A decade ago, if someone talked about a project management tool, the first name that would come to mind was MS Project and the image you would see in your mind was Gantt's chart.
Well, the world has evolved, and Agile is taking over most of the new product development projects. Agile is also being used as a transition step for legacy projects that want to get some of the benefits of going agile. Understandably, there are a host of project management tools out there that are vying for your attention. The good news is that most of them are free to use. At least most of the features are, if you are a startup.
The list can be long, but the top 2 (in terms of popularity and adoption) are:
Basecamp
Asana
The question is, which one is better for your project? In this article, we'll try to answer this question from the perspective of a project manager. First, let us understand what each one does.
What is Basecamp?
Basecamp was one of the initial project management softwares to enter the scene, in 1999. This company was founded by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim.
It started with the name '37signals' and was launched way back in 2004. Around that time, Agile adoption was picking up pace among startups and small companies. The team at Basecamp wanted this tool to be simple to use, so businesses of all sizes could use it. Even freelancers.
Figure: Basecamp has evolved distinctively across 3 versions
Basecamp was one of the initial project management softwares to enter the scene, in 1999. This company was founded by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim.
It started with the name '37signals' and was launched way back in 2004. Around that time, Agile adoption was picking up pace among startups and small companies. The team at Basecamp wanted this tool to be simple to use, so businesses of all sizes could use it. Even freelancers.
Figure: Basecamp has evolved distinctively across 3 versions
What is Asana?
Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz were frustrated with team-based work management, and decided to create a simple software. This was in 2008, when more and more projects were adopting the Agile approach.
Asana came to the party much after Basecamp, and has been known for its simplicity of design and ease of use. The official launch was not until 3 years later, and since then it has added more features as demanded by the community.
Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz were frustrated with team-based work management, and decided to create a simple software. This was in 2008, when more and more projects were adopting the Agile approach.
Asana came to the party much after Basecamp, and has been known for its simplicity of design and ease of use. The official launch was not until 3 years later, and since then it has added more features as demanded by the community.
What does a PM Require to Manage a Project?
Here are the top 5 needs of a project manager that a project management tool should address.
Planning, Scheduling & Tracking
This is the bread and butter for a project manager, especially if you are managing projects using a traditional Predictive approach.
You need to be able to define tasks, allocate them to team members, estimate time, track progress, and see the project’s overall status at any point in time.
As a project manager of a traditional project, you'd probably want to do this using a Gantt chart.
As an Agile project manager, you would potentially want a customized Kanban board.
Communications
As per PMI, a project manager spends over 90% of time and effort in communication.
Hence, a project management tool must be efficient at managing communication—from the PM to all stakeholders and also among the team members. More often than not, customers and vendors will need to communicate certain information.
Teams use email, messenger application, any dedicated communication platform such as slack, and/or even social media platforms for managing their communication needs.
Dashboards built into the project management system could also be a great way to share information and get communication channels buzzing. The dashboards usually allow you to add charts, images, documents and so on. Dashboards help towards taking decisions, either by specific stakeholders or the team collectively.
Collaboration
Effective collaboration among team members and also external stakeholders is important for project success.
A project team could be small (Agile team of 6-9 members) or hundreds of people working in various subprojects (as in a large software product development, maintenance, and support team).
The members will need to access each other's work - either to integrate, or to analyze dependencies, or to get the big picture of the project. The same holds true for project artifacts maintained by subteams within the project.
Reporting
"How are we doing on the schedule and budget this Sprint compared to the last one?"
If you were asked this sort of question from the sponsor, you would want a report to give that to you instantly, rather than having to go over a spreadsheet and tediously put together this information.
The ability to create customized reports, apart from the standard reports on scope management, schedule management, and cost management, is essential for a project manager. Reports such as trends on project task allocation, progress, defects, and risks are great for managing the project proactively.
Ease of Use (Of Course!)
You don't want to wrestle with a tool to get what you want daily. You would rather enjoy it if what you need is available at the click of a button.
Ease of use of any project management software itself increases the probability of ease with which a project manager can manage projects. There are unlimited examples where the PMs shun in-house, tedious, hated project management tools in favour of Excel Spreadsheet!
Ease of using PM software = Ease of managing the project.
Here are the top 5 needs of a project manager that a project management tool should address.
Planning, Scheduling & Tracking
This is the bread and butter for a project manager, especially if you are managing projects using a traditional Predictive approach.
You need to be able to define tasks, allocate them to team members, estimate time, track progress, and see the project’s overall status at any point in time.
As a project manager of a traditional project, you'd probably want to do this using a Gantt chart.
As an Agile project manager, you would potentially want a customized Kanban board.
Communications
As per PMI, a project manager spends over 90% of time and effort in communication.
