The final answer to Jira vs. Trello vs. Asana!
Find out which project management tool is right for you!
Motivation
Probably you are familiar with more than one of these tools, simply because the project management software market is huge. Any software developer, technical consultant or IT project manager comes across one or the other project management software during their lifetime. I myself have used all three before and can only state, that it can be difficult to decide which one to use based on their feature lists. Furthermore it can be quite upsetting not to know how the decision might impact a project.
Light, Middle and Heavy Weight
There are three types of categories for project management software, let’s see where the presented tools fit in and how they differ (basically).
They all support Kanban Boards, Web and Mobile Apps, APIs and come with a free trial.
Trello
Trello is great for starters. It’s a great light weight project management tool because it is mainly about the agile kanban workflow. Mostly it is used by startups and small teams. Trello comes with boards, columns and cards.
Trello has a free and premium plan.
I myself started to work with Trello when I worked on my first startup and little projects. I enjoyed the ease of use, quick setup and easy maintanance.
Nevertheless, as soon as I wanted more insights, better overviews, multiple visualizations of todos a.s.o I found its limitations and switched to Asana.
Asana
What I love about Asana is the ability for any task owner to see how their tasks impact overall project goals. Also I think it provides you with a great overview of deadlines, tasks and overall project processes.
Also the gantt chart is great for easy rescheduling and task dependency management.
When I founded a digital agency we used Asana daily and found everything we needed there. Only when working with big clients on complex projects we switched to Jira.
Jira
Jira is one of the most popular tools out there and is a great choice for big companies. It gives you the ability to coordinate between multiple complex projects and enables you to customize the workflows. Jira integrates nicely with Confluence — which is a great data management tool.
For smaller teams or little projects I believe Jira comes with a huge overhead.
I myself use Jira on a daily base working on big projects using Scrum.
Which tool will work for you
While certain tools can offer more functionality and better support for your use cases, the actual project success will not be based on your tool.
How is that?
Well, often teams challenge the usage of certain project management tools and believe that these are responsible for their productivity levels and project success. I have spoken to many developers and managers and came to the conclusion that the human factor and team communication is the real driver of success!
We often forget, that project management tools are there to help and support us, but they get only as good as the team using it.
Qualities in communication such as transparency, timing and clearness have a much deeper impact.
Nevertheless the right tool is based on your project scope and your team size:
- Are you a small team or have a small project? Choose Trello.
- Growing and organizational processes as well? Choose Asana.
- Big company with SCRUM processes and complex projects? Choose Jira.
Summary
I hope this article could give you a good overview of the differences and common features between Trello, Asana and Jira. Also I hope this article could elaborate, that the tool you choose will not impact your project success but rather support your team when communication is based on transparency, timing and clearness.
Curious about more?
My newsletter is a burst of tech inspiration, problem-solving hacks, and entrepreneurial spirit.
Subscribe for your weekly dose of innovation and mind-freeing insights:
https://davidthetechie.substack.com/
