Asana vs. Jira: Differences, pros and cons in 2024

If your company is in the market for agile project management software, there’s a good chance the decision will come down to a choice between Asana and Jira. These two project management solutions adopt an agile methodology for project management that takes a broader and more atomized approach to managing tasks and projects than the traditional waterfall structure.

Asana is noted for its many different project views and task management capabilities, while Jira stands out for its roadmaps that facilitate issue tracking and keep projects aligned with your company’s objectives.

Asana vs. Jira: Quick overview

Here’s a snapshot comparison of two of the leading agile project management solutions, breaking down their prices, key features and ratings.

Pricing and value

Verdict: Jira 

Jira’s Standard and Premium packages cost less than Asana’s Premium and Business plans while offering comparable features and functionality.

Asana pricing and value

Asana’s free plan is limited to list, board and calendar views and offers only basic workflows and reporting. However, it supports 10 users and offers unlimited tasks, projects and storage. The company’s Premium plan is a better value for small businesses. It adds timeline, Gantt chart views and automations; supports up to 500 users and costs $10.99 per user per month with an annual contract and $13.49 per user per month when purchased on a monthly basis.

The Business plan from Asana adds portfolio and goal views, as well as advanced workflows and reporting, making the package a good choice for midsize and larger firms. Business is priced at $24.99 per user per month with an annual contract and $30.49 per user per month with a month-to-month agreement.

Jira pricing and value

The free offering from Jira supports up to 10 users and allows unlimited project boards; it includes 2 GB of storage. Jira’s standard package is priced at $8.15 per user per month and requires a minimum of 10 users (it supports as many as 35,000 users). The plan includes 250 GB of storage and adds support during business hours.

Jira’s Premium plan costs $16 per user per month (minimum of 10 users) and offers unlimited storage, as well as 24/7 premium support and an uptime SLA. The company also sells an Enterprise package that is priced based on a custom quote. The plan lets firms have up to 150 separate sites, or license instances, to give separate brands and departments more autonomy.

Key features

Verdict: Tie

While the systems take different approaches to agile project management, both Asana and Jira include the full range of features that project teams need to plan, implement, track and successfully conclude projects in a timely and cost-effective manner.

Asana features

Asana’s approach to project management focuses on workflow automation. The core components of Asana’s Work Graph data model are tasks, project views and custom fields:

• Tasks describe work in context, including due dates and responsibilities.
• Project views include kanban boards, lists, timelines, calendars and Gannt charts.
• Custom fields facilitate tracking items by field type and showing at a glance the project’s status.

Other Asana features include:

• Status updates.
• Time tracking.
• User task lists.
• Automatic project updates through email.
• Goal setting and tracking.
• Portfolios for monitoring multiple projects.
• Reporting dashboards.

The product supports automated workflows through forms, rules, bundles and templates. 

The premium and business plans include Asana Intelligence, which applies AI techniques to enhance goal setting and status updates. Asana Intelligence lets you pose questions to the system using natural language. 

The business plan also adds:

• Resource management.
• Advanced reporting.
• Advanced workflows that include dynamic and custom rules, forms and custom templates.

Jira features

In contrast to Asana’s workflow model, Jira’s signature feature is the product’s interactive timelines that simplify planning and tracking the progress of various project tasks, including those that are part of multiple teams and projects. 

The company’s advanced roadmaps tool visualizes data in boards, projects and filters to help managers establish the project’s critical path and investigate potential variations in plans and schedules quickly and simply.

“The integration of agile and traditional project management methodologies such as waterfall allows teams to organize their projects by incorporating phases and milestones, following the Waterfall approach and integrating iterative Agile components that support the scrum or Kanban approaches,” said Chris Teodoro, a Technical Project Manager and official with the Project Management Institute.

More than a dozen default reports are built into Jira that let managers view the progress and status of projects from various perspectives. Reports work with scrum, Kanban and other agile development environments:

• Sprint reports indicate overcommitment and project scope creep.
• Burndown charts monitor the team’s progress in achieving sprint goals.
• Release burndown keeps tabs on the project’s release date and actions required to stay on schedule.
• Velocity charts let teams know how quickly they’re moving from sprint to sprint to better determine future performance likelihoods.

Features offered only in Jira’s Premium and Enterprise versions include capacity management and project archiving, while Enterprise adds Atlassian Analytics, Atlassian Data Lake and data connectors for querying non-Atlassian data sources.

Software integrations

Verdict: Jira

Projects that adopt an agile approach to management rely on the ability to aggregate data and other resources from a variety of internal and external systems. 

Asana’s integrations cover the full range of business tools and processes, from finance and HR to operations management. While Jira’s Atlassian Marketplace offers dozens of business management tools, the integrations are more weighted toward IT and app development projects.

Asana software integrations

Asana offers hundreds of third-party apps that connect to its project management software in more than a dozen categories, including communications, finance and HR, IT and development, product management and sales and service. 

The apps are combined into collections for enterprise IT, Google, Microsoft and Asana’s own add-ons for Salesforce and Android and iOS devices.

