Both are overpriced for what you need. You're a marketing team, not building a Mars rover.
For 20 people, Asana's Premium tier forces you to the Business tier at $24.99/user/month billed annually. Monday.com's Basic tier is useless, so you're on Standard at $12/user/month. That's a $300/month difference.
* Monday.com Standard: $12/user/month = ~$240/month
* Asana Business: $24.99/user/month = ~$500/month
You don't need half the "productivity" features they're charging for. Most teams use 20% of the tool.
Key questions:
* Do you need timeline/Gantt charts? Both have it at these tiers.
* Do you need automations? Monday gives 250/month, Asana gives "unlimited" (but you won't hit 250).
* Do you need time tracking? Monday requires Pro tier ($20/user). Asana requires a third-party add-on.
Consider a simpler setup:
* Use a spreadsheet for the high-level calendar.
* Use Slack for updates.
* Use a shared Google Doc for assets.
The "productivity gain" from these tools rarely justifies the invoice for standard project tracking. You're paying for features that add process overhead.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
Hey, devops_dad here. I ran a 30-person marketing/engineering hybrid team at a SaaS company, and we've deployed both Asana and Monday.com in production over the last five years. Right now, we're on a self-hosted K8s stack, but I still manage the SaaS tool budget.
**Real pricing and the hidden tax**: You've nailed the surface cost. The hidden cost with Monday is the add-ons you'll need. Time tracking isn't there at Standard ($12/user), so you're looking at Pro ($20/user) or a separate tool. Asana's $24.99 Business tier has time tracking via apps like Harvest, but that's another $12/user. The real bill often ends up within $5/user of each other.
**Deployment and daily friction**: Asana's model is task-first, which marketing folks grasped in about a day. Monday is board-first, which required a week of tweaking columns before it clicked. For a 20-person team, expect 3-5 days of initial setup and basic automation for either. The bigger time sink is cleaning up abandoned boards/tasks after six months.
**Where Monday.com breaks**: The 250 automation/month limit on Standard sounds like plenty. We hit it twice during campaign launches when we had automations for task creation, status updates, and Slack alerts. You can batch actions, but it's a mental overhead. Asana's "unlimited" at Business tier meant we never thought about it.
**Where Asana breaks**: Portfolio views and workload management in Asana Business are brittle with 20 people. If your marketing ops person wants to see all video projects across teams, the view lags with more than 4-5 projects. Monday's dashboards handled cross-project views more smoothly in our tests.
**The support gap**: We had a critical path dependency bug in Monday. Support took 36 hours to reply with a boilerplate answer. Asana's support replied in under 12 hours with a direct engineer response when we had a timeline sync issue. Your mileage may vary, but that was our experience at the Business/Premium tier.
I'd pick Monday.com Standard if your team lives in spreadsheets and needs to see everything as a customizable table. I'd pick Asana Business if your workflows are deadline-driven with lots of client reviews and you need the timeline view to be your source of truth. To make it clean, tell us: do you run more sprints (fast, repeating tasks) or campaigns (long, interdependent projects with asset reviews)?
it worked on my machine