Asana Problems & Issues

Paid plans can't be bought for one person - the smallest Starter or Advanced subscription is 2 seats, so a solo user pays at least $263.76/year on Starter (2 x $10.99 x 12) or about $324/year billed monthly. A forum feature request for a solo plan has been open for years and Asana staff said in 2025 there are no immediate plans to change seat tiering.

Asana sells seats in bands: one at a time from 2 to 5 users, then in blocks of 5 up to 30, 10 up to 100, 25 up to 500 and 50 beyond. Adding a sixth person moves a team to the 10-seat tier and roughly doubles the bill. Forum users call this unfair; staff confirmed in May 2025 that tiering would not change soon.

The free Personal plan now allows only 2 users for accounts created from November 2025; older accounts were moved to a legacy Personal plan that keeps up to 10 users but lose it if they upgrade and later downgrade. Small teams that used Asana free now have to pay or switch. The free plan still lacks timeline, dashboards, automations, forms and custom fields.

Starter is $10.99/user/month annually ($13.49 monthly). Portfolios, goals, resource management, approvals, branching forms and native time tracking need Advanced at $24.99/user ($30.49 monthly) - a 127% jump with no tier in between. A 10-seat Advanced team pays about $3,000/year.

SAML SSO and SCIM provisioning are only in Enterprise, which has no public price. Teams that need SSO for compliance must move to Enterprise regardless of size; audit logs, data residency and SIEM need the higher Enterprise+ tier.

Paid plans include 5 AI Teammates/Dash requests per user per month, capped at 50 per account (250 on Enterprise), plus pooled AI Studio credits. Beyond that, requests cost $0.50 prepaid or $0.60 pay-as-you-go, and heavier AI Studio use needs a separate Plus or Pro subscription. Forum users question the cost per person.

Reviewers repeatedly say Asana takes weeks to set up well: sections, subtasks, multi-homing, rules, portfolios and goals all interact, and new users often don't know which view to use. Teams without a dedicated admin or training plan report low adoption and messy projects.

Status history shows several 2026 incidents: a January 22 app-wide outage, July 7 web loading errors for US users, an August 31 outage that fully took down about 25% of users for roughly two hours, a September 2 outage fixed by rolling back a deployment, and a September 30 partial API/mobile outage.

In August 2026 forum users reported manual and triggered rules sitting in 'Processing' indefinitely across whole workspaces; Asana staff said it was under investigation and asked for rule IDs. A separate September 21 incident stopped automations for EU users. Older threads describe rules that silently fail in some projects created from the same template.

Forum users report slow loading of tasks and projects after desktop app updates, typing and drag lag in large projects, and a Windows app whose local data folder grew to several GB. Asana support usually suggests reinstalling, running the connectivity test or splitting very large projects.

A recurring forum complaint: after the first import, the Google Calendar feed stops adding new tasks or removing completed ones. Sync is one-way (Asana to Google only) and Google can take up to 24 hours to refresh subscribed calendars; the usual fix is removing and re-adding the calendar from a fresh link.

Field teams (mostly Android) report comments, photos and new tasks created on the phone never reaching web users, and assignments or due dates reverting. One 2024 forum thread ran for weeks with about 200 affected users; reinstalling and clearing cache did not help, and staff gave no ETA.

Native time tracking is only included on Advanced and above; Personal and Starter rely on integrations such as Harvest or Toggl, which usually have their own subscriptions. Agencies billing by the hour often hit this first.

Users report missing email notifications, Inbox items that never become emails, and Slack notifications that stop for a whole workspace. Causes include bounced or filtered mail, notification settings, and Asana suppressing alerts while you're active; several threads end without a fix.

A task can only be assigned to a single individual. While others can be added as 'collaborators,' this isn't true joint ownership. If two people need to review a document, you must create separate tasks. This limitation frustrates teams needing shared task responsibility.

Subtasks don't belong to the parent's project by design, aren't auto-assigned to the parent's assignee, and are missing from some views and filters. Users regularly lose track of subtasks or end up duplicating tasks to make them visible.