Asana Review 2026: Goals + Portfolios Done Right, Developer Integration Done Wrong

Asana’s Goals + Portfolios layer is the most complete OKR-to-task bridge in the mid-market segment. At £10.99/seat Starter, you get portfolio views, milestone tracking, and goals linking that monday.com puts behind the £24/seat Pro tier. For cross-functional teams that run quarterly OKR cycles — where product, marketing, and ops all need to surface their work against company-level objectives — Asana’s data model is architecturally superior.

The limitation: Asana’s developer integration story is weak at the Starter tier. Salesforce and Jira native integrations require the Advanced tier (£24.99/seat). GitHub integration exists at Starter, but it’s read-only status — commits don’t update task status the way ClickUp and Jira handle it. For engineering-led organisations, this is a disqualifying gap.

The honest verdict: Best for cross-functional teams where marketing, ops, and product share a workspace. Skip if you’re engineering-led (ClickUp or Jira), solo/micro-team (the Personal free plan’s 15-user cap doesn’t justify £10.99/seat for limited value), or need Gantt at under £24.99/seat.

TL;DR

• Score: 8.5/10
• Price: £0 Personal / £10.99/seat Starter / £24.99/seat Advanced
• Year-1 realistic cost (15 people): £2,400–£3,600 on Starter

Goals + Portfolios — the feature that differentiates Asana

Asana’s Goals layer connects company-level OKRs to individual projects and tasks. A company goal (“Reach 10K MRR by Q3”) links to a sub-goal (“Launch 3 enterprise accounts”), which links to a project (“Enterprise onboarding Q2”), which contains tasks assigned to specific people with due dates.

The visual rollup — seeing at a glance whether the work being done is actually moving the goal — is unique in the mid-market segment at this price point. monday.com’s equivalent (Goals on Pro tier, £24/seat) is less mature. ClickUp’s Goals feature is present but the UI requires more configuration.

Portfolios let a programme manager aggregate multiple projects into a single status view. Five simultaneous product launches? One Portfolio shows timeline, status, and owner for each without needing to click into each project. This is a feature that Smartsheet and Wrike charge significantly more to deliver; Asana includes it at Starter.

Workflow automation — strong, but not as intuitive as monday.com

Asana’s automation (called “Rules”) supports the same “When / Then” pattern as monday.com: “When due date passes without completion, move to Overdue section and notify manager.” The builder is good. It’s not as immediately intuitive as monday.com’s — the trigger/condition/action model requires more clicks — but it’s genuinely powerful.

Automation limit on Starter: 25,000 rule runs per month per workspace. This is 100Ã- more than monday.com Standard’s 250/month. Teams that automations-first their workflow will not hit Asana’s cap. This is a meaningful advantage over monday.com for automation-heavy teams who don’t want to jump to the £24/seat tier.

Mobile app — the best in the category

Asana’s mobile app (iOS and Android) is consistently the top-rated in the PM software category on App Store and Google Play. In our testing: task creation from voice input, offline sync on iOS, and push notifications with inline reply all work without friction. monday.com’s mobile app is functional but occasionally drops background sync on poor connections. ClickUp’s mobile app is feature-complete but slower on older devices.

For teams where field workers or frequently-travelling managers need full task management on mobile, Asana’s mobile experience is a differentiator.

Pricing — the £10.99 → £24.99 cliff

The jump from Starter to Advanced is 127% price increase per seat. This is the steepest mid-tier cliff in the top-5 tools — steeper than monday.com’s Standard-to-Pro jump (£10 → £24, 140% but from a lower base). For a 15-person team, moving from Starter to Advanced adds £2,139/year.

If your evaluation requires Salesforce integration: budget for Advanced from day one. The native Salesforce connector at Advanced syncs deals to Asana tasks bidirectionally. At Starter, you need Zapier (add ~£150-300/year for the required Zapier plan tier).

Import friction — the test result

We timed Asana’s import from three sources on 2026-05-01:

• From Trello: 11 minutes 08 seconds. The import preserves cards as tasks, lists as sections, labels as tags, due dates, and attachments. Trello checklists become Asana subtasks with one limitation: checklist items with their own due dates don’t transfer — the due date drops. For teams with date-specific checklist items, this requires manual cleanup.
• From CSV: 5 minutes 45 seconds. The CSV importer has the cleanest column-mapping UI in our test — auto-detects standard field names (Name, Due Date, Assignee, Priority) and maps correctly for US and UK date formats. Recommended for anyone migrating from a spreadsheet-based system.
• From Asana (own data export): 2 minutes 30 seconds. Not a meaningful test — the self-import is a backup/restore, not a migration. Included for completeness.

Import friction score: 8.5/10 — tied with monday.com’s Trello import, slightly better on CSV. The Trello checklist date-loss is the only meaningful gap.

Comparison with the nearest alternatives

Asana vs monday.com: Asana wins on Goals + Portfolios at this price tier, automation volume (25K vs 250 actions/month on comparable tiers), and mobile experience. monday.com wins on board UI, template quality, and the speed from “signed up” to “team is using it”.

Asana vs ClickUp: Asana wins on cross-functional workflow clarity and mobile. ClickUp wins on developer-native sprint boards, custom view depth, and price value at the £10/seat Business tier. For engineering teams, ClickUp. For mixed cross-functional teams, Asana.

Asana vs Wrike: Asana wins at the Starter tier for most use cases. Wrike wins on native time tracking (Asana has no native time tracking at any tier — you need Harvest), resource management, and client billing features for agencies.

FAQ

Does Asana have a free plan that’s actually usable?

Asana Personal is genuinely usable for small teams doing simple task management. 15 users, unlimited tasks, basic projects. The limits: no automation, no Gantt timeline, no dashboards, no custom fields. For a 5-person startup doing basic task tracking, Personal covers 80% of needs for 12–18 months.

Does Asana integrate with Jira?

Natively, yes — but only on the Advanced tier (£24.99/seat). On Starter, the Jira connector is not available; you’d use Zapier or Unito as a bridge at additional cost. If your engineering team runs Jira and your ops team wants Asana, budget for Advanced or evaluate whether ClickUp’s native Jira-equivalent sprint board is the better architecture.

Is Asana better than monday.com for agencies?

No — and this is a common misconception. Asana lacks native time tracking, client billing, and the resource workload views that agencies need. For agency work: Teamwork (£9.99/seat Deliver) or Wrike (£8.21/seat Team) are architecturally better. Asana is for internal cross-functional teams, not client-billing agencies.