Asana alternative
An Asana alternative built for teams under 25.
Momentum keeps the parts of Asana that small teams actually use — lists, boards, due dates, assignees, comments — and drops the enterprise scaffolding nobody asked for. Flat $20/month for the workspace, not per seat, and bundled with seven other Stack tools.
Why teams leave Asana
The UI is built for 200-person orgs.
Asana's tabbed interface — List, Board, Timeline, Calendar, Workflow, Dashboards, Messages, Files — is designed for cross-functional teams running parallel programs. For a 6-person team shipping one product, that interface is mostly noise. Every project view loads a sidebar of features you'll never use and a top bar of tabs you'll never click. New hires spend their first week figuring out which tab matters. Small teams don't need portfolios, workload balancing, and goal hierarchies — they need a list of what to do today and a board of what's in flight.
Per-seat pricing escalates fast.
Asana Starter is $13.49/user/month on annual billing. A 5-person team is $809/year. Grow to 10 and you're at $1,619. Hit 15 (the free-tier ceiling) and you're paying $2,428/year — and that's before anyone needs Advanced ($30.49/user/mo) for custom rules or workflow automation. The pricing model assumes you'll grow, which is fine for VC-backed scale-ups and miserable for everyone else. Every new hire is a line-item conversation with finance instead of a free addition to the workspace.
"My Tasks" gets slow once you have any history.
Asana's My Tasks view aggregates assignments across every project you've ever touched, and it's the first thing most users open in the morning. After a year of use it's pulling in hundreds of tasks across dozens of projects, and the load time creeps from snappy to 3–5 seconds on a cold start. Filters help, but the underlying view is doing a lot of work. Teams end up writing their own dashboards to escape it, which defeats the point of having a tool that handles that for you.
Notification volume is a second inbox.
Asana sends an email and an in-app notification for almost every interaction — comments, assignments, due-date changes, project updates, status reports, mentions, follower additions. The default settings turn the inbox into a firehose. The fix is hours of per-project notification tuning that most users never do, so they either drown in email or mute everything and miss real updates. The tooling rewards heavy configuration and punishes anyone who just wants reasonable defaults.
What Stack Momentum does differently
Two views, both fast: list and kanban.
Momentum gives you a list view and a board view. That's it. Both render in under 150 ms on a project with 500 tasks. Switching between them is a single keystroke (⌘1, ⌘2). There is no Timeline tab, no Workflow tab, no Dashboards tab — because the moment you ship those, you ship the cognitive overhead of choosing between them. We cover the 90% case for small teams: see what's on your plate (list), see what's moving (board).
Flat pricing — the workspace is the unit.
Stack Momentum is $13/month standalone, or $20/month as part of the full Stack bundle. Both prices are flat for the workspace. Add your tenth teammate, your fifteenth, your twenty-fifth — the bill stays the same. Compare to Asana Starter for 5 seats: $809.40/year. Stack bundle: $240/year. That's $569 saved annually, or 70%, and the gap widens as your team grows. Hire freely instead of pricing every new seat.
A "Today" view that opens in 80 ms.
Momentum's home view shows tasks due today and tasks you've moved into your active sprint — nothing else. The query runs locally against your synced project cache and renders in ~80 ms even with hundreds of tasks across dozens of projects. There's no aggregation magic, no fancy filtering, no upsell to a Premium dashboard. It's the view we wanted from Asana's My Tasks and never got.
Native macOS app that doesn't feel like a browser tab.
Momentum ships as a real macOS app (Electron, but tuned). Global hotkey ⌘⇧M opens the quick-add window from anywhere — type a task, hit ⌘↵, it lands in your inbox. Menu-bar icon shows your due-today count. System notifications respect your Focus settings. Asana has a desktop wrapper but it's effectively the website in a window; ours is built around the OS-level affordances that make a tool feel native.
Where Asana still wins
Honest tradeoffs — read this before switching.
