A comprehensive Asana overview: Features, pricing, and limitations

If you’re hunting for a work management tool, Asana has probably popped up a dozen times. It’s a beast in the project management world, used by huge companies like Amazon and Spotify to keep massive teams and complex projects from going off the rails.

And for that job, it’s fantastic. It helps organize chaotic workflows and makes it crystal clear who is doing what and by when.

But no tool does everything perfectly. This Asana overview will walk you through its best features, break down the pricing, and point out its limitations, especially for teams handling customer support or trying to build a reliable knowledge hub. While Asana is a champ at organizing projects, you’ll probably need another tool to truly manage your team’s knowledge and automate support.

What is Asana?

At its core, Asana is a platform that helps teams organize, track, and manage their work together. Its whole purpose is to cut through the noise of teamwork and answer that age-old question: who’s doing what, and is it done yet?

To really get it, you have to understand its structure. Everything fits into a neat hierarchy:

• Organizations: This is the top level, tying everyone at your company together under one shared email domain.

• Teams: Just what it sounds like. These are the different groups in your organization, like Marketing, Engineering, or Sales.

• Projects: This is where you corral all the work for a specific goal, whether it’s a new product launch or a Q3 marketing campaign.

• Tasks: The individual to-do items inside a project. Every task gets an owner, a due date, and its own little space for files and conversation.

• Subtasks: Smaller steps that break down a bigger task into more manageable chunks.

This setup gives everyone a clear map, showing how their small piece of the puzzle fits into the company’s bigger goals.

Core features

Asana’s biggest selling point is its flexibility. It doesn’t force you into one way of working; instead, it offers a bunch of different ways to look at your projects so you can find a system that just clicks for your team.

Find a project view that works for you

Different jobs need different tools, and Asana gets that.

• List view: If you love a classic, no-fuss to-do list, this is for you. It’s perfect for simple projects where you just need to tick off tasks one by one.

• Board view: This is a Kanban-style board where tasks move through columns like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." It’s a super visual way to see progress at a glance, and a big hit with agile teams.

• Timeline and Gantt view: On the paid plans, these views let you map out your project schedule visually. You can spot where tasks depend on each other and fix potential roadblocks before they cause any real trouble.

• Calendar view: This gives you a bird’s-eye view of all task due dates for the week or month on a shared calendar. It’s a lifesaver for planning ahead and making sure no one is overloaded.

Workflows and automation

This is where Asana starts to get really smart, helping you ditch the boring, repetitive stuff.

• Rules: You can set up simple "if this, then that" commands to handle routine actions. For example, you can create a rule that automatically assigns a task to your manager for review as soon as you move it to the "Done" column.

• Workflow builder: This tool helps you build out standard processes for things your team does all the time. It makes sure the right information gets to the right people at the right time, every time.

• Forms: Forms are a clean way to kick off new work. You can create custom intake forms for new requests, so your team gets all the info they need right from the start, instead of having to chase it down.

Reporting and goal management

For team leads and managers, seeing the big picture is everything. Asana has a few features to help with that.

• Portfolios: This lets you bundle related projects together so you can check on the health and progress of a whole initiative in one spot.

• Dashboards: You can build live charts and graphs to see what’s going on with your project data. Keep an eye on budgets, see how many tasks are getting done, and get a quick read on overall progress.

• Goals: This feature, available on the pricier plans, helps you link your team’s day-to-day work directly to the company’s big strategic objectives. It helps everyone see why their work matters.

Pricing plans: A complete breakdown

Asana offers a few different tiers, with each one adding more powerful features. The prices listed here are per user, per month.

Asana pricing at a glance

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	Price (Billed Monthly)	Key Features
Personal	$0 (Free)	$0 (Free)	Unlimited tasks, projects, messages; up to 10 teammates.
Starter	$10.99	$13.49	Everything in Personal + Asana AI, Timeline view, Workflow Builder, Dashboards.
Advanced	$24.99	$30.49	Everything in Starter + Portfolios, Goals, Workload, Forms branching.
Enterprise	Contact Sales	Contact Sales	Everything in Advanced + SAML, SCIM, custom branding, 24/7 support.

