Comparing Trello & Asana for Small Organizations

Leveraging Technology for Smaller Organizations

For some businesses and organizations (like ours) the COVID-19 Pandemic has shown that small teams have somewhat of an easier time making systematic changes in the way they use technology. However, ease can sometimes be a double-edged sword.  Often you can hear eGuide Owner, Gregory Perrine, telling clients, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” when discussing platforms. Why is that? 

Thinking strategically about the technology powering your business can mean the difference between scaling smoothly, or creating a tangled mess of information that will add time to projects, reporting, and operations. 

As we discussed in our blog post: Effectively Managing Projects for Small Business and Organizations, technology management platforms can streamline and create efficiencies in your workflow. Knowing and committing to a universal project management system will allow you to flow from project to project with ease. 

Digging Into Trello

You may already know, but eGuide is a little bias when it comes to Trello. It’s the project management tool that we’ve consistently used since 2016, and it has been able to scale and adapt to the growth of our business. 

Trello is based on the Kanban style of project management, which originated in Japan and was used by Toyota for manufacturing starting in the late 1940s. The building blocks of a Kanban style project management system is based on segmenting information into “boards, lists, and cards”, allowing users to easily create a project structure that allows them to group information together. Trello was one of the first platforms of it’s kind that allowed users to easily drag and drop broad or granular tasks into various phases of a project through a seamless desktop or mobile experience. 

As this style of project management has become more widely used and recognized, other platforms like Microsoft (Planner), Salesforce, Monday.com, and Asana have all created the option to view projects in a Kanban style. While this visualization option is effective, where Trello continues to lead the market in Kanban style project management comes from their easy to use automation tool, Butler, and also community developed power ups that can allow each board to be customized to the needs of the project. 

Understanding Asana

Where Trello projects tend to move from left to right, scrolling horizontally, Asana generally takes a more traditional approach moving from top to bottom as you would scroll through a website or spreadsheet. In our experience, this small fundamental detail has been a reason why some businesses adapt to one platform over another.

Asana takes a more traditional “spreadsheet” approach which allows the project managers to create individual tasks and groupings of tasks within a project. Each task then can be further customized by assigning a user, date, labels and other functionality. Users can establish a relationship between two tasks which can help to visualize project flow and bottlenecks. 

Just like Trello, Asana continues to develop their platform by including integrations and tools that allow you to visualize projects in a variety of ways (gantt charts, timelines, kanban), and automations (Asana calls Rules) to help streamline project tasks. 

Should I Try Asana or Trello? 

Luckily both Trello & Asana allow you to explore their platforms for free, and to be honest until the start of this year, eGuide was using the free version of Trello for all of our project management. 

While we recommend eventually committing to one platform, the best way to get a sense of fit is to “try it on”. Choosing two small projects, or even the same project, and building out a frame-work in both platforms will allow you to experience the user interface and experience first hand. 

It might be likely that if you are coming from managing all projects via spreadsheets, Asana may be a better fit, however if your projects are based on a repeating set of deliverables the drag and drop functionality and easy to create templates of Trello may win out. 

Choosing a few members from your team to test out both platforms and communicate preferences will ensure that everyone is committed to the transition and has a personal investment in using the platform. 

Once the decision to move forward with one platform or the other is made, digging into tools that will allow you to further operationalize and automate your projects is the key to working more efficiently and effectively. 

Both Trello and Asana are here to stay, and if you are like many of our eGuide Partners, there is no shortage of projects happening in your organization, especially as we transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploring ways to increase awareness and automate steps in any project can mean the difference between staying where you are, or growing to where you want to go.