I've found Asana to be a much, much nicer product to work with than Jira (at least as a developer, not sure about from the management side.) I genuinely wish them success and hope they're able to grow their marketshare.
Do you have up-to-date experience on both? I ask because, this year is my first time using Jira in 10 years. I was in big corp 10 years ago and we were on Jira and it was a disaster to have to use. UI was a mess and it constantly went down or went slow (big corp; self-hosted.). My current startup started using Jira Cloud recently and I found it to be much better than my past experience, and better than Asana.
I last used Asana at my last company, which I left 2 years ago. It was slow and a resource hog even on our pretty beefy work MacBook Pros. Compared to my current Jira Cloud experience in 2020, I much prefer Jira now.
This was about 2 years ago - at that time I found both Asana and Jira to be similarly slow, so kind of a wash in that regard. But it was corporate self-hosted Jira, so perhaps Jira Cloud is a smoother experience.
Jira self-hosted is actually often a lot faster than Jira Cloud, if you have decent gear to run it on. You run the database too, so it's a matter of how much cash you want to throw at it. Jira and Postgres on decent storage can be pretty quick, though of course it's still 100x slower than any normal 1990s desktop app.
I was in two jira cloud projects this year and in my current project we're using Asana. I've used Asana on and off over the years and I kind of prefer it. Jira is just a constant pain in our industry. It seems what process heavy product people gravitate too. So, I'm well familiar with it; know how to customize it (you have to); and know how to work with it instead of against it.
Asana is pretty complex these days and neither is perfect. Both are kind of slow. But crucially, bulk editing tickets in Asana is just a lot nicer. This is the single reason I prefer it over Jira because anything bulk is just a hell of multi modal dialogs: click, wait, click, wait, etc. It completely sucks the life out of me and makes me curse at my laptop.
Asana feels more like a spread sheet when you are bulk editing. I can switch to the list view, multi select a few tickets and e.g. add some tags, assign to the same person, etc. Boom done. This is so satisfying. I also love bulk inserting tickets in the list view: type, enter, type, type, etc. No modal dialogs involved for two key activities. No process bureaucracy imposed. This is why I like it so much. Jira does not even come close to enabling this level of efficiency.
I'm mostly a developer but seem to always end up taking on a lot of product management tasks as well. Comes with the job when you hit a certain amount of seniority. I tend to be vastly more experienced than some of the junior PMs I work with as well (by some decades). So, inevitably, I end up spending quality time with whatever ticketing system is used and translating their business requirements into actually actionable tickets suitable for consumption by developers (i.e. doing their job). I'm experienced enough to know that the tool is rarely the problem or the solution (it's always the process) but the tools do bias the process (jira and scrum-butt go together real well) and tend to become part of the problem. PMs preferring Jira because that's all they know is usually the reason it's used.
A pain point with Asana is that it is indeed quite slow for some things. E.g. drag and drop of tickets is very sluggish on Firefox. Initial page load is also not great; but once loaded things are reasonable. However, Jira cloud is painfully slow in comparison. I've seen 10-20 second page loads for ticket detail pages. That's appallingly bad and IMHO completely unacceptable for a paid product. It looks to me that they UI is doing lots of REST requests all the time and some use cases seem to end up doing way too many of those.
So any time they get busy, the seconds add up. It's what makes using Jira such a miserable experience because absolutely everything involves multiple such page loads. If you can avoid having to go to detail screens, it helps. Unfortunately, inevitably the fields you care about are scattered over different views.
Asana is much less painful in this respect. But both have challenges on this front. Jira is the more feature rich (in the everything and the kitchen sink sense); but the features that matter to me (as opposed to the gazillions of crap bolted onto Jira over the past 20 years) are all there in Asana. Also, it seems to be a bit more opinionated on what the UI should be in the sense that you don't end up spending a lot of time heavily customizing it; which is a thing in all Jira projects I've been on.
I can work with both but prefer Asana.
An issue with both is that they integrate poorly with things like Github pull requests and version control in general. These days what I look for and have not really found yet (despite lots of plugins) is deep integration with and visibility into CI/CD. IMHO the life cycle of an issue includes events from these. At some point PRs are created, CI tests them, the PR is merged (and thus closes the issue), and CD deploys the change to production. I'd love to have a Github issue tracker style integration into either Asana or Jira. In fact with a little feature work to adopt some asana like features, the Github issue tracker could end up being superior.
Linear.app has nailed the experience IMO. It's simple, fast, developer-first, and has the advanced features you'd want without the bloat. Asana IMO is just too slow performance wise and functions more as a product manager-first tool as opposed to a developer-first tool.
Ooof I'm on asana for the first time after using jira for 10+ years. I hate it. Asana is a generic workflow tool where jira leans towards software development. This means that every part of your process you need to create in asana then explain to your team this is the one true way to use asana.
Example Epics. A way to roll pieces of a project into a larger ticket describing that project. There's no concept in asana. So you have to hack it by doing sub tasks and manually adding the project to each subtask so it shows up on the board.
I am a software developer working for clients that both use Asana and Jira so I used both. About a year ago I had to pick my own 'task management system' to work with other (freelance) people on client projects, I decided to pick Asana. The reason why? Asana isn't perfect, but at the very least it works and does what it does very well. It is really easy for people to understand the concept and start using it. Also, I really appreciate how easy it is to create a task and work on it yourself or assign it to someone else.
That being said, there is one thing I have been missing in all of those years. That is the ability to have automatic numbers assigned like Jira does (e.g. TE-01, TE-02) and allow those to be referenced in Git messages. So that is why I built a 3rd party integratie[0] that does this and integrate this. The Asana API was a _joy_ to work with, it works fast, quickly and the documentation is top notch. Now compare that to my experience with both the BitBucket API and Jira API.
What are the main differences. I just found it to be pretty much similar and what I find really confusing is my current and last company both had both of them one for business and one for devs. Both doing the basic kanban board and nothing else as far as I could tell.
Not a fan of the board/card focused view, mainly. I think it's visually cluttered and hard to read at a glance. Asana's list view (esp. with inline subtasks) feels a lot more like a to-do list, and I prefer that UI.
I last used Asana at my last company, which I left 2 years ago. It was slow and a resource hog even on our pretty beefy work MacBook Pros. Compared to my current Jira Cloud experience in 2020, I much prefer Jira now.