Back in March, I wrote a comparison of Asana and Do.com. At the time, there wasn’t much to differentiate the two services, and my conclusion was that for most people, it would come down to which interface you liked better. Since then, both services have added some new features, so I thought that now would be a good time to revisit the comparison and see how things have changed.
Pricing
This is one of the big changes in Asana. Their paid plans, which they announced in April, offer more users in a workspace, and more flexibility with permissions. Paid plans start at US$100 a month for up to 30 users, and go up from there. This seems pretty steep, but if you’ve got a business with more than a couple of staff, then $100 a month is probably not such a huge investment. And of course, Asana still offer their free plan for up to 30 users.
Do.com haven’t announced any paid plans. Their service is completely free. Do.com does integrate with Salesforce, though (which makes sense, because Salesforce owns Do.com), and that is a paid product.
Mobile
Both Do.com and Asana have iPhone apps. I’m saying iPhone rather than iOS, because neither of them really play nicely on the iPad. In fact, Do.com’s app didn’t even play nicely for me on the iPhone. In screenshots, it looks prettier than Asana’s app, but this is what I got the first time I logged in:
The error message I got
Things got smoother after that, but I haven’t managed to forgive them for that bad first impression. If you can get past that, though, you may find their mobile interface very pleasing. They use decent sized text, and descriptive icons, although I hate the big green “It’s done!” button that marks a task complete.
Asana’s app is a lot less blingy, and some of the text is probably be a little too small for comfort on the iPhone screen. On the plus side, the interface is pleasingly similar to the web interface, which makes for a less jarring transition between the two.
Do.com’s mobile app
And Asana’s
It’s worth noting that neither Asana nor Do.com have an Android app at the moment, although both say they are working on one.
API
This is all one way – Asana has released an API, and Do.com hasn’t. I haven’t exactly seen a huge torrent of things publicly released using the API (although my WordPress plugin and export tool are out there if you need them), but I’m sure that there will be some good stuff coming from the community.
Other new features in Asana
Asana has rolled out a couple of extra features I haven’t already mentioned. One feature I have been using is the ability to add guest users to a workspace. Guest users can be added to either a project or a task, and they can only view the tasks they have been added to (if you add a guest to a project, they can see all tasks in the project).
Their other big feature is Inbox, which I haven’t really used a lot. They’re touting it as “the first step to a post-email world”. Inbox is basically a feed within Asana that shows you all the activity on all the tasks you’re following. The idea is to cut back on all the emails you read and forget about and all the communication that slips through the cracks when you’re working on six things at once. It’s an intriguing idea, but like I say, I haven’t really used it much yet. You can read about it here, and if you have used it, please do comment and let everyone know what you think of it.
There are a couple of other minor tweaks that Asana has introduced, including the ability to search across all users and projects, and the ability to add a profile picture.
So really, quite a lot of new stuff out of Asana in the last four months.
Other new features in Do.com
Do.com has made a couple of feature announcements over the past few months (their Facebook page seems to be the place for such things). They’ve added twitter-style @ mentions to tasks, which they’re billing as the quickest way to add people to a task. At the same time, they added the ability to add comments to attachments at the time of upload.
Their other new feature, from back in May, was the ability to set a due time as well as a due date. Tasks with a due time will generate reminders 15 minutes before they’re due. This seems like a pretty practical feature, although one that most people are already getting from one of the many calendar apps and products out there. Still, it’s nice to have things in one place.
And that’s the big news from Do.com. Not revolutionary, but a couple of neat little tweaks. They promise more features to come over the summer, but they haven’t announced anything specific.
Conclusion
Do.com and Asana have both made some changes since I first looked at them. Both say that they have more changes coming, but neither has announced anything specific. It’s fair to say that Asana has made more and bigger changes than Do.com has, and so unless you use Salesforce and want the integration, I think Asana is the obvious choice for most people.
Do you use one of these services? Love it? Hate it? Got a killer feature that you’re still waiting for? (I do.) Tell that portion of the world that reads this blog about it in the comments.
I picked Asana and got started with it. I just had a question about it and went looking for their forum. No forum?! They don’t seem to have a forum! … or I couldn’t find it. Wow, to me that’s a fairly big negative. Does Do have a forum?
Not as far as I can tell, no.
