Top FREE Asana Alternatives
Managing a team and their workload can quickly become an uphill task, with deadlines overlapping and communication between teams frequently breaking down. The solution has been the development of project management software, an excellent example being Asana.
Yet, by providing a solution, other problems have sprung up. Users have found that these apps hinder the ability to collaborate between team members and teams and they are generally difficult for new users to adapt to. So we have you some time and compared 4 tools (Asana, Trello, Procezo, and Clarizen), comparing their benefits, drawbacks, and suitability for different-sized businesses on features, price, and support.
Asana, Trello, Clarizen, Procezo
Trello and Asana were both released around 2011. Trello has gained the most popularity over time with both businesses and consumers, with over 1 million teams on its platform daily. Asana has instead focused its efforts on attracting businesses maintaining a portfolio of more than 50,000 paying organizations.
Clarizen presents a solution to large enterprises, whose client portfolio includes EA and Western Union, among others. Procezo is a new player in the project management market, released in 2019, yet the tool is quickly gaining popularity for its clear and uncomplicated UI, cutting down the learning curve for new users.
Pricing
The free version of Asana allows up to 15 users and includes a wide range of features. At 9.99 a month per user, the increase in price can quickly skyrocket. With the lack of certain features missing entirely users often have to integrate Asana alongside other tools.
Trello’s Gold package is $45 a year, which is a reasonable price per user. You also get to use the full range of Trello’s power-ups, which are essential if you want to import and work with your data from other platforms. Trello is great for small businesses and startups with a small number of people. For larger sized enterprises, Trello may not be the best project management tool.
With Procezo, all its features are entirely free to use. As a user, you are allowed the creation of unlimited users, tasks and ongoing projects — as well as free support! One of its standout features is the free use of Gantt charts to determine workflows and visualize progress and processes. The inclusion of simple analytics is a useful add-on to see where some team members may have too many tasks. Procezo is the best suited for small businesses and startups wary of mounting expenses.
Clarizen has an expensive monthly cost. Firstly, you are only offered a 30-day trial, which discourages smaller businesses from the beginning. With its Professional Edition beginning at 29.95 per user per month and Enterprise version 44.95 per user per month, the costs of having Clarizen quickly begin to mount and bring its usefulness and benefits into question. Clarizen is ideal for mid-sized to large enterprises.
Features
Both Trello and Asana are praised for their user-friendly interfaces and short learning curves. Trello also has very good support and availability and reasonable pricing models. Asana has some unique features such as Asana Inbox, which adds a layer of ease to using Asana.
Clarizen incorporates many of Asana and Trello’s functions such as lists view, as well as more custom features such as email integration, cost-to-completion, and a client portal. Procezo is praised for its simple and efficient user interface, Gantt charts, unlimited tasks and subtasks, users and projects, deadlines and attachments alongside excellent customer support. Procezo genuine free-to-use platform can be used for both smaller businesses/freelancers and medium-sized organizations.
Premium
Trello’s premium features include unlimited integrations, public/private boards, and onboarding support. Asana boasts unlimited dashboards and custom fields, task dependencies, private teams and projects, and Google SSO integration. Clarizen promotes its integrated communication system which allows for collaboration on tasks and projects, as well as more customizable features. Procezo offers all its features, including Gantt chart, analytics, and boards free to all its users.
Disadvantages
As with anything, tools come with some disadvantages. Asana has trouble as projects grow larger and in numbers. It lacks a time tracking capability, which is very important if clients are charged on an hourly rate. Trello cards and tasks are limited only to one board or project. With limited email integration, the number of labels and difficulty working with multiple cards/tasks in cross projects, using Trello as your business grows can begin to confuse and a breakdown of communication between co-workers has been one of the main drawbacks.
Procezo would benefit from more integration with 3rd party applications, but its recent release and key integrations on the horizon and support for transferring your projects, it is difficult to criticize. Clarizen also suffers from a lack of integration with 3rd party applications among its biggest complaints by users.
Support
Asana is severely lacking in this department. With a 3-star review on Trustpilot, users have often complained of the poor quality of support offered, being charged before their free trial subscription had been canceled and customers have often experienced rudeness and general lack of customer care and little support when using the tool. Trello has been rated well with support by users, but its phone support only applies to paid users and communicates with its users mainly via email.
Clarizen’s tool has a steep learning curve, but over the years it has improved its support for its users especially its onboarding process.
Procezo offers a first-class, customer-centric approach to its users, through its onboarding process and throughout its user's lifespan. Its human touch approach is ideal for individual or small-sized organizations looking to grow who require responsive and effective support.
Summary:
Trello is an excellent tool for individuals and small businesses, but as your business grows complications will arise. Asana is best suited to medium-sized companies, but it is not without flaws. Procezo is well-suited to start-ups and small businesses, although medium-sized businesses would adjust well to it. Clarizen would benefit larger enterprises to which budget is not an issue and require highly customizable features of a task manager