Hence, a project management tool must be efficient at managing communication—from the PM to all stakeholders and also among the team members. More often than not, customers and vendors will need to communicate certain information.
Teams use email, messenger application, any dedicated communication platform such as slack, and/or even social media platforms for managing their communication needs.
Dashboards built into the project management system could also be a great way to share information and get communication channels buzzing. The dashboards usually allow you to add charts, images, documents and so on. Dashboards help towards taking decisions, either by specific stakeholders or the team collectively.
Collaboration
Effective collaboration among team members and also external stakeholders is important for project success.
A project team could be small (Agile team of 6-9 members) or hundreds of people working in various subprojects (as in a large software product development, maintenance, and support team).
The members will need to access each other's work - either to integrate, or to analyze dependencies, or to get the big picture of the project. The same holds true for project artifacts maintained by subteams within the project.
Reporting
"How are we doing on the schedule and budget this Sprint compared to the last one?"
If you were asked this sort of question from the sponsor, you would want a report to give that to you instantly, rather than having to go over a spreadsheet and tediously put together this information.
The ability to create customized reports, apart from the standard reports on scope management, schedule management, and cost management, is essential for a project manager. Reports such as trends on project task allocation, progress, defects, and risks are great for managing the project proactively.
Ease of Use (Of Course!)
You don't want to wrestle with a tool to get what you want daily. You would rather enjoy it if what you need is available at the click of a button.
Ease of use of any project management software itself increases the probability of ease with which a project manager can manage projects. There are unlimited examples where the PMs shun in-house, tedious, hated project management tools in favour of Excel Spreadsheet!
Ease of using PM software = Ease of managing the project.
How do These Compare: Asana or Basecamp?
Now that we have established the parameters, let us see how each of these are addressed in both these platforms -
Planning, Scheduling & Tracking:
PST (planning, scheduling, and tracking) is the core of any project management software. Most of the rest is either related to or an offshoot of these activities.
Basecamp
Basecamp allows you to schedule tasks on a calendar, and even create shared schedules. However, you won't find much support if you are looking for a detailed time-based task-dependency schedule.
The visual Hill chart option (we'll see in the Reporting section in a bit) helps you track the tasks and find out which ones are, or can, cause bottlenecks in the project.
Asana
Asana allows you to set up projects, tasks, subtasks, milestones, sections, goals, and even custom fields to define your own granularity. You can also plan, schedule, and track tasks using Workflow builder.
Workflow builder helps you create an efficient workflow by visually connecting people and even teams, and organizing the work. You can create your own process and build rules that trigger actions automatically (such as task assignments, status updates) for better collaboration.
Workload views visually show you how your team members are loaded. You can use this information for resource levelling or resource smoothing and create a better schedule.
Communication & Collaboration:
Effective communication can help you identify potential issues ahead of time, and forms a major influencing factor as far as stakeholder management is concerned.
Basecamp
Basecamp has a tool called Campfire (very aptly named, can you visualize people sitting around a campfire and chatting?) that provides an infrastructure to chat with individuals or groups. The file uploading system is intuitive and easy to use, as a means of collaboration.
Asana
Task comments and Mentions allow you to make 1-1 and 1-N communication within the team. Status of the task, goal, and project are communicated visually, in addition to direct messaging (DM) feature for private communication. Project level discussion boards, and team level conversation and announcement features allow you to not miss out on any type of communication.
Reporting:
The reports give you the high-level picture of the project, ability to assess risks, and most importantly, forecast the completion time and efforts.
Basecamp
Unfortunately, Basecamp doesn’t offer any native budget tracking, time-tracking, resource management, or reporting functions. If you are managing a hybrid project, you'd want to have control over the predictive part of the project, and there's no better way for that than using a Gantt chart. There's no Gantt chart feature in Basecamp.
However, Basecamp provides Hill charts to see the high-level progress.
Hill chart is an intuitive concept based on the fact that the team takes time to get along, get better at estimates and work till they 'get into the groove'. That's usually an uphill task. Once they cross that phase, then it's downhill—which means things get better, and faster, estimates get more accurate and consistent—basically, certainty sets in.
Based on the progress and pace of tasks, you can see the Hill chart of your project and identify risk areas or bottlenecks. Consider this a new way of seeing the overall project status. However, the tasks do not move along the chart automatically, you need to manually move them, which is a bit of a letdown.
Asana
Yes! Gantt chart. You can build a custom Gantt chart template and map the roles, tasks, and deadlines on a timeline.
Figure: Gantt chart template in Asana. Courtesy: asana.com
Gantt chart support wasn't available in the initial versions of Asana, but was added around 2020. Asana reports let you see the progress on milestones, overall project progress, portfolios, and even workload of the team. You can track the completion of tasks, and see which tasks are overdue. You can also see the high level status using various views such as boards, lists, and even timeline.
