track projects, and monitor work metrics. Asana is very popular among professionals and entrepreneurs due to its simple interface and ability to track projects based on various methodologies like Simple tasks (To-dos), Gantt Charts (timelines), KanBan boards, and Calendar views.

Asana also offers many workflow automations and integrations to manage big projects more easily.

What is Jira

Jira is the Asana competitor of choice for software teams and DevOps, and product teams who want to customize it to fit their project’s needs.

Jira was originally built to track bugs and issues,, and has since evolved to cover more cases and be customizable. It’s great for agile teams, scrum sprints, and kanban boards.

The best use cases for Jira are companies and organizations with a dev team ready to take on the optimization and set up the workflows and automation to fully utilize its capabilities.

For example, you can connect with GitHub to get updates, pull requests, deployments, branches, builds, and commits.

Compare Asana VS Jira Table

Both Jira and Asana offer a wide variety of features that cannot be easily compared one to one. Over the year, the feature gap has been reduced, now, both software offer:

• time-tracking, 
• workflow management, 
• user permissions,
• Integrations (e.g. Slack, Salesforce),
• file storage,
• due dates, and
• different views – KanBan, calendar, timelines, gantt charts, etc.

You will also find many key features you would expect from a work management tool. Here is a quick comparison table to better understand where each tool stands:

Pricing Comparison

Asana’s Pricing 

Asana offers 4 different pricing plans/tiers depending on the features you will need and is billed per user:

Free: Asana’s free plan allows for up to 15 team members and unlimited tasks, projects, storage, along with its basic views and integrations.

Premium: Asana premium costs $13.49 per month per user and adds more advanced views like the timeline, custom fields, forms, rules for automation, start dates & times, task templates, milestones, and an admin console to better manage users.

Business: Asana’s business plan costs $24.99 per month per user and adds advanced integrations and many project management tools like goals, workload, and approvals.

Enterprise: You need to contact sales to get a quote on enterprise pricing for Asana. You only need the enterprise if you are looking for a higher level of control, data export & deletion, custom branding, and support priority.

Pricing taken from Asana’s website on the 22nd of January 2023.

Jira’s Pricing

Jira also offers 4 pricing plans/tiers based on features and per user.

Free: Jira offers a free plan for up to 10 users with basic features and customizable workflows for a single project and simple security features. Jira also does not offer support on the free plan, but allows access to its forum for community support.

Standard: Jira’s standard plan comes at $7.75 per month per user and adds on administration control features and permissions, as well as additional security & compliance features. With a paid plan, you also get access to local business hours support.

Premium: Jira’s premium plan comes at $15.25 and unlocks multiple projects and advanced project management features on management, administration, and security & compliance. It also comes with a guaranteed uptime SLA and premium 24/7 customer support.

Enterprise: You need to contact sales to get a quote on enterprise pricing for Jira. The enterprise level opens up the Data & Insights capabilities from mother company Atlassian’s Analytics & Data lake, unlimited sites, and top-tier SLA.

Pricing taken from Jira’s website on the 22nd of January 2023.

Jira Features & Capabilities

Jira is the ultimate companion of agile and scrum teams. It comes with real-time tracking of scrum sprints and is ideal for agile project management.

It comes with:

• Bug tracking,
• Backlog,
• Customizable workflows,
• Roadmaps,
• Agile boards,
• Workflow engine, and
• Devops metrics

Jira integrates with important software such as Salesforce, Dropbox, Adobe, and many more. It also does a great job at agile reporting and tracking dependencies. 

Whether you are looking to create scrum boards or issue tracking, it’s the right tool for your software team!

Jira Advantages

Jira is a powerful and customizable software and it’s best for:

• Cheaper than Asana at all pricing tiers.
• Flexible workflow customization that allows organizations to design and customize a workflow process to fit their needs. 
• Robust issue tracking, including the ability to set priority levels, assign tasks, create sub-tasks, log time spent, and track progress.
• Track project and task completion, by using its roadmap features.
• Big, helpful community. Jira’s forums are a great way to get support and find solutions for problems or customizations.

Jira Disadvantages

However good it is, Jira comes with some serious downsides:

• Difficult interface, while it feels easy and familiar for more technical teams, it’s not a great option for non-tech teams.
• Requires setup & customization, while you can use the basic functionalities without any setup, Jira’s power comes from customizing it to the team’s need.
• Customer support is limited and gets better only at the most expensive plans.

Asana Features & Capabilities

Asana is a well-rounded project management software designed to manage projects and help teams collaborate effectively and efficiently. It comes with all the various views a project manager wants, task notifications, integrations, and reporting dashboards to keep track of projects.

Asana is a great collaboration tool as well, with an easy interface for comments and informing teammates of various project updates.

Asana Advantages

Asana is the swiss army knife of teamwork, and here are some reasons to use it:

• Free plan, for up to 15 users.
• Easy to start, with project management templates.
• Ease of use, while it needs some getting used it, it’s interface is clean and simple for non-tech people to use.
• Excels at task management, milestones, and time tracking.
• Multi-project management. It’s great for managing multiple projects and cross-team projects.

Asana Disadvantages

Of course, there are some downsides to Asana as well:

• Expensive plans. Asana has become the go-to project management software, and capitalizes in its wide appeal with higher prices than competitors.
• There is a learning curve for first time users.
• Difficult and limited customization. While it offers workflow customizations, it is limited compared to Jira and not as easy to set up.

The Verdict

🥇 Asana is my choice for a project management software and would suggest it for individuals, small teams, and marketing teams.

However, Jira has its clear place at more technical teams and organizations that require a higher degree of customization from their tools.

If you are still not sure which tool is the right one for you, you can the Asana Competitors article which includes more tools like:

• Trello,
• Monday.com,
• Wrike, and
• Airtable.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Which is better, Jira or Asana?

Asana is the most popular and well-rounded of the two, but Jira is better for software teams.

Can Asana replace Jira?

Yes, Asana can replace Jira in most aspects, but will not be as customizable as Jira.

What is the difference between Asana and Jira?

While they both have many common features, Asana comes with a better interface and is suitable for traditional project management and non-tech teams, while Jira is more suited for software and DevOps teams. 

Which app is easier to use, Asana or Jira?

Asana is easier to use than Jira.

Does jira have a gantt chart?

Yes, Jira has a gantt chart tool and it calls it roadmaps. It has everything you would expect from a gantt-chart, but may be slightly different.