ClickUp vs Asana Comparison 2023: Which One Is Better?

In this article, we’ll break down the beef between two huge project management software solutions: Asana vs ClickUp. 

Our ClickUp vs Asana comparison article examines the pricing, free plans, ease of use, and customer service options. We’ll also compare their project management tools side by side to see if ClickUp or Asana is better. 

Ready to see the final verdict? Read on!

What is the difference between ClickUp and Asana?

The main difference between Asana and ClickUp is that Asana positions itself as an ideal project management tool for use with the best and simplest views like Gantt charts and Kanban boards. ClickUp aims to be a slightly more all-inclusive set of PM tools, views and features.

Now, the truth is, Asana can really hold its own if you want to go beyond basic task management with boards and charts, and similarly, ClickUp is very useful if you only want to leverage the most basic of PM features.

If you’ve checked out an Asana review or two, you’ll likely remark on all the praise Asana gets for being an organizational and productivity machine. What’s more, users are quite impressed with the amount of tools you can get with the free Asana version. While there are some people who still prefer to explore Asana alternatives, many users are perfectly happy staying put with this system.

Meanwhile, a typical ClickUp review will be quick to point out how flexible ClickUp can be when it comes to customization and personalization. Another common refrain when reviewing ClickUp is how great it is for teams to communicate and collaborate, but even some solo individuals are quite happy with this app. 

If you consider the many alternatives to ClickUp, you’d be hard pressed to find another app that can tick all the ClickUp boxes as effectively.

ClickUp vs Asana comparison chart

Here’s a basic overview table for ClickUp vs Asana:

Asana vs ClickUp: Pricing

Beginning with Asana, there are three basic pricing tiers. The first is called the Premium plan and it’s $10.99 per user per month billed annually or $13.49 per user per month billed monthly. 

Then there is Asana Business which is $24.99 per user per month billed annually or $30.49 per user per month billed monthly. There is also an Asana enterprise plan but for those prices, you have to contact Asana.

ClickUp, on the other hand, has four paid plans. They begin with the Unlimited plan at $5 per user per month billed annually or $9 per user per month billed monthly. 

Next is the ClickUp Business plan at $12 per user per month billed annually or $19 per user per month billed monthly. 

Then it is ClickUp Business Plus at $19 per user per month billed annually or $29 per user per month billed monthly. Finally, ClickUp offers an enterprise plan too, but the price tag is not listed.

Winner: ClickUp

When it comes to pricing, it is always nice to have as many options as possible, and for this reason, ClickUp beats Asana, even though there is bespoke pricing with both platforms if your company or organization is at the enterprise level.
 

Asana vs ClickUp: Free versions

Luckily, both Asana and ClickUp have free plans to offer to users who are on a budget, and are ideal for true startups or small businesses. ClickUp’s free plan gets you 100 MBs of storage, and you can add an unlimited number of users. You also get unlimited tasks, collaborative docs, whiteboards, real-time chat, Kanban boards, Scrum Sprint management and 24/7 support.

With the Asana free version, it offers unlimited storage with a cap at 100 MBs per file, but you are limited to 15 team members. You also get unlimited projects, tasks, activity logs and comments. 

The Asana free plan includes list views, calendar views and board views, as well as basic workflows which function with over 100 different app integrations. As for customer service, however, the free plan only has community support.

Winner: Asana

The fact that Asana has unlimited storage is one huge reason why this is the winner of the free plan section. Although Asana’s free plan has a 15 team member maximum, most organizations using these free plans will likely have small teams with fewer than 15 users anyways. It’s just too bad about the customer support.
 

Asana vs ClickUp: Customer support

Often, the quality of a software company’s customer service is a massive factor when comparing products. And it’s regularly the case that the more premium plans you choose, the better the support. 

For example, with ClickUp, the free plan includes 24/7 support, but once you get into the cheapest of the premium plans, you get live chat support too. From there ClickUp offers various service resources like onboarding training, administrative webinars and more.

It’s likely that when Asana says it has 24/7 support that’s only in the enterprise plan, that it is much more personalized than ClickUp’s 24/7 free support. Otherwise, on most Asana plans, there is a user forum, Asana Academy, webinars and guides. 

Winner: ClickUp

It’s nice to know that by subscribing to more and more premium plans, you can expect increasingly superior customer service, and that is why ClickUp takes the winning spot for this section of our comparative review.
 

