It doesn’t seem like Slack and Asana are arch rivals. Rather they work together!

They both don’t make a direct competitor, as Asana is majorly focussed on Project Management, while Slack brings team conversations together. Nearly both tools have made their launch to the public in the years of 2012 and 2013 respectively.

Asana has its foothold across a wide number of customers globally. The clientele-stack of Asana is fully loaded with big names of diverse industries such as; Nasa, Google, Bill & Melinda Gates, foundation, yelp, Vodafone, Deloitte, Avon, The New York Times, Airbnb, Uber and the list goes on. Founded by Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein as a Software-as-a-Service project management tool with the most recent valuation of $1.5B.

Interestingly, Slack occupies a good amount of share across the world with impressive clientele of Ticketmaster, Airbnb, Target, Capitalone, Oracle and many more.

Let’s look into a few exciting parameters of both the tools:

1. Getting Started

Asana

Find an easier way to manage broad range of projects and daily To-dos with Asana Project Management Software. The user can Sign-up to Asana with their Google Account or with their work email. They are able to access the application individually, as a part of the team, or from within the organization.

• Asana keeps things at the place and organized, so as the users can easily add tasks, conversations, teams, projects and invite other team members.

• While creating a new project, the users can make the choice either from a blank project or template, can choose teams, and also can make the privacy setting of project visibility to marketing teams and project managers.

• Assign tasks to the created project by choosing assignees, set due dates to each task, add more teammates, add them as task followers or project managers. With Asana create projects, organize tasks, assign responsibilities, bring scattered information to one place, track project deadlines and many more.

Slack

Conversations have to happen in one place to make the right decisions. Slack is a hub for all your team communication. Connect your team for all project discussions, share supported files, search team conversations, collaborate via one-on-one messaging, voice and video, etc., to gain optimum end-results.

• The users can sign-up to Slack workspace with any of their public/private email ids. They can sign-up to a new workspace altogether or can join an existing workspace if they have an invite from the admin.

• Can communicate with team members through channels, direct messages, voice, and video calls. Slack users can chat with bots for all kinds of help assistance.

• Slack users can sign into other workspaces within the application itself. With Slack give a project name for each channel, directly log in to the application with your workspace URL, catch up to innumerable integrations, talk to Slack bots with many more interesting features.

Getting Started Conclusion

Sign-up process of Asana completes in a few steps, while more steps are involved in Slack.

2. Ease of Use

Asana 

Creating projects and tracking those projects tasks are simple and easy at Asana. The user interface is neatly designed and is highly self-explorable. It lets you create tasks and to-dos, add sections to organize your tasks, set start date and end date to tasks, add an assignee to tasks to track the project progress.

How to use Asana tutorial for new users 

Team and Project management features are seen at the sidebar of the Asana application home page. Find my favorites, reports, teams, projects, team calendar, and more projects from here.

Slack

The user interface of Slack is quite appealing and impressive. Though it not as extensive as Asana, the UX is a little confusing. If we consider simple-to-use and the easy-to-understand user interface is one of the key performance indicators of measurement of any team collaboration tool, then Troop Messenger comes stands first in the row.

Getting Started with Slack - Tips, Tricks & More 

Workspace settings can be managed from the administration section of each workspace. Those settings would include; workspace sign-up mode and language, display name guidelines, default channels, etc., The best part is that the users have the provision to integrate to App Directory right from the user-side application itself.

Ease of Use conclusion

Asana, as a project management tool, has a number of user-interface navigations to work on project tasks, while Slack being a team collaboration tool has fewer hops.

3. Integration

Asana

Any tool that supports a good number of integrations makes teams job hassle-free. Asana helps the users to bring emails, storage, files, support tickets, and many more apps into the application for quick completion of tasks. It comes with more than 100 integrations like Zapier, Dropbox, Time Camp, Microsoft Office 356, Slack, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.,

Slack

Slack comes with a humongous App Directory. It supports somewhere around 1500 app integrations and useful slack bots to ensure seamless office work routines. A wide-category of app directory includes; communication tools, daily tools, essential apps, new & noteworthy apps, and brilliant bots. Slack lets to build own APIs to suit your business requirements.

