Teamwork.com vs Asana

These two tools look like competitors and are not really competing for the same job. Asana is built to coordinate work across a company. Teamwork.com is built to run client work and bill for it. The feature overlap is large enough to make them look interchangeable on a comparison table, and the difference shows up the moment somebody asks what a project cost.

Both price lists were read from the vendors' own pages, from the United States, in October 2026. Where a figure is annual or monthly, it says so.

The Prices, Side by Side

The mid tiers land on the same number, $24.99 billed annually, which makes the comparison deceptively clean. The entry tiers are a dollar apart. The real divergence is the seat minimum: Teamwork's Accelerate floor is five seats, so $124.95 a month, while Asana's Advanced has no published minimum. For a three or four person team, Asana is materially cheaper at the mid tier even though the per-seat figure is identical.

Teamwork's free plan allows five users against Asana's two, which is the one place Teamwork is clearly more generous at zero.

Key takeaway — Identical mid-tier per-seat prices, different floors. Teamwork's five-seat minimum on Accelerate is the number that decides this for small teams.

What Each One Gives Away Free

Asana's Personal plan carries unlimited tasks and projects, list, board and calendar views, status updates, time tracking through integrations, and 100+ free integrations. For two users.

Teamwork's Free Forever carries list, table, Gantt and Kanban views, subtasks, tags, dependencies, milestones, time estimates, native time tracking with billable flags, a client view, client companies, dashboards, unlimited custom fields and unlimited task list templates. For five users, capped at five active projects and 100MB across the whole account.

Two differences matter. Teamwork puts Gantt and native billable time tracking on the free plan; Asana puts Timeline and Gantt behind Starter and treats time tracking as an integration. Asana gives unlimited projects where Teamwork caps at five.

So the free plans answer different questions. Asana's tells you whether the team adopts the tool. Teamwork's tells you whether the billing workflow fits, which is the harder question and the one worth answering before paying.

The billing chain. Billable rates with retrospective changes, personal and company timesheets, expenses against budgets, time budgets, invoices built from logged time, retainers, and basic quotes. All at Accelerate. Then profitability, financial and fixed-fee budgets, multi-currency billing, timesheet approval and utilization targets at Optimize. Asana has none of this. It has no rate object, no invoice, no retainer and no profitability report at any price.

The client model. Client companies, a client view and collaborators on every plan, with unlimited client users from Basics. Asana offers unlimited free guests from Starter, which is generous, but a guest is a restricted member rather than a client entity with rate-visibility rules attached. Teamwork's rule that collaborators cannot be granted rate or budget permissions is a structural guarantee Asana does not need and does not have.

Resource planning tied to money. Workload at Accelerate, then skills-based scheduling, capacity placeholders and tentative-project modelling at Optimize. Asana has Workload at Advanced and capacity planning at Enterprise, but neither connects to a rate or a margin.

Goals and strategy linkage. Asana's Goals object, at Advanced, connects daily tasks to company objectives and rolls progress upward. Teamwork has portfolio health, which tells you whether projects are on track, but nothing that models an objective separately from a project.

Portfolios as a first-class object. Asana's Portfolios at Advanced group related projects with health and progress roll-up. Teamwork's portfolio health is a report rather than an object you build and share.

Automation headroom. Asana's Starter plan advertises unlimited automations. Teamwork meters them: 100 a month on Free, 5,000 on Basics, 20,000 on Accelerate, 100,000 above. And these are account-level allowances rather than per-seat quotas, so a twelve-person Teamwork team on Basics shares 5,000.

Breadth of adoption. Asana is the more widely deployed tool, which matters for hiring, onboarding and the odds that a new person already knows it. That is not a feature, but it is a real cost difference.

Intake Forms Are the Price Inversion Nobody Notices

Here is the comparison that overturns the most decisions, and it does not appear on either vendor's feature table.

Asana puts Forms on Starter, at $10.99 a seat billed annually with no seat minimum. Custom fields, custom templates, reporting dashboards and unlimited automations are on that same tier.

