Does Asana allow an Organization to have Different Tiers and How do they Integrate

English Forum Asana for Nonprofits Nonprofit Use Cases
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Hello,
We are a small nonprofit charity and would like to better understand whether Asana allows multiple and different tiers (free, premium and business) within one organization (one domain). If, Asana does allow this I am also interested in better understanding what the users at the different tiers can do and see as they use Asana. I realize that this topic was touched upon in:

However, I am still a little confused about this and would appreciate help and confirmation on the following since our resources are quite limited and we need to ensure we are making the right decisions:

  • Does Asana allow different tiers (free, premium, business) to be in one organization? It seems like the answer is “Yes” but I just wanted to double check.
  • If, “yes”, how are the tiers separated? It seems like different tiers are grouped into teams and divisions? So can I have Team A = Free, Team B = Premium, Team C = Business?
  • If, “yes”, how does this work in Asana for the different teams and users? Do users in tiers below other tiers (for example members on free) still have “View” access to features set up by higher tiers (for example members on premium)?

For example, what happens in the following scenario:
An organization has a Manager on a Premium/Business tier and 4 members on the free tier. The Manager then creates a Project and invites the free tier team members into the Project. The Manager creates Custom Fields and a Timeline for the Project. Can the other members who are on the free tier have at least “Viewing” access to the Timeline and Custom Fields? I would understand if the free members cannot use or interact with the Timeline or create Custom Fields but can they at least have a visual on both?

Thank you so much for your help and confirmation. :pray:

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Hello @EmmanuelY

Glad to hear you are using asana for your charity.
Thank you for posting this in so much detail.

I believe there is one key concept which has caused a bit of confusion. If it got cleared, then it will answer the rest of the question in your post.

Your membership with Asana is based on a domain. So when you subscribe a number of colleagues in ‘YourCharity’, everyone within the same domain i.e. name@yourcharity.org will be part of the same subscription tier. So if you went for free, they all are free, if you went for premium, they all access premium.

The use of features will be open to everyone within the same domain. But the difference is that you can set up private teams, projects, and so on where only 3 people can access and so on.

This set up is applied to ‘Organisation’ level. Where I see the confusion might have occured is if you work with difference workspaces.
Meaning: if you are working with a supplier who also uses Asana. Let us say they use Asana Premium while you use Asana Free. They add you to their own Asana space… On your profile, you will start seeing 2 workspaces (YourCharity and YourSupplier).
If you work under YourCHarity, then you are using free features, when you switch to YourSupplier, you will access premium features.
You can read more on here and hopefully that clarifies the matter.

Best,
Rashad

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Not wanting to complicate things, but just to add to @Rashad_Issa’s answer specifically on the above point: it is possible to be set up with a Division license on a team within an organization, where that team has a different subscription level than the rest of the organization. This is typically used in a case where the organization as a whole is at the Premium level but one team wants to have Business features. HOWEVER, the key thing to understand is in a Division license, the team with the Division license at the separate subscription level is really like a totally separate Asana entity - that team can’t share projects and tasks with the rest of the organization. So overall, I’d say the Division license is an exception rather than a rule in the Asana world.

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Yes, Divisions (as was mentioned)! Our organization has a combo of people on business, premium, and free. When we want to do things across people of different plans though, we have to create a new free team since you can go over your user levels.

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@EmmanuelY, A further clarification about what happens in an organization (or workspace). You choose the tier for it, but you can designate a team to be a different tier, and/or a division to also be at a different tier. A division is a collection of teams that you specify. People belonging to more than one team in a division are singly counted.

Hope that helps,

Larry

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Hi @Rashad_Issa thank you for your helpful and thorough reply.

I would like to confirm that if a User in an Organization with a Free Tier (using the organization’s domain) accesses another Organization on a Paid Tier, the User with the Free Tier will be able to see, access and use the Paid Features within the other organization?

Thank you for confirming.

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Hello @Phil_Seeman thank you for your reply and for explaining Divisions, interesting.

