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.