Teamwork puts intake forms on Accelerate, at $24.99 a seat billed annually with a five-seat minimum. Below that, Basics has no forms at all.

So for a team whose core problem is unstructured requests arriving by chat and email, Asana solves it for $10.99 a seat with no floor, while Teamwork solves it at a $124.95 monthly minimum. That is a twelve-fold difference at two seats for the same functional need, and it runs opposite to the direction the rest of this comparison points.

Asana also offers forms branching and conditional customization at Advanced, which Teamwork does not meter as a separate feature. Teamwork's equivalent is the custom workflow, capped at three on Accelerate.

The inversion reverses again if the request has to end in an invoice. Asana structures the intake and stops; Teamwork carries it through rates, timesheets and billing. But if intake is the whole job, the cheaper tool is not the one this comparison otherwise favours.

The Counters That Decide It

Both vendors gate things by number rather than by tier name, and these are the ones people miss.

Teamwork's custom workflow cap is the single tightest gate across both products. Three distinct approval paths on Accelerate is fewer than most agencies and marketing functions actually run, and the fourth path requires the unpriced tier. Asana does not meter workflows this way, so a process-heavy team hits a wall in Teamwork that does not exist in Asana.

Asana's unlimited storage against Teamwork's tiered allowance also looks decisive until you read Teamwork's proof rule: proof files do not count against the allowance, which removes the largest files from the calculation for a creative team.

Security and Compliance

Teamwork states SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022, data residency in the US or the EU on AWS, two-factor authentication and role-based permissions on every plan, automatic database snapshots every few seconds, and a stated uptime goal above 99.9%. Dedicated infrastructure is Enterprise only. SAML single sign-on appears as Enterprise in the plan matrix and as part of a purchasable Advanced Security add-on on any paid plan in the knowledge base. Two answers to the same question. The vendor also states that Single Log Out via SAML is not supported^[1].

Asana puts SAML authentication and SCIM user provisioning at Enterprise, with scaled security at Advanced and service accounts, view-only licences and project admin controls at Enterprise.

For a security review, the practical difference is that Teamwork's SSO answer is ambiguous and its SLO answer is a definitive no, while Asana's is a clear Enterprise gate. Get both in writing either way.

The AI Layers, and the One With an Expiry

Teamwork's AI is tiered and documented: AI Essentials, comment summaries, a project wizard, a task builder and expense categorization at Basics; an AI utilization summary at Accelerate; smart assign and profitability forecasting at Optimize. It also ships an MCP server with Claude and ChatGPT named as supported connections, which is a genuinely current capability.

The catch is the bill. Teamwork states AI is included in all paid plans "for an introductory period", with usage-based credits launching later: November 2026 on the pricing page, September 2026 in its own machine-readable pricing file. The credit price is published nowhere.

Asana includes a trial of its AI on Personal and Starter and meters its agent features with credits, publishing a per-credit figure. So Asana's AI cost is knowable today and Teamwork's is not, which matters if the AI layer is part of why you are buying.

How to Choose, in Three Questions

Do you bill someone for this work? If yes, and you need the hour, the invoice and the margin in one system, Teamwork is the answer and Asana is not a candidate. Not because it is worse, but because it does not do this job at any price. Budget Accelerate at five seats minimum, and expect a sales call if profitability reporting matters.

Is your problem cross-company coordination rather than client delivery? If the work is internal, the stakeholders are in other departments, and leadership wants objectives linked to tasks, Asana's Goals and Portfolios are built for exactly that and Teamwork has no equivalent.

How many approval paths does your process need? More than three, and Teamwork's custom workflow cap pushes you to an unpriced tier while Asana does not meter this at all. This is the question most likely to overturn an otherwise clean Teamwork decision.

For a four-person studio that bills time: Teamwork Basics at $29.97 a month covers reporting and billable flags, but intake forms and unlimited proofs sit at Accelerate's $124.95 floor. So price both and decide whether the forms are worth the jump. For the same four people doing internal work: Asana Starter at $10.99 a seat, no minimum, and no part of the billing engine you would be paying for and not using.