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Flowboard vs Asana

Asana tracks the tasks. Flowboard tracks the margin.

Asana is the tool agencies most often say they left, and the complaint is volume rather than one dramatic failure. Across 6,357 agency reviews of the six tools agencies actually use, UX and complexity is Asana's largest count at 261 mentions, 14%, with pricing behind it at 90 mentions, 5%. The pricing part is checkable on Asana's own page: task-level time tracking is listed from Advanced at $24.99 USD per user per month billed annually, timesheets and rates and budgets read Timesheets and Budgets add-on at $5.99 USD per user per month billed annually, and margin is not named at any tier. Flowboard runs the same delivery work with hours, margin, and invoices in one workspace, and a client login that is not a seat.

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For agencies who bolted a timer, a budget spreadsheet, and a reporting doc onto Asana.

Complete enough to replace the everything-app. Simple enough your clients actually use it.

Agencies churn on a pendulum. You move up to Asana or ClickUp chasing structure and one place for everything, then the setup time, the tiers, and the clients who never log in push you back down to Trello or Notion for something simpler, and you outgrow that too. Across 6,357 agency reviews of the six tools agencies actually use, the two biggest reasons people switch are opposites, more power and more simplicity, and nobody serves the middle. Flowboard is built for the middle: the whole agency in one workspace, and a client view your clients will open.

What agencies say in their own words

agency reviews of the six tools agencies actually use
6,357agency reviews of the six tools agencies actually use
of Asana agency reviewers name UX and complexity as their switching trigger, 261 mentions, Asana's largest count
14%of Asana agency reviewers name UX and complexity as their switching trigger, 261 mentions, Asana's largest count
of the 6,357-review corpus are Asana's own reviews
1,875of the 6,357-review corpus are Asana's own reviews

“[...] Worst of all is the peruser price tag for even incidental users who don't need to log in, but just need to be managed. That alone makes it infeasible for resource planning.”

3★, Design, 11-50, December 2019

“You cannot run a team within Asana unless you want to waste a LOT of time figuring out the status of all your projects. They are missing such basic features that I ultimately had to build a spreadsheet to handle reporting instead of using their system for it.”

1★, Marketing and Advertising, 11-50, February 2019

“[...] You can't have two assignees for a task and every task has only two status possible : not done and complete. For a marketing agency, this is not enough. The subtasking isn't really nice to use. In fact, I hated it. It makes projects hard to understand and some tasks can be lost if the main task is complete and not the subtasks. It is confusing.”

4★, Marketing and Advertising, 2-10, April 2019

“[...] The Asana icon on my phone constantly bears a badge that says 93, indicating that I have 93 items in my inbox. This number doesn't change when I open old messages or receive new messages. It's impossible to tell at a glance whether I have an actually new new ping. [...]”

4★, Marketing and Advertising, 2-10, September 2020

as reviewed on Software Advice

Feature comparison

FeatureFlowboardAsana
Client seatsFree and unlimited. Portal users live in a separate identity table and are never counted against the workspace member limitUnlimited free guests, listed from Starter, described as inviting external collaborators without additional cost or impact on your user count
Client-facing surfaceStandalone client login by magic link or password, with task, comment, and file visibility scoping, plus a Preview as Client toggleGuests join your workspace at a permission level. Asana Client Management, the module for teams delivering client work, reads Coming soon in Asana's own pricing-page navigation
Task-level time trackingOne-click timer on the Kanban card, the List row, and the task detail panel, in one planTime tracking with integrations on the free Personal plan. Native Time tracking is listed from Advanced, at $24.99 USD per user per month billed annually
Timesheets, rates, budgetsTime entries filtered by billable, project, and date range, with cost rate per hour held to Owner and Admin, in the same planTimesheets, User rates, and Project budgets each read Timesheets and Budgets add-on, priced at $5.99 USD per user per month billed annually and available on Starter, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ plans
Creative proofingPin annotation on the asset, four proof states, version history with per-version annotation countsApprovals and proofing is listed at the Advanced tier, described as annotating designs and PDFs directly in Asana
Margin per clientPer-project and workspace-wide profitability computed from logged hours, with cost rate per hour returned to Owner and Admin onlyNot named on Asana's pricing page at any tier. The nearest published line is Project budgets, inside the paid add-on
Plan structureOne plan, $39 per seat per month USD, no seat minimums$10.99 USD per user per month on Starter and $24.99 USD on Advanced, both billed annually, with Enterprise at Contact sales for pricing. Paid plans lift the user cap, and Asana's FAQ states seats are added in increments of 5 up to 30 total users

Where Flowboard differs

Margin per client, computed from hours already logged

You find out the project lost money after it ships. Every hour your team logs updates that project's margin, per client, with no spreadsheet and no second purchase. Cost rate per hour is returned only to Owner and Admin, so members and clients never see internal cost rates, and billable capacity is measured against weekdays rather than calendar days. So what: you catch the overrun in week two, not at invoice time. Honest limit: the numbers come from hours already logged. There is no forecasting and no margin alerting.

