Comparing Todoist, Linear & Asana

Over the past year, our team has hopped from Todoist to Linear to Asana. They all have their standout features and also their limitations. I often wish I could create the perfect project management app by borrowing the best features from each.

What would those be?

From Todoist, I’d take their best-in-class natural language processing. From Linear, their keyboard shortcuts and incredible integration with Slack. And, finally, from Asana, their 30,000-foot views of projects, goals, and resource management across teams and workspaces.

Yet, each of them has frustrating blind spots.

Todoist has spent much of the past year focused on calendar integration for time blocking, but I’m not convinced most users want to time block their tasks. I wish they would focus next on true project management views and improve their Slack integration.

Linear, meanwhile, insists on prioritizing cycles over due dates and refuses to create views and groupings based on due dates. While I appreciate their commitment to prioritizing product teams, they are unnecessarily kneecapping their tool by not allowing teams that aren’t cycle-based to organize their tasks by due date.

Asana is the goldilocks of the bunch. It does a bit of everything but nothing remarkably well. Custom views maddeningly don’t sync properly to their iOS app. There are some keyboard shortcuts, but not many, and some natural language processing capabilities, but not extensive. It also features a Slack integration, but it’s not particularly effective.

What did we settle on for now?

Asana. Which, as I mentioned earlier, does most of what we want but not exceptionally well. If, over the next year, Linear or Todoist can look past their blindspots, that could tempt us to give them another look.