What is Asana and what is it used for?

What Is Asana?

Asana is a cloud-based project and work management platform developed by Asana, Inc. The company was founded in 2008 by Dustin Moskovitz (co-founder of Facebook) and Justin Rosenstein (former Google and Facebook engineer). Asana went public on the NYSE (ASAN) in September 2020.

Company Background

Headquartered in San Francisco, Asana reported $723 million in annual revenue for fiscal year 2025 and serves over 150,000 paying organizations. The name "Asana" comes from a Sanskrit term meaning "seat" or "yoga pose," reflecting the founders' goal of creating a tool for focused, productive work.

Key Features

• Tasks: Assignees, due dates, subtasks, dependencies, and custom fields
• Projects: Organize tasks into projects with List, Board, Timeline, and Calendar views
• Portfolios: Track progress across multiple projects in a single view
• Goals: Set and track company-wide objectives with measurable key results
• Rules: Automation with triggers, conditions, and actions
• Forms: Standardized intake forms that create tasks automatically
• Reporting: Cross-project dashboards with charts and metrics

Pricing (April 2026)

• Personal (Free): Up to 10 users, unlimited tasks and projects
• Starter: $10.99/user/month — timeline view, rules, forms, dashboard
• Advanced: $24.99/user/month — portfolios, goals, advanced workflows, approvals
• Enterprise: Custom pricing — SAML, data export, custom branding

Primary Use Cases

Asana is used for project planning, marketing campaign management, product launches, sprint planning, and cross-functional team coordination. It competes with Monday.com, ClickUp, Jira, and Smartsheet.

Differentiator

Asana's Goals and Portfolios features provide top-down visibility from company objectives to individual tasks. This makes it particularly effective for organizations that want to connect daily work to strategic priorities, a methodology Asana promotes as the "Pyramid of Clarity."