monday.com vs Asana: which is better for a small team?
Choose monday.com if you need to track records such as clients, deals or orders alongside project work, because its boards behave like a flexible database and it has a dedicated CRM product. Choose Asana if the work is mostly tasks and projects moving through a team and leadership needs portfolio-level reporting across them.
In detail
Both are mature, well-supported platforms and either can run a small team well. The deciding question is what the system is mainly tracking: records, or work.
- Strongest at
- monday.com: CRM, pipelines, order tracking and any process where each item is a record with many fields. Asana: task and project delivery, team workload and cross-project reporting.
- Structure
- monday.com is built from boards and columns you design. Asana is built from projects, sections, tasks and custom fields, with portfolios grouping projects for leadership.
- CRM
- monday.com has a dedicated CRM product. Asana is not a CRM and is usually paired with one.
- Licence pricing
- monday CRM's published 2026 pricing is $12, $17 and $28 per seat per month for Basic, Standard and Pro, billed annually. Asana is $10.99 per user per month on Starter and $24.99 on Advanced billed annually, or $13.49 and $30.49 billed monthly.
- Reporting caveat
- Asana's portfolios and portfolio workload require the Advanced plan, so budget from Advanced if cross-project reporting is the reason you are buying it.
Questions that settle it
- Does a sale need to flow into delivery in the same system? That points to monday.com.
- Is the main problem visibility across many projects and people? That points to Asana.
- Do you need to store detailed records with many fields per item? That points to monday.com.
- Do several teams need workload and status reporting across all their projects? That points to Asana on the Advanced plan.
An Asana example
AX Legal had split its work across 41 Asana projects, one per client, so nobody could see workload or status across clients. TekConnected rebuilt it as three team-based projects with a client field on every task, eight custom fields, ten automation rules and a portfolio view for leadership. Management can now see every open task by client or team member in a single view.
TekConnected implements both platforms. Most implementations of either land between $8,000 and $25,000, with licences paid to the vendor directly.
Related case study
Rebuilt a fragmented 41-project Asana environment into a unified three-project operations platform with automated task routing, cross-client reporting, and management dashboards for a corporate law firm serving 40+ international clients.