Asana vs ClickUp: Knowledgebase & learning

There are many great ways to avoid having to deal with customer service if you can serve yourself, like by accessing a knowledge base, an FAQ section, a community forum, or other webinars, guides or video tutorials, some of which were mentioned above as part of the customer support section.

While both ClickUp and Asana offer a variety of knowledgebase and other self service resources, one can only decide which is better depending on the specific problems one has, and one’s base line proficiency for troubleshooting and problem solving.

Winner: Tie

In the end, both of the knowledge base self service modules offered by ClickUp and Asana are pretty decent, so long as you are the type of person who prefers to figure out ways to help themselves and solve their own problems.
 

ClickUp or Asana for ease of use

As far as project management software goes, the level of ease of use will strongly determine the speed of onboarding and the team’s commitment to using the tool and features.

ClickUp has always been regarded as a very user friendly platform, and no doubt many people claim it has a speedy learning curve. As you get to the more advanced tools, things can get a bit trickier, like with their automation features.

Meanwhile, Asana too is considered quite the user friendly project management tool. Although at first, the user interface and dashboards may not strike one as being incredibly simplistic, one finds that with a bit of practice, everything falls into place, even at the more advanced end of its functionalities.

Winner: Asana

The category of ease of use is never a simple one, as every single project management software solution strives to be as easy to use as possible, and this goes for ClickUp and Asana, but also for Monday.com, Airtable and the team communication platform Slack. In the end, our users and reviewers feel that Asana is slightly more user friendly than ClickUp.

ClickUp vs Asana features & functionality

Time to lay out all the tools and see which ones are better in both Asana and ClickUp.

Views

When running a project management platform, the quantity and variety of views is crucial for picking the best system. The most standard views are the Kanban board, the list view, the calendar view, and the Gantt chart, although there are many other options for views that more thorough project management tools can offer.

Winner: ClickUp

With ClickUp, you get a very large list of view options. They include list views, board views, calendar views, box views that display who is working on what, Gantt charts, activity views, timelines, workload views, tables or spreadsheets, maps, mind maps, doc views, chat views, and whiteboards. Asana, on the other hand, is basically all about lists, boards, calendars, timelines, portfolio views and goal views. 
 

Asana or ClickUp for tasks and projects

The best project management tools simply breakdown projects into tasks, as well as group projects into larger portfolios. Common features when it comes to task management include task lists, to-do lists or checklists, subtasks, task dependencies, and linked tasks. More important features get you task time tracking, task assignees, and task due dates.

Winner: Tie

As two of the top project management solutions, we have been forced to declare the category of task management and project management a tie between Asana and ClickUp. Both of these PM systems have all the key features to create projects and break them down into tasks and subtasks, and to plan your tasks according to roadmaps, milestones and goals. 

ClickUp always offers unlimited tasks in their projects, which they call workspaces. You also have a good deal of customization with ClickUp for task custom fields. Similarly, Asana has unlimited tasks and projects, and therefore, this is a tie.
 

Team communication and team collaboration

No project gets underway in a vacuum and few go all the way with a lonely team of one person. Teamwork is the name of the game, and for this reason, project management platforms need to offer a lot of communication and collaboration tools for team members. 

For example, Asana has task comments where team members can communicate with each other directly inside a task. There is private messaging inside Asana, and you can also have full team conversations.

Winner: ClickUp

ClickUp offers almost every single team communication and team collaboration feature as Asana, but we’d go so far as to argue that ClickUp has even more teamwork functionality. 

You get annotation and proofing, in-app video recording, emailing from inside ClickUp, team sharing tools, guest visibility, smart notifications and reminders too. Both Asana and ClickUp, however, have decent features for assigning administrative roles and permissions to your team members.
 

Workflows and automation

Just as the industrial revolution was kicked off by the use of rudimentary automation, cutting down on the repetitive manual labor of workers and thereby making them more productive, so too does the project management world need automations to streamline your operation as much as possible. 

A workflow is an automated series of tasks that are triggered by events or scheduling, and they set off a chain of automated activities which can more quickly and efficiently do a lot of the more simple and repetitive work that humans used to do.

