Project Management

Both Notion and Asana offer what most teams are looking for in a modern project management tool. You can set up projects in the form of a database and define as many properties as you need for tasks like assignees, reviewers, external links, dates and other pertinent information.

View projects as tables, Kanban boards, calendars or timelines to get the information you need about a project’s progress. Notion also includes a gallery view, which lets you see each row of a database as a card, like a bulletin board.

Both apps integrate directly with dozens of other workspace apps, as well as indirectly with hundreds more through Zapier and IFTTT, so you can link all the work your team is doing in one place and automate common steps.

Communicate with team members in both apps on tasks by tagging them with an @ mention in threaded comments. Team members can personalize their notification preferences to get an email when they’re mentioned or just follow updates within the platform.

Data Management

Both Notion and Asana use the same databases for data management that you use for project management. You can create as many separate projects or databases as you need to keep information organized, and you can set up unlimited customized and filtered views to visualize data and create dashboards.

Information Infrastructure

Notion uniquely merges document creation and management with project and data management through pages. You don’t have to link out to third-party documentation in your database. Use Notion to both create and organize documents associated with projects and databases.

You can organize pages in a hierarchy like web pages and search for one to link within another while you’re writing with only an @ mention.

Asana integrates with creative suites, including Google Drive and Microsoft Office 365, so you can link to external documents easily to keep information organized within your Asana databases. This is a simple solution if you’re already using the third-party apps and don’t want to migrate, but it’s much less seamless than Notion’s all-in-one experience.

Creative Collaboration

Both Asana and Notion facilitate some creative collaboration through their project management features—you can communicate with team members about projects through comments on tasks.

Only Notion’s pages let you keep even more collaboration right in the same tool. Use them like you would Google Docs or Microsoft Word to create written assets or documentation and invite team members to collaborate. You’ll see real-time edits and presence as team members work on pages, and you can add comments to suggest changes or ask questions by linking to anchor text within a page.

However, Notion’s word processing features are limited compared with the most popular third-party tools. It doesn’t offer an in-app spell checker, word counter or the ability to track changes, although you can see a version history and restore older versions of a page.

File Storage

Neither Notion nor Asana offers files storage as robust as options like Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. But both offer unlimited file uploads, and the ability to organize files using their complex databases could be attractive for some teams.

Notion offers unlimited file uploads for all free and paid accounts. Individual file size is limited to 5MB for free accounts. Technically file size is unlimited for paid accounts, but users have experienced failed uploads with extremely large files. Notion reps have recommended limited file size to 2GB to 3GB.

Asana offers unlimited file uploads with all free and paid accounts, with an individual file size limit of 100MB across the board.

Automation

Asana offers superior native automation functionality, although Notion has native automation in the works with its 2021 acquisition of integration software Automate.io.

In Asana, you can set custom rules to automate common steps in your project management processes—like routing tasks to the correct projects, assigning steps to the right team members, adding or tagging team members at necessary steps in the process and notifying team members when work is ready for their input.

Both platforms integrate with Zapier and IFTTT to connect with hundreds of apps and automate common processes in your workflow—like moving files from one platform to another, sharing information with stakeholders and creating tasks based on events happening around the business.