Visor Vs. Asana

Visor and Asana are both popular, flexible apps that you can use to manage and visualize tasks, projects, and portfolios of projects.

You can use Visor as an alternative to Asana to plan, share, and track your projects.

You can also use Visor with Asana to unlock additional capabilities which either don’t exist in Asana, or are only available as part of their higher-cost plans (such as managing and visualizing your portfolios of projects).

Using Visor is an easy way to enhance Asana (especially its portfolio management functionality), share with all your stakeholders, and save money.

Use this page to compare Visor and Asana to see which is best for you, and learn how using Visor with Asana to share with stakeholders and manage portfolios of projects could reduce your annual license costs by over 84%.

Can Asana and Visor Work Together?

Yes, Visor has a two-way integration which is included completely free of charge. This enables you to visualize, update, and share your real-time Asana project and portfolio data in Visor, while maintaining a synchronized, single source of truth across both apps.

Combining Visor with your existing Asana instance unlocks a wide range of additional features and capabilities, including many that are either unavailable in Asana or restricted to higher cost Asana plans.

Visor’s Starter Plan vs. Asana’s Starter Plan

The table below compares Asana’s Starter plan against Visor’s Starter plan.

You can use all of Visor’s functionality with your real-time Asana data, via a two-way integration.

You can also enter or upload data directly into Visor and use it as a standalone system to manage and visualize projects.

To see how Visor compares to Asana’s Advanced Plan ($61 per user per month), check out the table at the bottom of this page.

*Guest users in Asana can only be “external;” specifically they cannot access Asana using their company email address. More information below. 

How Much Will Your Asana Upgrade Cost?

Visor’s Free Plan includes a two-way Asana integration and the ability to create portfolio Kanban board and Table/Spreadsheet views, and basic portfolio management functionality, that you can use with your existing and future Asana projects.

Visor’s Starter plan unlocks portfolio Gantt chart, Dashboard, and Timeline views, and enhanced portfolio management functionality that you can use with your existing and future Asana projects.

To get similar portfolio management capabilities directly in Asana you will need to purchase Asana’s Advanced plan ($30 per user per month).

The table below gives illustrates how much upgrading your Asana plan could cost you: 

Please feel free to confirm these costs using Asana’s full pricing information.

Visor can be used standalone, or as a complimentary enhancement to your existing Asana instance. Visor has both a Free plan, and a free trial, and includes a two-way Asana integration as standard.

Your Asana Subscription Cost Can Increase Rapidly

Asana licenses can only be purchased in bundles. You cannot purchase individual Asana licenses. The minimum size of these bundles also increases as your total user count increases.

Here’s how Asana describes their model:

“Our subscription offerings increase in increments of 5 users when total users are less than or equal to 30; increments of 10 when total users are between 30 and 100; increments of 25 when total users are between 100 and 500; and increments of 50 when total users are more than 500”

This pricing model, combined with the inability to add internal view only users for free, could cause your Asana subscription costs to rise disproportionately to the number of actual users.

Visor is Better Than Asana Portfolios

Even if you are not required to do exhaustive project portfolio management (PPM), there are still many instances where it’s necessary to group projects together into “portfolios” in order to take a higher-level, big-picture view.

Asana’s Portfolios feature is only available with an Advanced plan ($30.49 per user per month with a minimum of two users). Visor’s project portfolio management functionality also addresses a number of Asana Portfolio’s shortcomings.

This means that using Visor with Asana enables you to unlock portfolio management functionality and save on your license costs.

How much could you save?

You can use an Asana free plan, with a Visor Starter plan, at a total cost of $18 per user per month. That’s a saving of $12.49 per user per month.

You could also opt for the Visor Team plan to get unlimited free viewers. Asana charges you for all internal users even if they only need to view projects and portfolios. This means Visor is a far more cost-effective way to create portfolio visualizations and share them with as many stakeholders as you need to, without ramping up your costs.

Which important portfolio management features does Visor have that Asana doesn’t?

• Portfolio Gantt Charts: Asana only allows you to view your portfolios in a simple timeline view – in Visor you can create fully-functional portfolio Gantt charts, roadmaps, timeline views, and board views.
  
• Filtering By Milestones: In Visor you can create portfolio Gantt charts and other views with milestones, and filter to just show milestones across your portfolio of projects. This isn’t possible in Asana.
  
• Drilling-down: In Asana portfolio views you cannot easily expand individual projects to see task or subtask details. This makes it laborious to uncover the causes behind issues like projects being delayed or going over budget. In Visor you can show as many levels of hierarchy as you want, from just projects, all the way down to tasks and subtasks.
  
