Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool? | Hacker News Reader

Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

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48 pointspytrin53 comments

One of the cool things I've seen people use Zapier for is to test out other collab tools (https://zapier.com/zapbook/asana/trello/). You can test out Trello for a week by piping in data from Asana without the fear of losing a weeks worth of data in Asana if you don't like Trello.

That's super handy. Zapier is shaping up to be my favorite out of IFTTT and Wappwolf.

However, would decent if they allowed selective Dropbox permissions (eg limited to a single folder). It's disturbing when startups (even a single individual/founder) has access to all my private data. It's not necessary most of the time either.

"Please trust us" seems suboptimal.

You trust Dropbox. You could presumably trust Zapier.

That you don't isn't really an argument for them changing their practices.

For example Mint.com keeps your banking passwords in order to do offline-logins, but people still trust Mint not to steal their money.

If many people don't trust a startup, I think they likely need to change their presentation style and not their practices.

The difference is Dropbox specializes in files. They have years of practice designing their technology and organization to not spy on their users.

Zapler does not have as much practice so screw-ups are more likely.

Indeed. And it's not just about spying.

The Zapier people are probably decent and honest etc, however that's not the point. It introduces a new security threat and attack vectors unnecessarily

It violates the principle of needing just enough access, to perform a task.

IIRC Mint uses a read-only API run by Yodlee

To expand on that Mint never stores your account passwords. Yodlee does and provides the data back to Mint. Here are their security claims: http://www.yodlee.com/security.html

As one data point, my credit union specifically recognizes accesses to my account from Yodlee, due to my Mint usage.

Problem is not that Zapier or any other system want access to your whole Dropbox. Problem is that Dropbox API is constructed in such a way that no granular access is possible to request from a user. Google Drive in comparison is more fine-graned however more complicated to use (from API side) too.

I found Trello kind of awkward to work with. Lots of long dropdown menus without any icons or well written titles. Just lots of long menus in general, forcing me to do a full scan every time I want to do something. Just unintuitive and hard to get fast at. I keep having to remember how to do things.

I find Asana the exact opposite. It's extremely polished and everything behaves and works as I would predict. Feels kind of like Microsoft vs Apple.

I'd be happy with either really though, they both work.

Agreed with your first paragraph, it's kind of what I Was getting at with my response on this topic. Trello is a decision factory. The 100th time I create a ticket I shouldn't still feel like I have to figure out where to put it, how it gets categorized, etc. But I do.

Odd. Trello is the first task list tool I've actually enjoyed because of its simplicity. To add a task I just need to click, type, and press enter. Done. To reassign a task I click and drag. Done + the satisfaction of seeing my todo list shorter and completed list longer. Love it. I don't even make use of 90% of the features but they're basically invisible to me.

This is a "nice to have" feature, but my main complaint is probably how I feel it's difficult to report off of my data (see trends, etc.).

I'd never heard of Asana but now I'm curious to try it out.

Well, it sounds like we have two different use cases. We're using Trello as a ticketing system for a six-person team and haven't figured out a good flow yet. We're using it for much more than just to-do's. In fact, "To Do" is basically a separate board.

Like I said in my first post, I am prepared to accept that my issues with Trello are a product of how we're using it. That being said, I don't want to use a tool where "how you decide to use it" can have a negative impact on productivity. (Within reason, for those of you from the "Literal Internet".)

We started out with Asana and moved to Trello. The problem with Asana was that it was a very good write only interface, but ultimately it didn't work well for the team, because reading is just as important as writing. It took a little bit of effort to get going for Trello (eg which boards to have) but ultimately it has worked out extremely well for the whole team. The ordering of the cards providing prioritization is great and being able to assign more than one person to a card helps in some situations.

Just FYI, Trello can be much more than a task-list-tool. It can be.. whatever.

It's extremely flexible. We used it for a system design, and the lists are not todo's. One list lists all the database tables for example, but we're still experimenting so this might not be the best way to do it.