Once again, just to confirm here, so if 1 Organization has 2 Divisions on different Paid Tiers, these 2 Divisions cannot interact in any way whatsoever (cannot see nor access projects in each others divisions)? Thank you for confirming.

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Hello @Heather_Slania this is really interesting – it gives me some hope that there might be a solution for our nonprofit. So your Organization has 3 different tier groups, including 1 free tier group. Are you using different teams or different Divisions to organize these different paid plans?

I am also curious, what you mean regarding “when we want to do doing things across people of different plans” and how a “new free team” helps you do this. Thank you for your help in clarifying. :pray:

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Hi @lpb thank you for your clarification that within 1 division a user on multiple teams is counted as a single seat – this is helpful to know.

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Hi @EmmanuelY

Glad I was able to assist.
Yes, you are correct.
Organisation 1 - Free
Organisation 2 - Premium
You have access to both orgs. Any projects you are involved with under Organisation 2, you will get access to the premium features. When you switch to Org 1, you will only be able to use free features.

Rashad

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Hi @Rashad_Issa, thank you for confirming, I appreciate it.

Wow, that’s both interesting and weird in my opinion. I imagine a funky workaround as the following:

  1. Charity A has the resources only to afford 5 Premium licenses which it passes to 5 of its program managers.
  2. However, in order to be operationally effective and make the licenses meaningful, they need the rest of the organization to access the projects managed by these 5 program managers.
  3. They ask the remaining program staff to use a domain outside of the official organization domain. They do this by either creating a secondary domain or use personal accounts (possible?) and set up a secondary organization on a free plan.
  4. From this secondary domain they then are invited to access the projects within the official organization which is on a paid plan. They then can use all of the paid features.

@Rashad_Issa is my understanding correct? Would the workaround I detail above work?

My apologies for all these confirmation requests – I am still trying to wrap my head around Asana’s system and what I learn from everyone here will determine whether or not we are able to go the paid route with Asana. Thank you! :pray:

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@EmmanuelY,

That’s all correct (3 and 4 in your post).

But you need to be aware that then those folks coming into the org with a non-org domain email address are Guests, not Members, of the org. See my recent reply on this topic, and the link to the Asana Guide on Members and Guests:

It’s not as frictionless as paying for all, but perhaps the only affordable option for some.

Are you able to qualify for the TechSoup discount? Or perhaps @Michael_A can help?

Larry

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Thanks @lpb for assisting.

@EmmanuelY hopefullt this has helped.
No problem about asking all these questions, thats the beauty of this forum. We are always here to assist to the best of our capability. So please do not hesitate to check in and ask.

One thing to keep in mind is to take a step back and assess:
Do you need the workaround only for financial purposed?
Does the workaround outweigh the benefit of having the full team onboarded?

Being a member vs a guest does bring to it another layer of security controls, and as Larry mentioned it wont be a frictionless approach.

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Hi @lpb thank you for confirming that the workaround would work but also highlighting that the approach would not be frictionless. Thanks also for the link to the post, it was very helpful and interesting to read.

It’s interesting that the “behavior” of the Guest (Secondary Free Organization) → Paid Primary Organization User is the behavior that I hoped was built into Asana for one Organization:

“The above would give them your org’s premium features, but (as shown below and elsewhere in the Asana Guide) there are some things Guests can’t do (like the aforementioned creating teams). Another big one is creating/editing Custom Fields (they can set values of Custom Fields, just not create/edit/delete them; you’d have to do that for them.”

I hoped that, within 1 Organization, Free Teams would be able to access Paid Teams Projects, but not be able to use Paid Features (Custom Fields, etc.), just view them. It’s funny (strange?) that Asana allows this type of behavior and access from external users but not from internal users (as @Rashad_Issa pointed out there is also the issue of security and internal users would be more secure).

Thank you Larry for remembering about the TechSoup post and asking about the discount. Unfortunately it looks like there is (currently) no way around the shackles of TechSoup. :anguished:

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Hi @Rashad_Issa thank you for your understanding and patience.

