Choosing Your Asana Plan: What you gain by choosing Advanced (similar to legacy Business) over Starter (similar to legacy Premium)

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For those who are deciding between the Asana Starter and Asana Advanced plans, this post offers the most concise yet complete reference available to help you choose.

Here is what you gain by choosing Advanced (similar to the legacy Business) over Starter (similar to legacy Premium):

  1. Goals: Major module in Asana for strategic planning/tracking of goals and measures–OKRs, for example–at the organization or team level, and connecting goals to work.
  2. Portfolios: High-level view grouping projects and/or other nested portfolios. The Advanced plan will be limited to 100 Portfolios per organization (Legacy Business has unlimited Portfolios), but an enforcement date hasn’t yet been announced as of Feb 2024.
  3. Workload: Track individuals’ effort vs their capacity for tasks in projects in a Portfolio.
  4. Universal Reporting on Projects, Portfolios, and Goals across your whole organization; Starter only reports on tasks. (Hat tip to @Craig_Barber2 for getting the Help doc updated to reflect this.)
  5. Additional Reporting Options: Project Dashboards: Y-axis adds Time to complete, Time in section, Time in custom field; Universal Reporting: Y-axis adds Time Entry: Estimated Time; X-axis adds Time Period: Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year. (Hat tip to @Bastien_Siebman for these details.)
  6. Additional Rules (Automation) Limits/Features: Advanced allows 25k actions/month; Starter only 250 actions/month; Legacy Premium rules are limited to pre-set (not custom) rules.
  7. Additional Custom Field Options: Formulas (calculations), Time tracking, lock custom fields.
  8. Additional AI (aka Asana Intelligence) Limits/Features: Advanced allows 1500 actions/month; Starter 150 actions/month; Legacy plans do not include Smart answers, Smart status, or Smart digest
  9. Additional Forms Features: Multiple forms per project, branching logic in forms (show fields depending on prior answers), default the task assignee in form submission task, add header image, and customize the confirmation message
  10. Other: Approval-type tasks; Project Templates add Roles and support Advanced plan features like Rules; Critical Path in Timeline and Gantt Views; Proofing; integration with Jira Cloud; and Admin Console Insights tab with detailed engagement activity over time: See Asana Help regarding each for more info.
  11. Additional note for Legacy Business plan holders: The Advanced plan does not include support for Salesforce, Tableau, and Power BI integrations

See also:

Thanks,

Larry

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Very good extensive list @lpb

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Great post, @lpb ! Coincidentally I was preparing to draft a similar post and to also include upgrading from Advanced → Enterprise… shotgun! :sweat_smile:

Just a note on point 6; it turned out that Starter does support external actions, as confirmed here.

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Thanks so much for that compliment, @Richard_Sather, and sorry for the duplication. I’ll definitely look forward to your Advanced / Enterprise version (and won’t plan on doing that myself!).

And thanks for catching that on point 6; I updated the OP.

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You need to pay for Enterprise if you want to do anything useful in Asana with reports and workloads. Then it starts to get closer to the capabilities of real project management software like MS Project but with some real advantages that leverage the collaborative and online aspects. I still can’t

With the lower plans all you get is a collaborative task checklist software with some extra frills thrown in and there are plenty of cheaper options for that.

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Thanks

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Having been using Asana for our small business for many years now, i’m still a bit sour at having taken the plunge and started paying for Premium a few years back only to quickly see a new tier appear at double the price. And then for features we were paying for to disappear into that higher tier and new features not be made available to us.

The jump to Advanced is a huge step up in cost for a small business, and I slightly resent the bait and switch I experienced in the past.

It’s also super annoying that seats jump up in blocks of ten, you hit 31 employees…bang, you’re paying for 40 seats. :slightly_frowning_face:

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