Asana VS Jira

Let’s have a detailed comparison of Asana vs Jira to find out which one is better. Let’s discover some of the essential factors that you must consider and decide whether Asana or Jira fits your business.

Asana and Jira are among the top two commonly used project management tools, each with a specific way of approach. Both have a strong online reputation and are used by startups to large enterprises. Let's explore further with a detailed discussion on Asana vs Jira

Comparison of Asana vs Jira In terms of Features

Asana includes features like Boards, Calendars, Integrations, and Dashboards. Jira is known for functionalities like Scrum Boards, Kanban Boards, Agile Reporting and Agile Roadmap Planning. When you compare Asana vs Jira, look for scalability, customization, ease of use, customer support and other key factors.

1. Agile Reporting & Support:

To ensure that you keep working on the right track, Asana offers Universal Reporting. This feature provides actionable and real-time insights in one place for all the teams involved in a project.

While on the other hand, Jira software offers real-time insights that help you in making data-driven decisions with agile dashboards and reports. It offers reports like Burndown Charts, Sprint Reports, Release Burndown, and Velocity Charts. These agile reports enable scrum teams to stay on track with their sprint goals.

Jira reporting also allows you to analyze your project performance with Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Control Charts, Resolved Issues Reports, Resolution Time Reports, User Workload Reports, etc.

2. Dashboard & Interface

Both Asana and Jira software have a customizable dashboard that effectively assists you in planning and tracking your work. Their plug-and-play widgets make them highly user-friendly.

Asana is quite easy to start, as anyone from your team can set it up. However, for Jira software, you might need a special administrator who will deploy and configure the tool successfully for you.

However, Jira software offers an added feature Quickstart Bar. This bar takes you through the basic tasks of the software while allowing you to select between receiving pop-ups, watching a video, going through a document, or all of them. At the same time, Asana also offers pop-ups for quickly accessing its features.

3. Built-In Workflows

Asana enables you to plan, structure, and visualize your work in your preferred way. You can organize your work using Kanban boards that allow you to view where your tasks stand in real-time. Asana’s timeline feature allows you to map out your projects and stay on track even when some changes occur.

Additionally, it allows you to view project progress on a calendar, so that you can identify patterns of overlays and loopholes and become more efficient and productive.

On the other hand, Jira software offers scrum boards, Kanban boards, and roadmaps to efficiently manage your projects. Customizable scum boards allow you to stay focused and manage your workflow in stages like to-do, in-progress, and done tasks.

Kanban boards ensure that all your team members experience transparency and avoid duplication of work.

4. Collaboration

Both Asana and Jira software facilitate cross-functional teams’ collaboration. In Asana, every user gets cross-project visibility and can view who is responsible for which particular task.

With the team management feature in Asana, users can assign and ask other workers to join them on a particular task or project. Further, Asana mobile app for Android and iOS enables users to collaborate and connect right from their device.

However, in Jira software, a user can collaborate using third-party platforms like Trello, Confluence, Slack, or Zoom. These integrations ensure transparency and make workflow creation easier.

You can link Trello to Jira and generate cards for every task with all relevant information. This ensures that everyone in your team knows what’s happening on a project.

5. Popular Integrations

Asana can be integrated with some popular apps for communication, finance, HR, marketing, productivity, security, etc. A few popular apps include Splunk, Microsoft Teams, Adobe Creative Cloud, Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Gmail, Google Calendar, Zapier, etc.

Similarly, Jira software also offers integration with multiple tools that can automate your workflow in just a few clicks. Third party tools that can be integrated with Jira include Slack, Zoom, Google, Microsoft, Trello, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc.

6. Assigning Tasks with Due Tasks

Assigning tasks in Asana and Jira is pretty and quick. For instance, while using Asana, you can comment on a specific task by using ‘@’ to tag a teammate. In the comment, you can either assign a task or ask for clarity on a task. Also, you can tag your team leads or mentors to keep them in the loop.

Apart from this, Asana enables private messaging, project, and team conversations where you can communicate and assign tasks.

However, in Jira software, you can assign tasks using an add-on, Confluence. Using Confluence, you can assign, view, and add tasks. While assigning a task, it allows you to add a due date for the task. To assign a task, just tag your teammate using ‘@’ and mention the comment.

7. Project Sharing

Both Asana and Jira allow project sharing with internal and external teams/ partners. You can give user permission to your teammates for viewing, comment, or editing.