Asana Dashboard gives you key insights without having to drill down into each of your projects or modules. Charts and graphs help you zoom into any aspect of the project and drill down to the level of clarity you need. This is great for managing risks.
Ease of Use:
Basecamp
Basecamp uses the block system of showing content, unlike a menu-based system. Once you understand the features, it is easy to work with them. The User Interface is quite intuitive.
Asana
Right off the bat, Asana has more features than Basecamp. The features are simple to use and intuitive to understand. There isn't much to compare here in terms of usability—both have a very short learning curve. Just a matter of preference and getting used to.
Now that we have established the parameters, let us see how each of these are addressed in both these platforms -
Planning, Scheduling & Tracking:
PST (planning, scheduling, and tracking) is the core of any project management software. Most of the rest is either related to or an offshoot of these activities.
Basecamp
Basecamp allows you to schedule tasks on a calendar, and even create shared schedules. However, you won't find much support if you are looking for a detailed time-based task-dependency schedule.
The visual Hill chart option (we'll see in the Reporting section in a bit) helps you track the tasks and find out which ones are, or can, cause bottlenecks in the project.
Asana
Asana allows you to set up projects, tasks, subtasks, milestones, sections, goals, and even custom fields to define your own granularity. You can also plan, schedule, and track tasks using Workflow builder.
Workflow builder helps you create an efficient workflow by visually connecting people and even teams, and organizing the work. You can create your own process and build rules that trigger actions automatically (such as task assignments, status updates) for better collaboration.
Workload views visually show you how your team members are loaded. You can use this information for resource levelling or resource smoothing and create a better schedule.
Communication & Collaboration:
Effective communication can help you identify potential issues ahead of time, and forms a major influencing factor as far as stakeholder management is concerned.
Basecamp
Basecamp has a tool called Campfire (very aptly named, can you visualize people sitting around a campfire and chatting?) that provides an infrastructure to chat with individuals or groups. The file uploading system is intuitive and easy to use, as a means of collaboration.
Asana
Task comments and Mentions allow you to make 1-1 and 1-N communication within the team. Status of the task, goal, and project are communicated visually, in addition to direct messaging (DM) feature for private communication. Project level discussion boards, and team level conversation and announcement features allow you to not miss out on any type of communication.
Reporting:
The reports give you the high-level picture of the project, ability to assess risks, and most importantly, forecast the completion time and efforts.
Basecamp
Unfortunately, Basecamp doesn’t offer any native budget tracking, time-tracking, resource management, or reporting functions. If you are managing a hybrid project, you'd want to have control over the predictive part of the project, and there's no better way for that than using a Gantt chart. There's no Gantt chart feature in Basecamp.
However, Basecamp provides Hill charts to see the high-level progress.
Hill chart is an intuitive concept based on the fact that the team takes time to get along, get better at estimates and work till they 'get into the groove'. That's usually an uphill task. Once they cross that phase, then it's downhill—which means things get better, and faster, estimates get more accurate and consistent—basically, certainty sets in.
Based on the progress and pace of tasks, you can see the Hill chart of your project and identify risk areas or bottlenecks. Consider this a new way of seeing the overall project status. However, the tasks do not move along the chart automatically, you need to manually move them, which is a bit of a letdown.
Asana
Yes! Gantt chart. You can build a custom Gantt chart template and map the roles, tasks, and deadlines on a timeline.
Figure: Gantt chart template in Asana. Courtesy: asana.com
Gantt chart support wasn't available in the initial versions of Asana, but was added around 2020. Asana reports let you see the progress on milestones, overall project progress, portfolios, and even workload of the team. You can track the completion of tasks, and see which tasks are overdue. You can also see the high level status using various views such as boards, lists, and even timeline.
Asana Dashboard gives you key insights without having to drill down into each of your projects or modules. Charts and graphs help you zoom into any aspect of the project and drill down to the level of clarity you need. This is great for managing risks.
Ease of Use:
Basecamp
Basecamp uses the block system of showing content, unlike a menu-based system. Once you understand the features, it is easy to work with them. The User Interface is quite intuitive.
Asana
Right off the bat, Asana has more features than Basecamp. The features are simple to use and intuitive to understand. There isn't much to compare here in terms of usability—both have a very short learning curve. Just a matter of preference and getting used to.
Conclusion
Both Asana and Basecamp are tools you can use to manage a project, there's no doubt about that.
Budgeting is something that's not available in both Asana and Basecamp. As a project manager, that's one thing I would love to have.
Know that both these were created not as a replacement for existing project management tools, they were created to simplify the management of projects. There's a difference.
However, from a pure project management perspective, I'd say Asana is more aligned with the PM mindset.
And for that reason, Asana is a hands-down winner for me.
Do you want to learn more about each of these amazing tools?
