An honest comparison
NEWWORK Projects vs Asana
Asana is built for cross-functional work: marketing launches, operations, portfolios and goals across a company. NEWWORK Projects is built for teams that build software with agents and need the ticket to be precise.
Last reviewed October 2026, from Asana’s own public pages. Sources below.
Where Asana is genuinely good
- ✓Cross-functional planning that non-technical teams adopt easily.
- ✓Portfolios, goals and workload across a whole company.
- ✓AI Teammates and AI Studio for workflow automation.
- ✓A generally available MCP server (v2).
Choose Asana if
Most of your work is not software, or you coordinate many non-technical teams in one place.
Choose NEWWORK Projects if
Your work is software, more of it is built by coding agents, and you need briefs, checks with evidence and pull requests next to the ticket.
Side by side, for agentic work
| NEWWORK Projects | Asana | |
|---|---|---|
| What an agent gets from a ticket | A brief: intent, context, behaviour, constraints and acceptance checks. A readiness score says whether it is ready for an agent, and open questions keep it from being handed over. | The task as it was written. |
| Agent access | MCP by URL and personal token, or the newwork-projects-mcp package. On every plan, including Free. Never counted or metered. | The Asana MCP server (v2) over OAuth with a pre-registered app; AI Teammates inside Asana. |
| Proof of done | Acceptance checks ticked with evidence (pull request, commit, test run). Done tickets show Verified, or what is missing. | Completion, approvals and rules. |
| Code | GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket pull requests, branches and commits link themselves by ticket key and move tickets on push, open and merge. | Through integrations. |
| Client work | Change requests with prices and approval, project budgets in hours or money, cost centers, capacity planning. | Portfolios, goals and workload. |
Where we fall short today
- –No marketplace of extensions: GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket for code, Jira, Linear, GitHub Issues, Asana, ClickUp and CSV for import, Slack, Teams, webhooks and a REST API, MCP for agents.
- –Nova and Brainstorm read code from Bitbucket; GitHub and GitLab repositories are for coding agents only.
- –Single sign-on is Google or Microsoft; SCIM is part of Enterprise, and SAML comes with Enterprise agreements.
- –No native mobile apps; the web app installs on phones and computers, with notifications.
- –Agents connect with personal tokens; OAuth sign-in for MCP clients is planned.
Sources · reviewed October 2026
Products change. If something here is out of date, write to hello@newworkprojects.com and we will correct it.
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