Absolutely, the only reason is purely financial. Sometimes (often), in nonprofits we cannot exactly think in a “Business” or Corporate way regarding whether the benefits of X outweigh the downsides of Y. There is not exactly a numerical or price value that we can tag onto such decisions in the nonprofit charity sector.

Our nonprofit charity is based in a country where literally each $ can have a huge impact. Here is an example: for 1 Asana Premium User Account I can put 2 Students through High School for 1 year. A High School education and degree for a disadvantaged student can change their future and life. So how do we make the decision? Would Asana Premium make us more productive and efficient, I would like to say “yes” (I hope), but who am I to say that our increased productivity and efficiency is more important than the education (and potentially future) of a student?

This is where things are very tricky for small grassroots nonprofit charities. Our resources are limited and we want to use them to make the greatest impact and help the most people. We want Asana to be a part our journey, but there is a balance and limit that we have to keep in light of the people whom we serve. I apologize for the ramble… but I hope it clarifies a bit how these are difficult decisions for nonprofits to make and if I had to side between choosing cool and helpful tech tools and the education and future of a child, I would probably have to side with the latter…

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Since I haven’t used Divisions myself, I’m going to defer to those who have used them to give you a clear answer on how Asana information inside and outside the Division can or can’t interact. @lpb or @LEGGO, can you clarify? Thanks!

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I work at a small college and, as you can imagine, there are a million different potential areas… even students use their .edu address to make their own free team. Within my own department (treated as a division in Asana) we have several teams.

Maybe this will help! If you look at how Asana structures things and add in a “Division” between teams and organization, you can see how each division would have any number of teams but then not be linked to another division. So each division can have their own paid/free access with however many seats, but the access doesn’t carry over because you can’t go over your seat limit. You purchase a number of seats in your division, which can have guests from outside, but not from the same domain as explained above.

If I need to do a project with someone from another division, we usually make a new team outside of our division structures… it’s usually a new cross-departmental project anyway that doesn’t fall neatly in our own divisions. Theoretically, you can add additional seats to your division to allow more people to join, but I usually don’t feel the need (desire, sure) for more of the paid features for this external projects.

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@EmmanuelY,

I’ve re-read the entire thread. I believe you can easily do what you want to do, and it’s straightforward.

I think confusion began in the first post where you asked about having multiple tiers. And you quoted an old post with misinformation: 1) the minimum for Premium is now 2-person, not 5-person, and 2) the 15-persons part is only for Basic/Free tier and not combinable with Premium tier.

The initial questions about multiple tiers directed the discussion unnecessarily to 1) multiple tiers, 2) divisions, and even 3) multiple organizations, all of which are irrelevant to your needs.

I think you should purchase a 2-person Premium plan for your org.

@Michael_A, Is it possible to see if Emmanuel’s org qualifies for the discount from Asana directly without TechSoup and maybe his org can use the saved funds charitably as he states because:

Emmanual, contrary to:

. . . it does work this way within one org.

Your 2-seat Premium means your org will be Premium for all Teams and Projects you create, which will be available for shared access (to the extent you allow this with permissions) by all Members and Guests.

Allow two and only two users to join with their domain email addresses. They will be Members and can create Teams for themselves and on behalf of others, create Custom Fields for themselves and on behalf of others, etc.

You can support as many other users in your Premium org as you want (hundreds) but they all will be org Guests and all must join with non-org domain emails. (If any join with org emails, Asana will warn you that you will be billed for more than your two seats if you don’t correct this by de-provisioning the extra Members soon.)

@EmmanuelY, Does this make sense? @Rashad_Issa, @Heather_Slania, @Phil_Seeman, do you agree?

Thanks,

Larry

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Yes @lpb you have put it together beautifully.

@EmmanuelY I think this approach will be neat and straight forward for your needs. It will require you to keep on top of the guest members and accessibility. But it is worth you considering it and seeing if it fits what you are after.

Larry, thank you for providing this detailed response. Hopefully Michael can assist!! :pray:

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Yep @lpb ! Thank you for taking the totality of the questions asked and not just a first!

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