Winner: Asana

It’s about time that Asana won a category here, and the field of workflows and automations is one that we are happy to bestow on Asana. You get workflows for things like automated time tracking which is great for invoicing, start date and end date workflows, task dependency workflows, and proofing and approval workflows. 

The Asana workflow builder is easy to use and there are workflow templates with pre-set rules and triggers and unlimited actions. Automation with ClickUp isn't half bad either, however, with 100 free automations per month, or 1000 in the premium plan.
 

Analytics and reporting

The best project management software solutions don’t just let you plan and run projects, but these platforms can also monitor your activity, analyze your results, and provide you with all sorts of invaluable insights into your past performance and your future forecasting. 

Data analysis and reporting are both important features in Asana and ClickUp, but which one is better? This depends on the quality of the data capture, the sophistication of the analysis, and the clarity of the reports.

Winner: Asana

Asana wins this category, but we admit, it was pretty darn close. 

With Asana, you get to export your reports in CSV and PDF in the free plan. You also get status updates, custom fields, chart customization, and advanced searching. What's more, Asana gives you analytics on milestones and goals, as well as portfolio-wide reports. 

ClickUp, on the other hand, also does goal analytics, and offers reporting tools like time estimates, sprint analytics, workload profiles, work in progress (WIP) limits, and data on your critical path and slack time.
 

Templates

Templates are a fundamental tool for so many different kinds of business SaaS, whether we are talking about project management software, CRM, marketing and sales platforms, and more. 

Templates can help your team get started more quickly and efficiently with a new task, project or goal by providing a solid standard form or process which you can then use, modify, update, save, reuse and share.

In project management, common templates are available for projects like action plans, agile PM, Scrum management, concept maps, event planning, product launch and team goal setting.

Winner: ClickUp

Truth be told, you will not be disappointed with Asana’s template library, but we felt we had to give this category to ClickUp because they have more templates specifically geared toward project management, along with other categories like finance and accounting, IT, HR, operations, marketing, sales and CRM. 

Some ClickUp project management templates include work breakdown structures, venn diagrams, stakeholder maps, Gantt charts, and project network diagrams. Asana has some amazing templates for product development, like product roadmap, sprint retrospective, customer feedback, and creative content feedback and approval templates.  
 

Mobile apps

Almost every angle project management system can be used with your mobile device. In some cases, the interface is designed to be responsive to screen size and will adjust depending on whether you are using a computer, tablet or mobile phone. 

What is even better is when the PM software makes an app specifically for mobile use. Fortunately for our case today, both ClickUp and Asana have dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android. So, which one is better?

Winner: Asana

The Asana mobile app was created with incredible design and attention to detail to be both intuitive and effective. It’s a great tool for keeping in touch with your project team, staying on top of your to-do checklist, and using the calendar features. 

You have your set of different views like Gantt and Kanban, and you can use the mobile app to keep your eye on the ball when it comes to reaching milestones and crushing your project goals. 

The ClickUp mobile app does pretty much the same amount of things as Asana’s, and it looks good too. You can update task status, collaborate with your team and get push notifications and reminders.
 

Integrations

We’ve come to the final category in this review article pitting Asana vs ClickUp, and that is for the integrations. An integration is the mechanism by which one app can communicate and share data with another app so that you can create interoperable functionalities between two apps. 

One common integration example is to connect your regular email to your project management tool to automatically sync communication and get notified when there is incoming mail in both platforms.

Winner: Tie

It is very often the case that when it comes to integrations, most of the best project management tools are tied, as they often have similar lists of integration options. For example, with Asana you get native integrations with Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Teams and Outlook, Salesforce, Dropbox, Google Drive, Github, Trello and more. 

ClickUp has many integrations as well, like Zoom, Slack and Github, or you can use the connector app Zapier for further integrations, like for Gmail, Salesforce, Jira and Monday.com.   

Which is better, ClickUp or Asana? Our takeaways

And so, to push the question up against a wall and demand an answer: Asana vs ClickUp, which one is really better? As you’ve seen from our chart, ClickUp edges past Asana by no more than a hair’s breadth.

There’s little doubt, both ClickUp and Asana are leaders when it comes to project planning software, along with other household names like Wrike, Monday.com and Zoho projects.

As a consumer and user of project management SaaS, you really have a tasty buffet of options. But if you don't want to waste much time, then the age-old debate of ClickUp vs Asana is a great place to start to narrow down your choices.