No Gantt charts, no timeline view.
If your work involves dependency chains across multi-month projects with critical-path math, Momentum is not your tool. Asana's Timeline (and tools like MS Project, Smartsheet, ClickUp) handle this; we don't. Small teams generally don't need it — but if you're scheduling a 40-person construction crew across overlapping phases, you'll feel the absence quickly.
No portfolios, workload, or goals/OKRs.
Asana Advanced and Enterprise add portfolio rollups, workload balancing across teammates, and goal/OKR hierarchies that connect company strategy to individual tasks. These are real features that real organizations use. Momentum doesn't have them and won't soon. We're a tactical task tracker, not a planning suite — if you need to roll up status across 30 projects to a leadership dashboard, evaluate carefully.
Limited custom fields and no automation rules.
You get the basics — title, assignee, due date, status, description, comments, tags — and a small number of optional custom fields. There's no rule engine ('when status changes to Done, assign to QA and notify Slack channel'), no per-project field schemas, no scripted automations. Asana Advanced has all of this. If your workflow lives or dies by automation, we'll slow you down.
Stack Momentum vs Asana — feature comparison
| Feature | Asana | Stack Momentum |
|---|---|---|
| List view | Yes | Yes — renders in <150 ms at 500 tasks |
| Kanban / board view | Yes | Yes |
| Timeline / Gantt | Yes (Starter+) | No |
| Portfolios | Advanced+ ($30.49/user/mo) | No |
| Workload view | Advanced+ | No |
| Goals / OKRs | Advanced+ | No |
| Custom fields | Unlimited (Starter+) | Basic only |
| Automation rules | Yes (Starter limited, Advanced full) | No |
| Forms | Yes (Starter+) | No |
| Asana CSV import | — (it's their format) | Yes — direct import wizard |
| Native macOS app | Web wrapper | Real Electron app, ⌘⇧M global hotkey |
| Today / My Tasks view speed | 3–5 s on cold load | ~80 ms (local-cached) |
| Per-seat pricing | $13.49–$30.49/user/mo (annual) | $20/mo flat (workspace, not per-user) |
| Free tier | Yes — 15 users | No (bundle starts at $20) |
| Bundled with other tools | No | Yes — 8 apps for $20/mo |
Pricing — at 5 seats per year
Asana
Asana Starter @ $13.49/user/mo (annual)
$809.4 /yr
Stack bundle
Stack bundle @ $20/mo flat (1 workspace, unlimited users)
$240 /yr
Saves $569.4/yr (70% off)
Migrating from Asana
- 1
Export each Asana project as CSV.
In Asana: open a project → ••• menu → Export/Print → CSV. Asana exports per project, not workspace-wide, so plan to repeat this for each active project. Archived projects can usually be skipped.
- 2
Drop the CSVs into Momentum import.
In Momentum: Settings → Import → Asana CSV. Drag one or more CSVs. The wizard maps Asana columns (Name, Assignee, Due Date, Section/Column, Description, Tags) to Momentum fields automatically; you confirm the mapping in one screen.
- 3
Reconcile assignees by email.
Momentum matches Asana assignees to your workspace members by email. Anyone not yet in the workspace shows up in a "needs invite" list — invite them in one batch, and their tasks attach automatically once they accept.
- 4
Verify a sample project.
Pick the project you live in daily. Open both Asana and Momentum side-by-side. Spot-check 20 tasks for due dates, assignees, sections, and comment threads (note: Asana comments import as a single description appendix, not threaded). Anything off? Tell us — we patch the importer.
- 5
Cancel Asana at next billing.
Keep the Asana account on free tier (15 users) for 30 days as a safety net while Momentum becomes the source of truth. Cancel paid seats at the next renewal date — Asana does not pro-rate annual plans, so timing matters.