What you get with each plan

• Personal (Free): This plan is great if you’re flying solo or working with a small team (up to 10 people) and just need the basics. You get the list, board, and calendar views, but you’ll be missing the more advanced automation and reporting tools.

• Starter: This is the first paid plan, and it’s where things get interesting for growing teams. The key upgrades are the Timeline/Gantt view, the Workflow Builder, and the ability to create custom fields and forms. This is also where you get access to Asana’s AI tools for things like summarizing tasks.

• Advanced: This plan is built for companies that need to manage work across several departments. It unlocks the big-picture features like Portfolios, Goals, and Workload, which helps you see who’s working on what so you can manage resources better.

• Enterprise: This is for large organizations that need tighter security, more control, and dedicated support. It adds features like single sign-on (SAML) and 24/7 priority support. For this, you’ll have to talk to their sales team to get a quote.

This Asana tutorial for beginners offers a visual walkthrough of its core features and different project views.

Where Asana struggles with support

Asana is a top-tier project management tool. No question. But if you try to shoehorn it into being your customer support hub or your central knowledge base, you’re going to get frustrated, fast.

Limitation 1: It’s a to-do list, not a library

Asana is built around tasks, which have a start and an end. Once a task is checked off as "complete," all the useful information inside it, like a brilliant solution to a tricky customer problem, gets buried. It’s almost impossible for another teammate to find and reuse that knowledge later.

Picture this: your support agent figures out a tough technical issue and documents the fix in an Asana task. That knowledge is now locked away. Your AI chatbot can’t see it, and it won’t pop up for another agent working on a similar ticket in Zendesk or Intercom. This is exactly why a tool like eesel AI exists. It plugs into all the places your knowledge lives, like Confluence, Google Docs, and past support tickets, to create one brain for your whole team. It can even help write your knowledge base articles for you by turning great ticket replies into drafts.

Limitation 2: Its automation is for internal work only

Asana’s automation rules are slick for internal workflows. You can set a rule to automatically move a task into a "Review" column. But that automation can’t interact with your customers. It can’t read an incoming support email, figure out what the person needs, and give them an answer.

This forces your team to manually copy and paste information between their helpdesk and Asana. It’s slow, clunky, and a pretty bad experience for everyone involved. That’s the exact gap eesel AI’s AI Agent was designed to fill. It connects to your helpdesk to handle frontline support, drafts replies for your agents, and sorts incoming tickets, all using your existing knowledge. The best part? You can get it working in minutes.

Limitation 3: No clear path to customer-facing AI

While Asana has added some AI features, they are all focused on making internal project management better, think "Smart summaries" of tasks or "Smart fields" for organization. There’s no button you can press to launch a customer-facing chatbot that can actually resolve support tickets. If you wanted to build that, you’d be looking at a complex, expensive custom project.

With eesel AI, you can skip the guesswork. It has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test how an AI agent would perform on thousands of your past tickets before you ever show it to a real customer. This risk-free setup tells you exactly what your automation rate will be and lets you roll it out with confidence.

Test your AI Agent on past tickets in eesel AI's simulation mode before going live.

Is Asana the right tool for you?

After this Asana overview, the verdict should be pretty clear: Asana is an incredible tool for managing projects and internal teamwork. It brings a ton of clarity and collaboration to the table.

But if your work involves a lot of customer interaction or depends on knowledge being easy to find, Asana by itself just isn’t enough. Its project-first design means knowledge gets trapped, and it doesn’t have the automation tools that modern support teams need.

Often, the smartest move is to use the right tool for the right job. Let Asana do what it does best, managing projects, and bring in a specialized AI tool to handle your knowledge management and support automation.

Bridge the gaps in your workflow with eesel AI

If you’re using Asana to manage projects but are tired of fighting with knowledge silos and drowning in repetitive support questions, it might be time to add a dedicated AI layer to your stack.

eesel AI works with your existing helpdesk and knowledge sources to automate frontline support, give your agents the answers they need in seconds, and turn your scattered documents into a unified knowledge base that actually works.

Try eesel AI for free and see how you can automate your support workflows in minutes, not months.