Airtable vs Asana 2023: Which is Best for You?

Features

Workspaces:

Asana and Airtable have different workspace approaches.

With Asana, the structure heavily relies on projects and tasks:

• Organization (Your business name).
• Teams (Departments or groups of teams that work together).
• Projects (The specific projects, goals, brainstorms, meeting agendas, or initiatives the team is working on).
• Tasks (Actionable steps within that project).
• Sub-tasks (Multiple steps within your tasks).
• Comments (Relating to your tasks).

This hierarchical workspace structure means you and your team can easily collaborate and manage your projects!

Airtable takes a slightly different approach with workspaces, primarily focusing on the organization and management of your data:

• Bases (Your databases).
• Tables (Specific project or data tabs, similar to a spreadsheet. You can add multiple tables to your base).
• Records (Rows that store your items within each Base)
• Column fields (Specific details about your records, including user names, notes, dates, links to another record, status, etc).

And if you want to enhance your workspace and tables, you can incorporate various extensions in addition to your bases.

These extensions serve as visual dashboards, empowering you to analyze and take actionable steps with your data.

Winner = Draw

Customization:

Airtable is known for its extensive customization options, particularly regarding data organization.

You can:

• Choose and modify field types.
• Customize your data views through sorting, filtering, and grouping.
• Configure forms to gather information from external stakeholders.
• Create formulas.

Plus, you can do all the basic things like change your base’s appearance, icon, and name, add subtasks and due dates, and assign team members to tasks.

This level of customization and flexibility means you can adapt the platform to meet your needs, whether that’s complex data or tracking project progress.

Asana, on the other hand, has a more structured interface.

While it may not offer the same level of customization as Airtable, Asana does allow users to tailor their experience to some degree.

You can add and edit descriptions, assignees, due dates, recurring tasks, priorities, and attachments, choose if your project is private or public, and more.

One of the things I personally love about Asana is that you physically tick off tasks when you complete them (like you would on an actual to-do list), which is just so satisfying!

Winner = Airtable

Templates:

Templates are a great way for you and your team to jumpstart your projects and workflows.

Asana provides a wide selection of pre-built templates to help with:

• Project planning.
• CMR
• Meeting agendas.
• Events.
• Onboarding and more.

These templates are pretty easy to use and have been designed to offer a good starting point for you, with pre-populated tasks, due dates, and dependencies.

And if you upgrade to a paid plan, you’ll get custom templates and a workflow builder!

Airtable also offers a range of templates focusing on data organization and management.

Users can choose from templates tailored for different purposes, such as CRM, project management, inventory tracking, events, content calendars, product launches, and more.

Read more: My top 7 CRM software for small businesses

These templates also come with pre-defined fields and configurations. However, it’s important to note that these can be slightly overwhelming for complete beginners.

If you’re new to the world of project management, I suggest starting from scratch with Airtable.

Winner = Asana

Automation:

On both platforms, you can automate everyday tasks to help you save time, like sending emails or adding new records based on external triggers.

In Asana, the automation feature is called “Rules.”

Basically, you can create custom rules based on triggers and actions to automate mundane and repetitive tasks.

For example, when you add a task to a project, set up a rule to automatically assign that task to a particular team member.

With Airtable, you can build up to 100 powerful automated workflows (on the free plan!) for different functions.

Simply set up triggers based on record changes, and define actions that include:

• Sending notifications.
• Updating fields.
• Creating new records.

Airtable’s automations are more advanced and customizable for data-driven workflows, whereas Asana’s are simple yet effective.

Read more: How to use Monday.com automations

Winner = Airtable

Collaboration:

You’ll love Asana’s collaboration features if you’re a cross-functional team!

With Asana, simply assign the same task to different project boards or break up your tasks into subtasks to make cross-departmental collaboration easier.

With real-time updates and notifications, you and your team will stay in sync and track the progress of your projects seamlessly.

Asana also allows for task dependencies, making it easy to visualize and manage workflows with multiple interconnected tasks.

Additionally, users can use the “@mention” feature to tag specific team members.

On the other hand, Airtable’s level of collaboration is more advanced than Asanas. Teams can create and manage databases by assigning different access permissions for team members.

Other features include:

• Collaboration within bases.
• Comments on records.
• Table sharing.
• Tracking changes made by users.
• File attachments.
• Automated notifications and reminders.

Asana is the best out of the two for internal communication, whereas Airtable is the go-to option for teams needing to communicate with external teams.

Winner = Airtable