FallingWallenda:
On Asana’s website, they have a page dedicated to what differentiates them from Monday.com. They play the VALUE CARD over and over. There really aren’t any references to product superiority.
I’m not sure I agree. In addition to the pricing pieces you mention, they also have a “more control for everyone in your organization”, “built for everyone, not just spreadsheet users”, “bring all your favorite tools with you”.
I do think this page is a defensive move on Asana’s part. I couldn’t find it on their homepage, the only way I found it was Googling “Asana vs Monday”, so I expect it’s directly focused on search result advertising.
Asana has been around much longer than Monday. And I feel like they started with a more “corporate” marketing push whereas Monday started with a more small/mid sized business marketing push. As a result, I feel like Asana sometimes has to fight a reputation of being more expensive, higher end, and more complicated.
I think this page is just about combating that perception, attacking in places where Monday is the perceived leader. Saying “we’re not expensive”, “we’re easy to use”, “we’re popular and cool”.
Remember that this is marketing, and targeted marketing at that, it’s as much about brand as it is about point features.
The site shows side-by-side ratings and Monday.com receives the same number of stars (4.5 stars) as Asana, but Asana touts the NUMBER of reviews. They have 5x as many reviews as Monday.
Again, some of this is defensive. “We’re just as loved”. But some of this is also implicitly talking about Asana’s first mover advantage. We’re bigger, we’re more popular, we have more tools and integrations.
My view
I use Asana at work. It’s liked here. We used Asana for a while at my previous job as well. But Monday clearly has momentum as well. The products and product strategies seem VERY similar. (Compared to similar products, like Trello, various dead Google products, Basecamp, etc. Which all handle similar “collaborate task management” functionality but ended up with much different products.) The growth curves are slightly different between Asana and Monday, given that Asana is older, but both seem legitimately hypergrowth.
Frankly, I don’t really know the answer of which will “win”. Maybe both will. But after reading some of the posts on this board it became clear that collaborative task management had reached some kind of tipping point. The concept has been around a long time, but with two marketshare hungry companies and a pandemic it seems clear that this is now becoming a new software category that will be widely adopted.
Personally, I felt like my indecision between the two companies was causing me to miss out. So I bought both a few months ago. As a combined entity they are one of my highest confidence investments.
- High growth
- SaaS
- Pandemic and “new workplace” tailwinds
- Network effects
- High operating margin, even compared to many SaaS companies.
I also think that both are potentially acquisition targets. That has pluses and minuses, as I think there is long term growth here and an acquisition would short circuit that. But I’m not opposed to a quick buck either. This does feel a lot like Slack to me: a new software category that someone like Microsoft or Salesforce will want to control. The reality is that a tool like Asana or Monday becomes a central part of its user’s routines and the big players won’t want to give up that kind of user mindshare to the (relatively) little players like Asana and Monday.
I figure I can benefit from buying both. And if one falters, or gets bought, I can potentially shift gears to the other.
And that’s essentially my advice here: don’t miss out on the entire category debating which is better. The reality is that the products are extremely similar. And the marketing strategies, while different a a few years ago, seem to be converging as well.
–CH
*An interesting side note here I think is Basecamp. Although Basecamp isn’t feature-by-feature competitive with Monday/Asana, it’s been around much longer and is also in the collaborative task management space. I think that Basecamp clearly could have owned this market. But, although Basecamp has been very successful, the Basecamp owners wanted to run the product they wanted to. They never went after the enterprises, preferring the small business market. Being very opinionated about how they run their company. Preferring organic growth.
It seems like I’m anti-Basecamp, but I’m not. I actually admire the Basecamp owners and have used and liked that product as well. They just chose a very different path. And I feel like Basecamp is an “alternate universe” Monday.