I have a series of SAAS Screeds. I need to get them off my chest.
Asana, in practice, is a glorified todo-list app. Seriously. Here is how my team uses it, and I don’t think we are abnormal.
At the start of sprints, we go through our single backlog section and add cards to the new sprint section. We prioritize stuff. During the sprint, we mark stuff as not started, in-progress, and on down to complete. Nothing we couldn’t easily manage in a shared org file if it was easy to just sync the file across Emacs sessions. Alas.
Asana costs, and I’m not kidding, 24.99 per month per user (source). My four-person team is spending $100/month or $1,200/year on a todo-list app. I’m not saying Asana doesn’t have other features. I’m sure it does? But I don’t use any of them, and I don’t think I’m abnormal. I don’t really see anyone at the company I work for doing anything different. Okay: Slack integration? That’s really the only thing I see.
The vast majority of the people at the company I work for have Asana licenses. For round numbers, it’s approximately 2,000 people. That is $50,000 per month!!!!!!!!!!!! On a glorified todo-list. Maybe they get some kind of deal for a larger order, but it must be insane.
I don’t understand why something like Basecamp does not destroy Asana at these prices (Basecamp is $299/month for unlimited users). I’ve used Basecamp for some side projects (free version), and it is great. Very nice setup. Can’t think of any usability advantage Asana has. Personal preference: I like the todo-list type setup Basecamp has and the “check-in” type stuff. But even if it was worse, it is 166x less expensive! It would have to be a lot worse to make up for that gap. Can anyone explain how Asana has positive market share with this large of a price difference?