Do you know if Do.com has a print of export funtion for tasks? I can’t find one
As far as I know, no, they don’t. And unfortunately, since they don’t have an API, there’s no way to build one for yourself.
Just released a beta of a native Android app for Asana. Check it out!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pro.pronobis.myasana_beta
It’s optimized for both phones and tablets and offers a nice home-screen widget. Works off-line too! Check out: http://www.myasana.org
I tried Andrzej’s Android app, it’s really nice!
also have you tried Zoho projects?
Hi Leigh,
Asana’s notes are attached to existing tasks rather than being a separate area as they are in Do. So you can’t attach notes to tasks, or select text in a note and turn it into a task as you would in Do. Taking meeting minutes in Asana would be quite a different beast – if you take minutes in the form of action points, you could create a new task for each action point and then assign it with all the notes attached, but if you take more traditional minutes, Do is probably a better tool for you, so I’d stick with it.
I have tried Zoho projects, but not recently. It didn’t really appeal to me, so I gave it a fairly brief once-over and moved on. If you’ve used it, I’d love to hear what you thought of it.
Cheers,
Ed
Hi Ed,
Thanks so much for the speedy response!
Just signed on with Zoho havent played around on there yet as have bene playing on asana and do trying to make my mind up.
are they both integrated with google and calendar , contacts etc?
I take notes of whats being discussed in the meeting and then within that tehre are action points which I then need to turn into tasks and assign to people. I could always take the minutes in evernote and then upload.
I see in do you can upload documents unattached to tasks but that pertain to a project can you do the same in asana? or only attach notes to tasks ?
Thank you,
leigh
They both integrate with Google after a fashion. Do probably has the edge on Asana there.
You can write notes about a project in Asana, but you can’t upload documents unless they’re attached to a task.
It sounds like Do is going to work better for you than Asana. There are other options that might be better than either of those, but nothing with a free plan that works for a team.
Hi There,
I am administrating for my internship and trying to find the best solution for us in project management which is free. I really appreciate your articles – its saved me loads of time and gave such helpful insight.
Just one question – the notes feature on Do that also allows you to assign tasks – is there something similar to that in Asana?
I take minutes in our team meetings and then assign tasks and it would be great to be able to do this from Asana.
Please advise
We use Asana at work, and tagging is very helpful when you’re working on a large number of projects. Instead of simply searching every project, you can identify tasks by department tags, client tags, location tags or any other differentiating factor, and then simply search those tags and get a cross-project view of what needs to be done by department, by client portfolio, or any other means you can imagine. It is very flexible for complex businesses. I tried Do and it just didn’t work for me the same way.
I use Do and love it.
I use it with my Google App account.
What I like the most is the Google Drive integration, although I don’t know if that’s a feature that’s already included in asana.
Interesting article.
I’m also always looking for the best productivity tool. For my personal need I’m quite happy with OmniFocus… Now I’m evaluating something to scale up some GTD methodology to my business team.
I’m playing with Asana but frankly it seems completely unusable on iOS devices: no iPad app and the iPhone app and both the iOS HTML5 Web versions provides just a limited set of the features you find in the full web desktop application. One for all you cannot edit on a task the due time on your iPhone , no way.
Now I want to see what are they doing with the some 20 millions funding they recently received…
Yes do.com seems more interesting and more business oriented.
I think there’s a serious third contender: Mindjet Action. The company is well known for its best-of-class mind mapping software but now they are fully committed on collaboration tools.
Have you checked this one?
Greg
I’d never heard of Mindjet, but they do look interesting – I’ll have to check them out. Have you used any of their software?
I have to admit, I never really got into the whole GTD thing, but I’d be interested to hear from people who do use it, and how tools like Asana, Do and so on work for them.
I integrated it but haven’t used it. Looks like basic access to Drive at first glance. You can sign in to Asana with a Google Account. As mentioned in the post, Asana has an API. Maybe the combination of these facts indicates aspirations for each product team? The way Asana describes Inbox I’m thinking theirs are lofty.
Asana certainly does seem to have some grand plans for the future, but looking at Do’s latest round of additions, it looks like they’re pretty ambitious too. The two products seem to be moving in different directions, and I think that can only be a good thing.
Thanks for the review.. but I think you forgot to mention that Do does integrate with google apps for Biz and Education and Asana does not.
That’s a good point – thanks for bringing it up. Are you using Do’s Google Apps integration? How are you finding it?