Among Asana’s featured integrations are:

• Adobe Creative Cloud.
• Dropbox.
• Mailchimp.
• Zendesk.
• Slack.
• Zoom.
• Freshdesk. 

Tools available for IT and development teams include ServiceNow, Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Okta for more efficient access management and Looker real-time analytics. 

The company’s API allows organizations to create their own Asana integrations, complete with such features as webhooks and app components that can be embedded directly into Asana.

Jira software integrations

The Atlassian Marketplace features more than 3,000 apps that integrate with Jira. App categories include project management, CRM, code review, continuous integration, shared workflows and testing and Q&A. Jira’s add-ons emphasize software development projects over Asana’s focus on links to general business and productivity apps. However, Jira integrates with dozens of business and management apps, including:

• Power BI.
• Salesforce.
• HubSpot.
• Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive.
• Google Drive and Docs.

Jira’s REST API provides companies with the resources they need to create custom links to Jira from their internal systems. The REST API is based on open standards and can be accessed using the web development language of your choice.

Customer support

Verdict: Asana

Agile techniques that originated with IT development teams are finding their way into other areas of business management. The agile approach offers distinct benefits for project management, but the “virtuous circle” nature of agile processes is fundamentally different from traditional waterfall processes. 

Quality support resources become a key consideration for companies adopting agile project management. In this category, Asana gets the nod over Jira for its wide range of guides and tutorials and its chat support for all of its paid plans.

Asana Customer Support

The support services available from Asana start with the help center’s searchable knowledge base and getting started guide. The company also provides several short video tutorials, project tips and tricks, personal productivity guides, team collaboration, workflow basics, goal setting and apps and integrations. 

Another guide explains in detail how to use the Asana interface, including the sidebar, home page, header, main pane and task details.

Other support resources available in the Asana academy are live and pre-recorded training sessions, more than 100 courses in seven different languages and a community forum. The company’s resources page offers product demos, articles and webinars covering: 

• IT.
• Operations.
• Project management.
• Collaboration.
• Planning.
• Goal setting.

Direct support is offered through a chatbot.

Jira Customer Support

Jira’s support page includes documentation, a knowledge base, system status updates and suggestions and bug reports. The Jira community lets you view answers to questions posted in the past and scroll through dozens of articles. The company also provides an frequently asked question (FAQ) section covering pricing and licensing.

You can submit questions to Jira’s support team through a web form. Technical support hours for subscribers to the company’s standard plan are regular business hours, Monday to Friday. The Premium plan has three levels of support, including:

• 24/7 for level one.
• 24/5 for level two.
• Standard business hours Monday to Friday for level three. 

The company’s Enterprise package adds dedicated 24/7 telephone support. 

User reviews

Verdict: Tie

Jira and Asana both garner consistently positive reviews on popular user-ratings sites — Asana for its ease of use and automated workflows, and Jira for the product’s adaptability and customization. However, both systems are noted for being difficult to learn and complex to manage, especially when working on multiple large projects simultaneously.

Asana user reviews

The characteristics that Asana users praise most often in their reviews of the product are its flexible, intuitive, game-like interface, its templates and use cases and its time-saving task automation features.

Asana earns a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Capterra, with reviewers noting how easy the system is to learn, its tracking of project tasks and its solid integration tools. They also note that it can be difficult for team members without project management experience to get up to speed in using the program.

Asana earns a 4.3 out of 5-star rating on G2, with users noting the software’s ability to break complex tasks down into manageable steps. Some point out, however, that Asana can be expensive for smaller teams and organizations. Also, its workspace can quickly become cluttered. 

Jira user reviews

Many Jira users note in their reviews that it’s easy to customize the product and adapt it to specific types of projects and tasks within projects. They also appreciate Jira’s many integrations with common business tools such as Slack and Salesforce.

Jira earns 4.4 out of 5 stars on Software Advice, with reviewers praising the program’s flexibility in accommodating many types of projects and tasks within projects. Reviewers also highlight how easy it is to initiate and implement sprints, although they point out that Jira can be difficult to learn and complex to set up.

On G2, Jira earns an overall score of 4.3 stars. Many report that the product has a steep learning curve. However, they also describe its centralized environment for assigning, prioritizing and tracking tasks as simple and efficient. They note that it integrates seamlessly with productivity tools like Google Workspace, although some add-ons can increase the complexity.

Final verdict

Winner: Jira

Jira gets the nod over Asana in a very tight head-to-head competition for two reasons:

• Jira’s pricing makes it a more affordable option for most small businesses than Asana, especially when comparing Asana’s business plan to Jira’s premium package.
• The free version of Jira gives very small teams more features than Asana’s free offering, which is limited to three views and basic workflows and reporting.

Asana’s approach to project management is more conventional than Jira’s, which is rooted in the agile methodologies that originated with software development teams and other IT projects. 

While both products apply an agile approach to project management, Jira was designed with an agile foundation from the start, while Asana takes a broader project management perspective that accommodates businesses transitioning from more traditional approaches.

Who is Asana best for?