Integration Conclusion 

Asana has integrated Slack for all its team communications and work collaborations.

4. Support

Asana

At Asana Guide, one can find a detailed product’s help documentation, starting right from Asana demo to Sign-up process orientation. It extends live chat support to the users in its website. However, Asana also has a presence of a priority support option that is rendered by a dedicated account manager. This service is available for premium users and thus comes up with a cost. Hence if you are ready to spend more bucks on the tool then you can get a better support option in Asana.

Slack

Slack provides detailed and comprehensive help support to its users. Slack is quick at resolving all kinds of customer issues. At Slack, customer support looks into; resolving issues, automation, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. Few of the customer support integration app includes; Slaask, Help, and Zendesk.

Support Conclusion

Both Asana and Slack extend equally notable support services to the users. But I see no Live Chat Support at Slack’s website.

5. Platforms

Both Asana and Slack have their presence on all the major platforms such as Windows, Mac OS, Browser, Android and iOS. After you download the app from Google play store, you can look into the quick start guide for Android. The mobile app users of Asana can access My Tasks, projects, conversations, Inbox, Quick Add, and search from their respective Android apps.

Slack’s desktop and the mobile app user interface seems to be similar. From the mobile app, you are allowed to set your status, check your activity, allow you to select the time bound for Do not disturb status, invite people and many more..to go on.

However, the windows phone app is not supported by either of them.

6. Search Features

Asana

The use of search functionality in Asana is quite simple and easy to use. Filter out projects, tasks, conversations, teams, team members, project managers, etc., with this search feature.

You can further filter out attachments, project delivery deadlines statuses such as completed, and incomplete.  Asana search functionality allows the user to add custom filters as per the project requirement. 

Slack

At Slack, search for messages, files, channels, It lets the users find the relevant files from the search filters of “Your Files”, and “All Files”. Slack allows the users to filter out messages from My Messages/files, Starred items, current conversations, and from using time filters.

Search Features Conclusion

As Asana has more functional features, there exists a scope to filter-out more entities when compared to Slack.

7. Security and Privacy

Asana

Asana takes customers security seriously to keep their data secure, safe and private. It is SOC 2(Type I) and (Type 2) certified for extending security, availability, and confidentiality to the users. To reduce all types of vulnerabilities and loss of data risks, Asana gets the processes and practices validated by trusted third-party services.

Slack

Slack extends its best features to provide security to users data. The various compliance certifications and regulations of the application include; FedRAMP, SOC2(Type II), SOC3, HIPAA and more.

Security and Privacy Conclusion

Both Asana and Slack are good at facilitating the best security and privacy to the users.

8. Dashboard, Analytics, and Reporting Widgets

Asana

Asana’s Dashboard is extensive and provides a birds view of all the projects at one place. It gives the data of projects, team member allocation, project deadlines, project status updates, etc., Asana has planned to remove the dashboard and replace the same functionality with portfolios.

Analytics facilitates detailed reports of project status to ensure optimum transparency.

Slack

From Slack user interface, team members can add channels, set notification preferences, can send direct messages, invite people, star the channels, manage channel settings, etc., to perfectly collaborate with other team members.

Slack’s analytic section is divided into an overview, channels, and members. The overview area says about the number of messages exchanged, file storage used, apps and integrations installed and the other two divisions show the information of a number of channels added, and members along with the date of account creation.

Dashboard, Analytics, and Reporting Widgets Conclusion

Apparently, we don’t see any specific-dashboard type of feature in Slack.

Conclusion

This in accordance with the end-users discretion, if someone is looking for end-to-end project management, then Asana would be the ideal tool to opt for. For exclusive team communication, Slack makes the best choice. Asana’s teams integrate Slack for effective team collaboration.

Disclaimer

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The aim of the article is to be informative. We intend users take an informed decision for an effective and productive experience. The comparison shown between Asana vs slack in the blog is only towards that end and has no intention of pitting one against the other team collaboration app brands. The images, logos, any concepts etc., used in this blog, purely belong to their respective companies or applications (Asana and Slack).
 

Readers are advised to consult and confirm from the respective service providers regarding details of features, latest updates, prices, and their policies before utilizing any of their services. 
This further informs the reader that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog solely belong to the author’s perception, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.