Only drawback so far is that it's kind of slow on my machine.. And i fear what thy may charge eventually.

At Woorank we gave both of them a spin and a must say that for our team (8 people = 4 tech/2 CS/2 Allrounders working closely together) Trello works best, even with only 2 boards.

We've put up the Trello board on a big screen in the office and after some tweaking (eg. cutting the tasks in smaller bits) it's amazing how productivity rose, just because people are pushing the enveloppe for getting a ticket from the left to the right.

Also for a workflow of a ticket having several states (planned, in progress, done, reviewed, pushed, live), and going back and forth a lot, we just didn't find a nice way to do this in asana, without having lots of projects with several sub-lists, having to reconsider the workflow again and again, etc.

Asana looks more promising to me, when used in bigger companies (20+), having several departements, using there own projects or workspaces, with their own flows and way of working.

We use Trello at work. We use it as a ticketing system/issue tracker, to-do list, and workflow system. I think it is great as far as it goes. It's got a great visual design, it's very simple and free-form.

Frankly however it forces too many decisions on me. I don't want to have to think about all the things that you're required to think about. It's a bit too free-form. Tickets and issues and all that isn't something I want to dedicate a bunch of time to; I just want something on rails that has already made smart default decisions about workflow out of the box, then allow me to tweak it from there.

Again, maybe it's a function of how we use Trello. But even the fact that it's basically unstructured is a negative to me. Give me something with smart defaults out of the box so that there is a workflow clearly delineated, and we don't have to invent our own on the fly.

Trello and Asana both are pretty generic and seem to refrain from enforcing any particular use case through UI. I also found this genericness hard at first, especially having used FogBugz and other “traditional” PM / ticket tracking tools that do all the decisions for you.

However, I seem to be stopping caring too much about creating “proper” cards (we use Trello as well), adopting the “create a card with whatever is on your mind if you feel there's a need for it”-like approach. I like it, and it's fast, maybe it'll will work for you, too?

Of course, some things still have to be considered before creating the card—e.g., task atomicity—but that's the case with any tool.

It depends on your workplace and workflow, though. If there's a certain degree of formality there, I think it's much better to have this enforced by UI, because then decision making is likely to become a real problem.

I work on projects on a pretty small scale (5 website, 1 or 2 of them need changes at a time -- some of them have 30 tickets, some have 3 or 4) and trello is perfect for me. If I fullscreen it I can get a good 'at a glance' look at everything i'm working on, and I have a colour code I use on labels to set the importance on projects.

I feel like trello has a certain tipping point for tickets :: at a certain point, its causes inefficiency. That being said, I felt pivotal tracker to be a bit lumbersome for my needs. I had to think too much / navigate the ticketing system.

I'd like to ask people who have used pivotal what thought think of it?

I haven't used Asana, but will check it out.

Been using Pivotal for a few years and really love it. For Agile/Scrum software development it's close to perfect. But I'm not sure how it'd play with other scenarios.

My major plus points for it is how it automagically calculates velocity and adjusts the following user story schedule accordingly. I'm not a big fan of the right-to-left panel layout, but it's not a deal breaker. It makes my life easier, which is what I want in a software package.

I love the design of Trello and could possibly move to that, but I'd miss the scheduling/velocity/estimating features. Also, some projects have a ton of stories and feel that Trello would be unwieldy. I have used Trello for personal to-do list type stuff though.

I've looked at many of them including BaseCamp, Mavenlink, Pivotal, and we're using Asana. We also use Streak and Boomerang. I have not worked with Trello but will definitely be checking it out. These tools are all great but believe it or not, when I need to do something really quickly a Google doc spreadsheet does the job. We're a small team and need to be focused on getting great product out. Tools that require a lot of work are time sinks and without proper care and feeding they start to bloat with items that are dragged along week-to-week. Anyone get "reminder" emails with tasks that are open but are no longer relevant or just not closed out?