Despite the limitations of Asana’s free project management service and the slightly higher per-user price of its fee-based plans for small businesses, the product is a better choice for teams and managers who are just getting started with project management. 

Asana is also a better option for running individual projects because, despite the time required to get up to speed with the product, it’s still easier to learn and use than Jira.

While Asana has fewer overall third-party integrations than Jira, the product supports the most popular communication, collaboration and productivity apps. Asana truly shines in managing the details of individual tasks and in supporting close collaboration between project team members. 

However, the product is less effective than Jira in providing project managers with a clear overview of big projects with many moving parts.

Who is Jira best for?

Jira’s roots in managing software development projects suggest that the product is most effective for DevOps and other IT functions. This is the business area where Jira is most widely used today, but the continuing integration of business management functions is sending departmental silos crashing down left and right. 

As employees across departments become more familiar with agile concepts, and as the systems become simpler to learn and use, agile project management tools such as Jira are likely to become more popular.

The benefits of agile frameworks can be realized in managing business processes that include HR, marketing and product development. Organizations can get a jump on the future by introducing agile strategies in other areas of their operation through tools such as Jira.  

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Does my business need project management software?

Nearly everything a business does entails a project, from hiring and onboarding staff to production, marketing and distribution. Several recent trends make project management software more important to organizations of all types and sizes:

• Project teams are more distributed than ever, which creates challenges for efficient communication, collaboration and task tracking.
• As projects get more complex and involve more departments and moving pieces, it becomes more difficult to maintain a clear view of the big picture and track progress toward meeting project milestones and long-term goals.
• The enhanced reporting and analytics functions of project management software provide insights that go beyond individual projects to benefit other business operations.

What should I look for when choosing project management software?

The most important features of project management software include task creation and management, timelines, time tracking, budgeting, workflows and reporting.

• Project dashboards give team members an at-a-glance view of the status of the tasks and components they’re responsible for, as well as an overview of the project’s status.
• Scheduling and deadline management clearly identify project due dates and milestones to ensure the project stays on track.
• Collaboration features clarify which team members are responsible for specific tasks and duties. This boosts communication, collaboration and overall efficiency.
• Secure file sharing protects the organization’s sensitive information while making sure team members have access to the resources they require to fulfill their responsibilities.
• Customizable project templates save organizations time and help ensure that your project plan accounts for all resources and other required aspects of the project.

How much does project management software cost?

The average per-user-per-month price of project management software for small businesses is about $10 in a range from $5 to $25. Midsize businesses can expect to pay an average of around $25 to $30 per user per month for project management software, and enterprises can negotiate their per-user price with their project management software vendor.

Project management solutions with advanced functionality and dozens of users can cost up to $3,500 a month.

Does Asana integrate with Jira?

The Jira Cloud + Asana add-on provides automatic two-way sync between Asana and Jira to support automatic updates between associated tasks, issues and designated fields. Data can flow between the two systems simultaneously within a project to keep team members and stakeholders up to date on the status of each task and project. 

Asana’s rules can be used in conjunction with Jira to customize workflow automations to meet the needs of specific project processes.

Do Asana or Jira have free versions?

Yes, both solutions offer free plans. Asana’s free plan includes three project views as well as integrations with popular productivity apps, basic reporting and community support. The free service offered by Jira supports up to 10 users and comes with 2 GB of storage, task lists and timelines.

Can you export from Asana or Jira to Excel?

The simplest way to export data from Asana to Excel is to use the Asana2Go utility, which supports export of Asana data to a CSV file, as well as to HTML or PDF. The utility is free for personal and most commercial use.

Atlassian offers a free tool that exports data from Jira to Excel. The Jira Cloud for Excel add-in gives you two options for exporting Jira data to Excel:

• Import from the Jira side panel by selecting a filter and using JQL to choose the fields you want to export to an Excel worksheet.
• Use the Jira() function in a custom JQL query to specify the fields and number of rows to be exported.
• To export Jira’s advanced roadmaps to Excel, choose “share as” in the upper-right corner of the plan and choose “CSV.” Select the “Export to .csv” option to generate the CSV file.

Do Jira or Asana have Gantt charts?

Gantt chart is one of Asana’s project views. You can create a Gantt chart through Asana’s timeline feature, or use the company’s Gantt chart template creation tool to map tasks, roles and deadlines on a project’s timeline. 

Doing so requires identifying the elements you need to map and the supporting information you’ll need from relevant sources. You’ll also have to factor in recurring dependencies and roles and add any required integrations.

Two roadmap tools in Jira allow you to create a Gantt chart:

• Roadmaps describe plans that apply to a single team.
• Its advanced roadmaps address the issues that impact projects across teams and organizations.

Jira provides a free project management template that includes Gantt charts for roadmaps.

Can I create RACI charts in Asana or Jira?

Asana offers a free RACI matrix template to support project-related decision-making. RACI stands for “responsible, accountable, consulted and informed.” It is intended to help project teams define decision-making roles, identify all parties involved in the decision and gain stakeholder buy-in.

Jira doesn’t support creating RACI charts. However, RACI matrix charts are available through third-party integrations into Jira.