Klusko vs Asana: which suits a team of 5 to 50?

Asana’s free plan is for two people. That fact decides a lot of Klusko vs Asana comparisons before anyone opens a feature list, because most of the teams we build for have somewhere between five and thirty people and no wish to pay for seats they don’t use.

But price isn’t the whole thing, and we’re not going to pretend Asana is a worse product. For some teams it’s plainly better. This page is our attempt to say where, and to be useful to the people who should stay with Asana as well as the people who shouldn’t.

A bit of background: before Klusko we ran a 12-person business. We paid for a chat app and a task app, and the job a customer rang to complain about was usually the one that had been agreed in a chat thread and never made it onto a board. Klusko exists because of that gap. Asana exists to be very good at projects. Those are different starting points, and it shows.

What Asana does better than we do

Timelines, first. This is probably the biggest difference. Asana’s Starter plan includes a timeline view, so you can lay tasks out along dates and see what runs into what. Klusko has no Gantt charts or timelines at all, and no task dependencies. If you run a six-month fit-out where the plasterer can’t start until the electrician signs off, you want that chain drawn out, and Asana draws it.

Portfolios are the second, on Asana’s higher Advanced plan. They let you look across many projects at once and see which ones are slipping. Klusko has workspaces and starred projects, which is tidy, but it’s not the same as a portfolio view for someone managing twelve projects and their owners.

Then automations. Asana has rules that move or assign tasks when something happens. Klusko has no automations. We have recurring tasks (tick off the weekly stock check and the next one appears) and task templates, which cover a lot of what small teams use rules for, but they aren’t rules.

And integrations. Asana connects to a long list of other tools. Klusko has no integrations and no API yet. If your week depends on tasks being created from a web form or a CRM, that settles it.

We think most small teams don’t need Gantt charts. We also know some do, and if you’re one of them, Asana is the better choice and we’d rather you picked it than fought us.

Where Klusko is the different kind of tool

Chat. Klusko has public and private channels, direct messages, threads, @mentions, reactions and file sharing in the same app as your projects. You can mention a task inside a message and it becomes a live link, so “can you do the Hartley quote” turns into a link to the actual task, with its due date and assignee, in the conversation where it was agreed.

Asana has task comments and project messages. It isn’t built to be the place your team talks all day, and in our experience it ends up in one tab with Slack or Teams in the next. That’s the gap we kept falling into. If you already live happily with two apps, this matters less. Have you ever scrolled back through chat looking for who said they’d do it? Then it matters a lot. There’s more on how the chat side works on our team chat page.

The rest of Klusko is plain task management: Board, List, Table, Calendar and Workload views, one assignee per task, priorities, subtasks, custom fields, saved views, and a Today view of what’s on your plate. Everything updates live for everyone. The tasks page has the full list.

The free plans aren’t close

Asana’s free plan covers up to 2 users, as of September 2026 (it used to cover more). Klusko’s free plan covers up to 10 people and 5 projects, with 2 GB of storage in total and the Board, List and Calendar views. Chat history on our free plan is complete. We never hide old messages.

So a four-person team can run properly on Klusko for nothing. On Asana, the same team pays from day one.

What a Klusko vs Asana bill looks like

Asana sells seats in steps: 2 to 5, then in fives. A 12-person team buys 15 seats. We find per-seat buckets annoying, and that’s partly why Klusko charges per person, full stop.

All prices below are per month, as of September 2026, Asana on Starter and Klusko on Team. Klusko is priced in pounds; the dollar figures are our published USD prices.

And that Asana figure buys you tasks only. Add Slack Pro for chat and a 10-person team is at $182.40 a month billed yearly. We did the full arithmetic, including 25-person teams, in our Slack and Asana cost breakdown.

One more thing on price: right now every Klusko plan is free, because billing hasn’t launched. We’ll give at least 30 days’ notice before anything is charged, and nobody gets moved to a paid plan without choosing it. Current plans are on the pricing page.

Moving over from Asana

We don’t have an Asana importer, or an importer for anything else, so switching means rebuilding your live projects by hand. That sounds worse than it is. Most small teams have a handful of active projects and a long tail of finished ones they never open. Rebuild the active ones, leave the archive in Asana until your subscription runs out, and export anything you need to keep.

For a hypothetical 10-person team with six live projects, we’d guess that’s an afternoon, probably less if one person does it with a cup of tea and nobody helping. Set up your workspaces first (something like “Operations” and “Clients”), then make task templates for the jobs you repeat, so the rebuild isn’t the same typing twelve times. The project management use case shows how we’d lay a typical project out.

Side by side

A few other things Klusko doesn’t have, so you don’t find out the hard way: multiple assignees per task, SSO, video calls, AI features, docs, an Android app. Our iPhone app is in testing and not on the App Store yet.

Which one we’d point you to

Pick Asana if your work is planned in dependent dates, if someone in the business manages a portfolio of projects, or if tasks need to arrive automatically from other tools. Those are real needs and Klusko doesn’t meet them. Asana is also the safer choice if you’re heading past 50 people.

Pick Klusko if you’re a team of roughly 3 to 50, your projects are boards of jobs rather than programmes, and the thing that goes wrong is work agreed in chat that never gets tracked. You’ll get one app instead of two, a free plan that fits 10 people, and a bill that doesn’t jump from 10 seats to 15 when you hire your eleventh person. If you’re still weighing other tools, our guide to the best project management software for small business covers Trello, monday.com, ClickUp and Basecamp too.

Say you run a six-person kitchen-fitting firm. You don’t need a portfolio view. You need to know who’s ordering the worktops for Tuesday, and you need that to be the same place where someone said they would.

Questions