Plain vs Asana.
Asana is work management for every team in the company, which is exactly why it fits engineering loosely. Tasks do not know about branches, releases, or pipelines, and the developer-facing features arrive as integrations. Plain Issues is built for software work first, attached to the code it tracks.
// Coverage
Asana does one job. Plain is the whole setup.
Seven surfaces every software team ends up paying for, one way or another. Here is what each product actually covers.
| Surface | Asana | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Code hosting | Not included | Included |
| Issue tracking | Includedgeneral tasks, not dev-native | Included |
| Docs & wiki | Not includedproject briefs only | Included |
| Team chat | Not included | Included |
| CI / CD | Not included | Included |
| Packages | Not included | Included |
| AI agents | PartialAI Studio add-on | Included |
Asana fully covers 1 of the seven surfaces. Plain covers all seven on one seat.
// Credit where due
Where Asana is genuinely good.
- It is genuinely cross-functional. Marketing, ops, and engineering can share one tool, which matters in some organisations.
- Portfolio and goal tracking give leadership visibility that developer-first trackers rarely bother with.
- The onboarding is gentle enough that non-technical teams actually adopt it.
The catch.
For a software team, Asana sits at the wrong altitude. A task is not linked to a commit, a PR review, or a failing pipeline unless you wire integrations to a Git host, a CI vendor, and a chat tool, all billed separately. Plain tracks work where the work happens, so status is read from reality rather than typed in on a Friday.
// Pricing
One seat price vs a stack of them.
Asana
$10.99/ user / mo
Covers work management. The other surfaces are other tools, other invoices.
Asana Starter, annual billing. Everything developer-facing is an integration to another paid tool.
Plain Pro
$24/ user / mo
Code, issues, docs, chat, CI, packages, and AI agents on every seat. One bill, one search index, one source of truth.
// FAQ
Common questions.
- Is Plain an Asana alternative for engineering teams?
- Yes. Plain Issues covers sprints, roadmaps, and task tracking, and unlike Asana it links every item natively to commits, PRs, docs, and the pipeline that ships the work.
- Can I import Asana projects into Plain?
- Yes. Plain imports Asana projects and tasks with assignees, due dates, and comments preserved.
- How does Plain pricing compare to Asana?
- Asana Starter is $10.99 per user per month for work management alone. Plain Pro is $24 and includes the tracker plus code hosting, docs, chat, CI, and packages.
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