• Multiple views for different stakeholders: In Visor you can create varied views, such as portfolio Gantt charts for your different stakeholders and teams. These can have different settings for groupings, levels of task hierarchy shown, timescales, and other attributes to give each stakeholder or group the best view for them. In Asana this isn’t possible, you are stuck with one view of your portfolio that you’ll need to stretch to fit every job and every stakeholder.
  
• Free Internal Viewers: Asana only gives unlimited view-only licenses to their Enterprise and Enterprise+ customers. If you are on any other Asana plan and need to share access to your portfolio views with stakeholders you’ll need to purchase a license for each of them. Visor’s Team plan gives you unlimited free viewers (whether internal or external) giving you complete freedom to share plans and updates with stakeholders and clients alike.

The conclusion is clear. Using Visor with Asana to plan, visualize, track, and share your portfolios is a much better and lower-cost option than upgrading to Asana Advanced with Portfolios.

Visor Makes Sharing Easier and Much More Affordable

Asana has key limitations that make it more difficult to share projects and views with internal and external collaborators:

• The Asana Personal (free) Plan doesn’t include any Guest users
• Internal view-only users consume paid Asana licenses (at all plan levels)
• Lockable custom fields are only available on the Advanced Plan
• Private projects are only available on the Starter or above plan

Visor has no such limitations and makes the experience of sharing your projects and plans easy, secure, and flexible to different scenarios.

See the table below for a full comparison and see the examples below for a better understanding of how using Visor with Asana can reduce your costs.

How You Can Reduce Asana Costs With Visor – Example Scenarios:

Scenario 1: Save 41%

Imagine you have a team of five people using Asana (Starter Plan) to create and manage projects, and ten additional stakeholders who need to view but not edit projects. You would be charged around $2,428 per year.

If you used Asana with Visor’s Team plan to share with those internal stakeholders, you would save around $1,000 each year (a 41% saving).

Scenario 2: Save 74%

If your team of five editors and ten viewers ever need to view and manage multiple Asana projects in a single view (see the portfolio management section above), you would be charged around $5,488 per year, (because you would need to upgrade every user to Asana Advanced to access Portfolios, and the Asana Advanced plan doesn’t include free internal viewers).

If you took the smarter route and opted for Visor Team with Asana Starter, you would save around $4000 each year (a 74% saving!)

Scenario 3: Save 84%

You can save even more if only three of your team members need to manage portfolios of projects, even if you still have five users creating, planning, and editing projects in Asana. Just get three Visor Team licenses for those who need to do portfolio management. You would save $4,624 each year – an 84% reduction in your costs compared to upgrading to Asana Advanced.

More Ways To Visualize Work, Without Extra Costs

Visor’s Starter Plan gives you all the view and reporting options offered by Asana’s Advanced Plan, for much less per month per user, as the table below shows:

Visor can be also be used to visualize and update your Asana data. Visor views stay in sync with your Asana projects and portfolios using a robust two-way integration. This preserves your single source of truth and prevents any extra importing, updating, or other admin. 

Asana’s Visualizations Are Good, But Visor’s are Better 

Asana and Visor both make it possible to visualize your projects in a wide range of formats, but PMs agree: Visor’s views (or visualizations) are more appealing and flexible.

Visor also gives you many more custom formatting options, enabling you to tailor views to the specific needs of different projects or audiences that you’re sharing custom views with. 

As the table above shows, you can only create portfolio level visualizations with Asana’s Advanced plan, whereas Visor’s Free plan enables you to create portfolio Kanban boards and list views, while Visor’s Starter plan unlocks portfolio Gantt charts, dashboards, and Timeline views.

Below are visual comparisons of the same view type in Asana and Visor.

Gantt Charts

Example of a Gantt Chart in Visor using real-time data from a portfolio of Asana projects:

Example of a Gantt Chart in Asana

Kanban Boards

Example of a Kanban Board in Visor

Example of a Kanban Board in Asana

The Best Deal For You

Ideally you now understand whether using Visor, Asana, or a combination of the two is best for you, your team, and organization.

Visor’s Starter Plan gives you the functionality that Asana charges much more for, and gives you much better capabilities to view, manage, analyze, and share your portfolios of projects.

Asana does have some functionality that Visor lacks, but if you need a tool to manage, visualize, and share your projects, Visor is the superior option.

Visor’s Team plan unlocks unlimited users and is ideal if you use Asana but need to avoid increasing your costs by paying for licenses for every single internal stakeholder you share view-only plans with.

If you’re still feeling unsure, the good news is you can try Visor for free and test it out yourself. If you’re already using Asana and are unable to change, you can use Visor with Asana, to improve your ability to visualize and share live Asana project data, without the expense of upgrading your Asana plan.