However, while using Asana software, you can share your private documents by simply inviting other users through email or a shareable link. You can keep your shared documents organized as lists on Kanban boards.

In addition to this, Asana’s Teammate View feature enables you to view other teammates' workloads. This tells you what your team has been working on, and what else you should assign them.

In Jira software, you can share complete access to Kanban boards by sharing a license with them. However, there is no way to give view-only access to other licensed users. But unlicensed users will be able to view tickets on the project, but not the complete board.

8. Color Coding

Asana’s own interface is designed with clean hues of white and gray to keep you away from any distractions. But they have introduced different Colored Projects and Tags that can replace the gray panel.

These colored tags help you to balance your work and prioritize critical tasks first. This works great, especially for employees who multitask in various domains like marketing, sales, operations, etc. You can choose colors of your choice and spice up your board.

However, in Jira Software, you get default colors for cards according to their type of issue. For instance, Green is for improvement, blue for a task, orange for a new feature, and red for a bug. Similarly, default colors are assigned to assignees, queries, and priorities. Although, later on, you can change or delete these default colors.

9. REST APIs

Both Asana and Jira offer robust REST API that can be integrated with your existing tools that are already in use. This allows you to automate your project management processes with rich APIs. In addition, REST APIs offer scalability, flexibility, portability, and independence.

10. DevOps Apps Marketplace

You can connect Asana to Azure DevOps. This will allow you to migrate, integrate, and sync your tasks, work items, incidents, or any issues between Asana and Azure DevOps.

Jira claims to be the best marketplace for DevOps apps. It offers about 1,000 plug-and-play add-ons that extend the Jira software to fit any development process. With the help of these add-ons, you can visualize and measure your task’s progress from the stage of ideation to final production.

11. Management Features

Asana enables you to streamline your project from start to finish using its unique management features. These features include organizing your work on Kanban boards, delegating tasks, creating subtasks, adding checkpoints, custom fields, etc. To save your time, Asana enables you to sync tasks, copy projects, and create custom templates to avoid the repetition of work.

Similarly, in Jira software, Kanban boards allow you to manage your multiple projects while ensuring continuous delivery. Kanban boards in Jira help visualize your workflow, identify urgent tasks, and track work-in-progress to maximize your output. Jira pushes you to continuously improve by highlighting real-time metrics so that you can identify loopholes and work on them.

12. Core Features

Asana’s core features allow you to manage projects for any size of team. It possesses distinctive features like:

• Project Overview
• Task Sync
• Custom Templates
• Real-time Workload Overview
• Advanced Search
• Cross-Project Visibility for Collaboration

Jira offers some excellent features that make it the ideal project management software for agile teams.

• Scrum Boards
• Kanban Boards
• Roadmaps
• Agile Reporting
• Developer Tool Integrations
• Custom Filters

Comparison Between Asana and Jira In terms of Deployment Type

While Asana supports Web Based deployment; Jira is suitable for Web Based and On Premises deployment. While selecting between Asana and Jira, figure out which one of the two is compatible with your devices. This will help in reducing the hassle after implementation.

Asana vs Jira: Support

Asana provides three kinds of support – Help, Premium Support, and Enterprise Support.

• Help: You can access Asana’s knowledgeable support team and Asana’s Guide which offers tutorial articles and videos.
• Premium Support: Access to recorded training, webinars, and customer community.
• Enterprise Support: Access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager that guarantees a response in two business hours.

Jira provides community support, support during local business hours, and 24/7 premium support in their different plans.

• Standard Plan: 9/5 Regional Support
• Premium Plan: 24/7 Support for critical issues, quicker responses
• Enterprise Plan: 24/7 Support for all issues, availability of senior support team, quicker responses, call support.

Asana or Jira: Which Is Ideal for Your Industry

Asana is preferred by organizations of all sizes. Where Jira is loved by engineers and product teams. However, if you are confused between Asana or Jira, you can also check if the software has customizable modules for your industry. Industry-specific functionalities will ensure higher efficiency and ROI.

Which Is Better? - Asana or Jira

Asana and Jira can be used for different purposes and are well-suited for teams with specific needs. Both fit great in different markets, but if you are looking for a platform that is easy to use, has low barriers to entry, and offers a lot of customization, flexibility, and integration options, then you must compare their specifications in detail at the time of demo. Compare Asana and Jira during demo to decide which one is best for your business.