We are looking to determine if we can switch from another platform, which is a relational database, to Asana for a certain use-case. We are a non-profit who captures lots of stories to show our partners the difference their support is making in people’s lives. We work all over the world. I need many different people from the field (some of whom are not direct staff of our organization) to be able to enter and also see tasks in a project.
Is it possible to share a project with some of these people so they can see what is in the project, but not necessarily edit it? Would these people need to have a paid for Asana license to do this, or is it possible for read-only access to not require an actual paid-for license. I ask this because the number of people across the earth who will need to enter and see stories is vast. They will not collaborate on these stories, but they would need to enter and view them.
We are investigating many solutions to solve this use-case, and I’m hoping Asana can meet the need. The sharing protocol for Asana seems to have changed quite a bit over the years and I’m not sure where we’re at this point. I read a lot of posts on this topic and there seems to be a significant evolution to this sharing workflow.
This part is key. Basically, any user who is not an employee and does NOT have an email @ your domain (or associated domains with your Asana space) is considered a ‘Guest’ user. That means you do NOT pay for their seat and you can invite unlimited Guests in your Asana space.
You can share everything with them, except Goals. So you can add them as members to Teams, Projects, Portfolios. You can assign tasks and they can fully interact if you want, otherwise you can set them to comment or viewer access, just like any other member.
Apart from not accessing Goals, the main limitations Guests users have is that they cannot create Teams, fields, rules or use any AI features, along with some other nuances.
I understand that guest access allows access in almost the same way as organizational users.
However, wouldn’t it be difficult to set up and manage access settings?
As an alternative, how about this method of making it publicly available to the general public? https://help.asana.com/s/article/read-only-links
There are different features in Asana that pertain here, and they have pros and cons, and a detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this reply but I wanted to mention that.
Your request asks both to allow people to enter content but then not necessarily edit it; if you’re referring to the same person, can you explain?
Asana Forms are a great way for someone to enter content to a project in a prescribed way and with no training; they could contribute to the solution.
If you are on Enterprise, there are view-only licenses you could consider for those who are only viewing project info.
@Ka_Nishiyama mentioned read-only links, but that shows primarily sections and task titles and I think won’t help you, but see Working with External Clients for completeness sake.
I don’t think this would pose a problem. By default guests only see what you share with them but if you put them on team(s) to which all the required projects have been shared, you can easily manage this, I believe.
Thank you so much, @lpb and @Richard_Sather for these fantastic answers. This Asana community is next-level. I’m honestly surprised at how great the forum culture is in 2025. Back when I started in tech in the early 2000’s the only thing that existed was forums and a google search. But even in this modern day of AI you can’t beat the help of real people. So thank you! This is awesome.
I was planning to have outside stakeholders submit story leads via an Asana form, which does not require them to have a license, an account, or even see the Asana project. For these stakeholders, my hope was to give them ‘view only’ access to the project so they could see what they uploaded, but not interact with it in anyway. But since I now realize I can give these people ‘comment only’ permission, I will most likely do that instead of ‘read only.’
The next key piece of information here is the existence of ‘view-only’ licenses. I do think this could help save money as there are some people in our org who have org level email addresses but would only need to view content and not edit it. Instead of paying for an entire seat for them, we could get them view only licenses. The only thing I don’t know is how that works with the whole ‘tier’ and ‘seat’ protocol which Asana seems to use to determine: 1) who counts as a seat and then 2) how many seats you must buy at one time. I wonder if the view only seats are an isolated process from the tier and seat workflow I just described and the view only licenses don’t count towards those seats?
Regardless, the info you’ve shared gives me some solid takeaways to take to our meeting later today and continue the conversation of using Asana as our story lead management system in place of the current relational database we are using now.
Thanks @lpb ! I am 95% certain we are at least on the Enterprise plan and perhaps the Enterprise + plan. I am not the Asana account admin here, but I sent some messages to that POC yesterday and am hoping to hear back today to get confirmation on this so I can do a better job of estimating the price of using Asana for this vs. other solutions.
Thanks for the kind words, @Justin_Jenkins.
As @lpb mentioned, let me know if you need any advice or help with provisioning your licenses. Feel free to DM me (click on my profile photo and then Message)