Yeah, but while Google docs does have collaboration features - assigning parts to different people is really hard.

I am not a fan of using another tool, but in my opinion Asana and Trello are light years ahead of BaseCamp (atleast the old version).

I've been evaluating both tools as well, and have Basecamp in the mix because my designer likes it. So far, my team and I haven't formed a consensus.

Personally, I always have my inbox open and have a management system of tags, stars, and other things to make my Gmail & Google Calendar a useful to-do list. But now that Mark mentions it, I ought to try out Streak and Baydin too. Anyone here have any experience with either one?

Co-founder of Streak here. We (obviously) love using Streak for bug tracking / product planning use cases and use it internally for that + hiring, fundraising, press, etc.

If you want email to be your core workflow, you should def take it for a spin. If you have any questions aleem at streak dotcom.

I'm a white dude obsessed with Indian food and your name made me giggle.

That's...that's all I got for this comment. Sorry.

With my team I use two products: Pivotal Tracker and Trello.

Pivotal is great for development projects. It talks to Github and Campfire, allows us to visually plan things, and has a great worfklow built in for moving stories through the development process. That said, it's not really well suited for either a) non-development projects such as system upgrades, server builds, research projects, etc or b) a steady stream of one-off fixes and tasks that don't tie back to a larger development effort. Small enhancements, bug fixes, infrastructure work, and the like. I originally tried to squeeze all this into Pivotal but it's sort of a square peg/round hole scenario.

Trello, on the other hand, is great for all the other "stuff" my team has to do. I can have one board that shows me at a glance what everyone is working on (we put placeholder cards in Trello for projects that are being managed in Pivota - there's usually only one or two at any given time). It's very flexible and adapts well for various types of work. In a pinch, I could replace Pivotal with Trello, but I would lose out on all of the integrations with Github and Campfire, as well as the more structured story card format and the agile workflow. Combining the two gives us the best of both worlds.

From my point of view, I see Trello better suited for managing a team project, while I see Asana better suited for handling personal tasks and projects. Trello allows you to assign multiple members to one card (task, depends on how you used it), while in Asana you can assign only one person to a task and followers get an update. Trello does a great job of providing the big picture of a project and its progress through its unique UI. Though the UI is not all rainbows and cookies. The larger your monitor the better because you have to keep scrolling to see cards.

Right now I use Asana to manage everything personally, but I use Trello to manage our company. If it was up to me I would like to do everything in Asana. I would like to see Asana give mobile a good shot. Right now they have a 2-star iPhone app and no Android app. Trello on the other hand as both iPhone and Android apps, and they are work pretty well.

One feature I really like about Asana is that it can sync your tasks to your favorite calendar app without any fuss. This feature makes Asana perfect for managing personal tasks with ease. Both services are mature but still have some way to go.

True, mobile is another thing I didn't cover in my comment. The trello app on iphone works like a thrill, given the fact it's a daunting task to get all the information on a small screen.

Asana had constant issues with syncing the data.

Cheers, I didn't realise they'd released the Android app ... "This app is incompatible with your HTC Wildfire". Baws.

Todos: wunderlist. Simple lists, syncs everywhere. Only bad thing is no nested items. Free.

Tickets: anything. Prefer redmine. Ok with Pivotal Tracker. Can use Jira, etc.

Collaboration: hipchat, skype, email, text, tickets, commit messages, and phone calls. Oh, and going out to lunch together.

Tried and liked Trello (simple). Tried and disliked Asana (complicated).

Why are there so many of these tools but none of them truly nail it? Asana, Sprintly, Pivotal, Trello, Basecamp, the list goes on. Plus there's Google Docs.

I wonder why there isn't a general consensus about one must-have tool.

Are they all watered down and so general that no one can really fall in love with any of the products?