The client surface is a login, not a permission level

Asana gives external collaborators unlimited free guest access, and that is a real answer to cost. It is not a client login. A guest joins your workspace at a permission level, and the module Asana built for teams delivering client work reads Coming soon in its own navigation today. In Flowboard a client gets their own login, by magic link or password, against a separate portal-users identity table rather than a seat in your workspace. Task, comment, and file visibility is scoped on the client surface, and the Preview as Client toggle filters your own screen using the same visibility rule the live portal uses, so the preview is a simulation rather than a mock. So what: you check what the client sees before you send it, instead of spending the afternoon after granting access working out what else they can now reach.

Subtasks that carry their own count

Every task returns a subtask count and a completed-subtask count, so the parent row states how much of it is finished rather than reading as done. Dependencies are modelled as blocking and blocked-by relationships on the task itself. So what: the parent's own row tells you there are two subtasks still open, on the board, without opening it. Honest limit: this is a count and a relationship, not a rule that stops a parent closing over open children.

What Flowboard does not have

No Gantt or timeline view. Asana lists a timeline view from Starter, so if that is why you are looking, Asana keeps it and we do not have it. Report export is CSV: Asana's comparison matrix carries CSV and PDF export in every plan column, and we match the CSV half only. No native mobile app: the mobile screens are mobile-optimized web views. No integrations marketplace. Portal branding is three fields, workspace name, logo, and accent color, on a Flowboard-hosted portal with no custom domain.

Keep the clean multi-view habit Asana taught your team. Add the margin the hours already contain, and a client login that is not a seat.

Why agencies choose Flowboard over Asana

Margin per client, in the workspace that does the work

Asana's pricing page does not name invoicing, profitability, or margin at any tier. The nearest published line is Project budgets, which sits inside the Timesheets and Budgets add-on rather than in a plan. Flowboard computes per-project and workspace-wide profitability from logged hours, and generates invoice line items from those same entries, grouped by team member or by task, locking them so the same hours are not billed on a second invoice.

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One plan, and no seat block to buy into

Asana publishes the seat rule in its own FAQ. Between 2 and 5 total users you add seats one at a time; up to 30 total users you add them in increments of 5. So the seventh person on an eight-person agency is bought inside a five-seat block, not as one seat. Below that, the free Personal plan is built for 2 members, in Asana's words plans designed for smaller teams. Flowboard sells one plan at $39 per seat per month USD with no seat minimums, and client contacts are not seats at all, so the eleventh client contact costs what the first one did.

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Free client seats, and a login behind them

Credit where it is due: Asana ships unlimited free guests and says so plainly, so guest cost is not the argument here. The argument is what a guest is. A guest is a permission level inside your workspace; a Flowboard client is a portal user in a separate identity table that plan-limit counting never queries. Asana's own module for teams delivering client work is labelled Coming soon in its pricing-page navigation. Flowboard's client surface ships today, with a Preview as Client toggle that filters your screen using the live portal's visibility rule.

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Hours at task level, without a second line on the bill

On Asana's page the free Personal plan carries Time tracking with integrations, native Time tracking is listed from Advanced at $24.99 USD per user per month billed annually, and timesheets, user rates, and project budgets each read Timesheets and Budgets add-on, priced at $5.99 USD per user per month billed annually and available on Starter, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ plans. An agency that wants native task-level hours and rates in the same place is reading two of those numbers at once, which adds to $30.98 USD per user per month before anything else. In Flowboard the timer is a Play button on the Kanban card and the List row, the time entry list filters by billable, project, and date range, and rates and margin are in the same plan.

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Five report engines rather than one export

Time and billing, project profitability, team utilization, invoice summary, and capacity vs actual are five purpose-built report engines behind one dispatcher, not one generic export with filters on top. Reports save, so a configuration is built once and reopened, and scheduled reports deliver to an explicit list of recipient emails. Honest limit: export is CSV. The PDF endpoint falls back to CSV, and Asana carries PDF export in every plan column.

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Native messaging, with unread built as its own surface

Channels, threaded replies, reactions, a rich text composer, a typing indicator, and a live presence dot, with unread tracking built as its own surface: an unread badge, an in-channel unread divider, and a dedicated Unreads view, alongside Drafts, Starred, and Threads. Honest limit: no voice or video calling inside Messages, and no native mobile app.

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Frequently asked questions

Move off Asana without starting over.

Flowboard ships import wizards for ClickUp, Asana, Trello, and CSV. You run them yourself from inside your workspace.

Keep the clean multi-view habit. Add the margin loop and the client seats.

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Self-serve import from ClickUp, Asana, Trello, or CSV
You run the import yourself, no ticket required
Included in the trial, no separate migration fee