FAQ
Is Stack Momentum a true Asana replacement for small teams?+
For most teams under 25 people running normal product/ops work, yes. Lists, boards, due dates, assignees, comments, projects, sections, tags — all there, and the Asana CSV importer makes migration a one-evening job. The clear exceptions are teams that depend on Timeline/Gantt, portfolio rollups, workload balancing, automation rules, or forms. If those are core to how you operate, Momentum will feel thin.
How much will my team save switching from Asana?+
For a 5-person team on Asana Starter (annual), you're paying $809.40/year. Stack Momentum standalone is $156/year ($13/mo × 12), and the full Stack bundle is $240/year ($20/mo × 12). Bundle savings vs Asana Starter: $569/year, or 70%. The gap widens as you hire — at 10 seats, Asana is $1,619/year and Stack is still $240.
Does the Asana CSV importer keep comments and attachments?+
Comments are imported as an appended block on the task description — they're preserved as text but not as a threaded comment timeline (Asana's CSV export doesn't include the thread structure). Attachments are not in the CSV; for those, download from Asana and re-upload to Momentum, or link to the Asana file URL until you've fully cut over. We recommend doing this only for active projects.
Can I keep using Asana while we evaluate Momentum?+
Yes — and we recommend it. Run a single project in parallel for 1–2 weeks. Pick a real project, not a test one. After two weeks, the team will have a clear answer on whether Momentum is enough. The Stack bundle is month-to-month, so there's no commitment cost to evaluating.
What about Asana integrations like Slack, GitHub, and Zapier?+
Momentum has Slack notifications (task assigned, due-date changes, mentions) and a webhook layer that covers Zapier-style automations. The GitHub deep integration Asana ships — auto-linking PRs to tasks via branch name — is on our roadmap but not shipped. If your workflow depends on it today, this is worth checking before migration.
Does Momentum work for non-engineering teams?+
Yes. The list + board model is general-purpose — marketing teams use it for content calendars, ops teams use it for onboarding checklists, design teams for project tracking. The places it falls down are sales pipelines (no CRM features) and customer support (no ticket queues, SLAs, or shared inbox). Use the right tool for those.
How does Momentum compare to Linear or Trello?+
Linear is opinionated for engineering teams — issues, cycles, triage, GitHub-native. If you're a pure dev team, Linear is sharper. Trello is lighter than Momentum — boards only, no list view, no real assignee logic. Momentum sits between them: more general-purpose than Linear, more structured than Trello, and bundled with seven other tools your team probably already needs.
What happens to my data if I cancel Stack?+
You can export every project as CSV at any time, free, with one click. Tasks, assignees, due dates, sections, comments, tags — all portable. The bundle is built on the principle that your data leaves with you. There's no proprietary lock-in container and no export tax.
Verdict
If your team is under 25 people and Asana feels like a tool built for someone bigger than you, Momentum is a clean swap. Lists, boards, due dates, assignees, comments — the tactical 90% of Asana that small teams actually live in — render fast, ship in a real macOS app, and cost a flat $20/month for the whole workspace. The CSV importer is built to make migration painless: export per project, drop into the wizard, reconcile assignees by email, done in an evening. The honest exceptions matter. Asana wins decisively on enterprise scaffolding — Timeline/Gantt, portfolios, workload balancing, goals/OKRs, custom field schemas per project, an automation rule engine, forms, and a deep template marketplace. Those features exist for real reasons at companies of a certain size, and we're not building toward them. Asana also has the longer integration tail; if your workflow has a hard dependency on a specific Asana app from their marketplace, check coverage before you migrate. For everyone else — small teams paying per seat for an interface designed for 200-person orgs, watching the bill climb every time they hire — Momentum at $20/month flat for the bundle is the obvious move. You stop paying per seat, you stop paying for the eight tabs you never click, and you get seven other Stack tools as free additions. Run the importer on one project, evaluate for a week, and you'll know.
Ready to switch?
Try Stack — all 8 apps for $20/mo flat.
Stack Momentum is one of eight bundled apps. No per-seat fees. Cancel anytime.