My take is that underneath the polish and functionality, what all these tools really do, is to impose a very specific workflow on its users. Peoples workflows differ a lot, so some tools will match some people better than others. In the end, most people will realise that either A) nothing quite works for them or B) will change their workflow to that which their chosen tool imposes.

because everyone approaches their to-do tools differently depending on their personality styles, visual emphasis etc etc.

I think a lot of it comes from the problem that most people cannot figure out how to use email is a productive way. Not that it's a problem with email, just that they get overwhelmed and hope that a To-Do app can help them.

I'm giving Asana a long term evaluation - at least 3 months. So far I really like the following:

Its very keyboard friendly (I havent played with Trello long enough to assess how keyboard friendly it is)

I can create tasks in a project by emailing them in (lets you forward emails to Asana and turn them into tasks)

Hey Guys. Shameless plug for my startup http://www.thetaboard.com

My goals with ThetaBoard.com were to be completely "methology agnostic" so it's nothing like Asana.

It is very similar to (yet admittedly less mature than) Trello but may appeal to some of you. I think it is simpler UI and has less in the way of clunky drop down menus and modal popups, etc. It was designed to be "view/edit in place" for everything.

I am going to charge for greater usage/premium features--the reality of being a solo founder/bootstrapped startup vs. Fog Creek that can afford to hire several fulltime developers for a "side project".

Anyway, have a look. Keyboard shortcuts/API/Dropbox+Google App integration/Mobile version on the near-term product roadmap. Would love feedback.

We're trying to solve this problem with more of a focus on priorities - mainly to try and prioritise what one person should be working on at a time: https://mijura.com/

For my freelance work, I use apollo (apollohq.com), currently pay for the basic plan (and I have a healthy permanent discount for having jumped on during their beta) and keep both internal projects as well as interface with external clients. So far it's been working well. It pretty much has all the features I need as a freelancer except for invoices (which I take care of with freshbooks).

I lean more towards Trello than Asana, but neither has got me.

Recently learnt about workflowy.com, thinking of trying it out.

We've had good luck with these products:

http://73primenumbers.com/

Although probably an overkill if all you want is a glorified todo list shared between a handful of people, I haven't seen a collaboration tool as flexible, powerful and well designed as Podio. Most underhyped web app in recent memory.

Trello has become our default work tool of choice. Have used Asana, but the drag and drop ease of Trello is what appeals to me. Also for kanban style workflows also check out blossom.io, great tool.

Huge fan of Jira for tickets, it's flexible enough to be a to-do list or really whatever you want, especially since if you need 10 or fewer people, you're only out $10 for a perpetual license.

Seriously? I was very disappointed when I got to try Jira. It's slow, clunky and ugly. Bugzilla is a bliss compared to Jira..

When was the last time you tried it? I just did a deployment at work (hopefully replacing BMC SDE) and it's rather snappy. Not as fast as plain HTML of course, being Tomcat on the back end, but I couldn't possibly describe it as slow, or clunky, or ugly.

It seems that Asana doesn't support Opera which is quite surprising. A screen that I got tells that Chrome (>= 11), Safari and Firefox (>= 6) are supported.

AES.io: is not as smooth as Trello or Asana, or some other collaboration tools, but with client-side encryption it is much more secure (plug).

(Shameless self plug) Review19 does the job quite well for me - http://review19.com

It figures that this is exactly the analysis I was trying to find as to what tool works best. Love it.

Kanbanflow for personal projects, and JIRA+Greenhopper in the company I work in.

Depends on who you are collaborating with.

Asana internally, Basecamp when dealing with external clients and Phabricator is cool within dev teams.

Trello needs a UI designer and Atlassian is pretty horrendous for anything other than the largest enterprises.

True regarding Atlassian, though Greenhopper is awesome. https://www.atlassian.com/software/greenhopper/overview

I love Jira 5.

I don't, they updated the task/chart/planning boards without warning.

Neither: after using Pivotal, our company has switched to Phabricator.

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