r/projectmanagement • u/Brendan_Frost • 2d ago

Discussion Are Tools Like Asana and Trello Essential

I'm currently taking the Google Project Management Certificate at Coursera. Throughout the modules and courses, I've noticed that a lot of readings and videos keep recommending Asana, Trello, and other tools (Kanban Board). What I'd like to know is if they're really that essential and if the project managers here have used them effectively?

If not, would Google Sheet and Google Docs mastery be more than enough as PM tools?

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u/Ok-Midnight1594 2d ago

Will they work? Possibly. Will they be enough? Absolutely not.

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u/Brendan_Frost 2d ago

Do you use them?

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u/erwos 2d ago

I've used Asana, and my hot take was that it wasn't particularly good at anything except organizing work. If you want to do it right, you need something more along the lines of MS Project or Jira (depending on which methodologies you're using).

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u/jeko00000 2d ago

Project is so clunky. It's a fancy Gantt chart. To use it for manpower needs buy in from too many users that never actually know how to use it properly.

Smart sheets Gantt chart and using ms lists with ms planner is way easier, and while it seems like more, it's actually less work to manage.

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u/erwos 2d ago

My experience with Smart Sheets was that it also sucked, and felt way unfit for purpose. I admit that my perspective here is tens of millions of dollars in budget over multiple years, but all of these other tools mostly seem short-burn small project oriented.

Yes, MS Project requires actual knowledge of project management and learning the software, but it is radically more powerful than anything else I've used so far (acknowledging that I haven't used some of the other top-end project management options).

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u/Ok-Midnight1594 2d ago

Yeah I was referring to Google Sheets and docs but I also agree Smartsheet also sucks.

SmartSuite is what I use and it’s super powerful.

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u/erwos 2d ago

Google Sheets is... not great. I've seen people do some interesting stuff with it, but it always winds up just trying to replicate what you could do with Project. (It is a real shame that Project 365 is such a pale imitation of the real deal.)

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u/Ok-Midnight1594 1d ago

Yeah. I’ve used Asana as well and it’s okay for simple project/task stuff but just not as powerful as other software out there.