What users are saying about
Asana
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Top Rated
2026 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.5 out of 100
Based on 2026 reviews and ratings
55 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 9.4 out of 100
Based on 55 reviews and ratings
Feature Set Ratings
Project Management

7.8
Asana
78%
HCL Connections
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
Asana ranks higher in 14/14 features
Asana ranks higher in 14/14 features
Task Management

8.8
88%
158 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Resource Management

7.4
74%
132 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Gantt Charts

7.9
79%
44 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Scheduling

7.9
79%
144 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Workflow Automation

7.8
78%
114 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Team Collaboration

8.5
85%
157 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology

8.5
85%
7 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology

8.5
85%
7 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Document Management

7.0
70%
133 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Email integration

7.1
71%
127 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Mobile Access

8.3
83%
130 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking

6.1
61%
6 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Change request and Case Management

8.4
84%
4 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management

6.7
67%
61 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Professional Services Automation

6.8
Asana
68%
HCL Connections
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
Asana ranks higher in 2/2 features
Asana ranks higher in 2/2 features
Project & financial reporting

5.5
55%
1 Rating
N/A
0 Ratings
Integration with accounting software

8.2
82%
35 Ratings
N/A
0 Ratings
Attribute Ratings
- Asana is rated higher in 2 areas: Likelihood to Renew, Product Scalability
- HCL Connections is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Availability, Support Rating
- Asana and HCL Connections are tied in 1 area: Usability
Likelihood to Recommend

8.0
Asana
80%
189 Ratings
9.0
HCL Connections
90%
20 Ratings
Likelihood to Renew

9.6
Asana
96%
35 Ratings
7.7
HCL Connections
77%
7 Ratings
Usability

9.0
Asana
90%
22 Ratings
9.0
HCL Connections
90%
4 Ratings
Availability

8.4
Asana
84%
4 Ratings
10.0
HCL Connections
100%
2 Ratings
Performance

Asana
N/A
0 Ratings
9.0
HCL Connections
90%
2 Ratings
Support Rating

5.9
Asana
59%
81 Ratings
8.0
HCL Connections
80%
8 Ratings
Implementation Rating

Asana
N/A
0 Ratings
7.3
HCL Connections
73%
2 Ratings
Product Scalability

8.2
Asana
82%
1 Rating
7.0
HCL Connections
70%
2 Ratings
Likelihood to Recommend
Asana
My experience in Asana is more than two years, and I really enjoyed the experience and working with my teams, as Asana provides effective communication between us and spread the fun, enthusiasm, and achievement in work faster, as I used conversations to inform the team what I want, follow up, comment on the tasks and inform them that the work is finished.
Freelancer
Self EmployedComputer Software, 1-10 employees
HCL Connections
IBM Connections is well suited for larger organizations that need an internal social networking tool and are willing to deal with IBM and the complexity of the software. It is less appropriate for smaller organizations and those who don't want to deal with the complexity, or IBM's awful customer service and prices.
Associate Director IT Infrastructure
Mennonite Central CommitteeNon-Profit Organization Management, 1001-5000 employees
Pros
Asana
- Easy to use by any user (good UX and no installation needed)
- Easy to create a simple project, add tasks and sub tasks.
- Different display options, according to the project/tasks type
- Works great using a web browser, you don't have to install the application

Verified User
Engineer in Other
Environmental Services Company, 11-50 employeesHCL Connections
- The plugin for MS Office/Explorer has made saving and sharing working documents extremely convenient for me and my close colleagues
- The newsfeed feature conveniently aggregates updates from the communities/people you follow. It's nice not to have to jump from community to community to see what's going on in the organization
- The various apps can be used for several purposes. A little creativity goes a long way when establishing what type of information the apps can be useful for communicating

Verified User
Administrative Assistant in Human Resources
Education Management Company, 51-200 employeesCons
Asana
- Some users might find the user interface a bit dull and un inspired
- We found the way to use multiple workspaces a bit confusing
- It takes quite a bit of planning to build a well organized workspace in order not to have way too many projects and tasks all over the place
Managing Director
IP BraaiLegal Services, 1-10 employees
HCL Connections
- The lack of a note-taking tool became a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. Our pilot users felt Connections was a natural place to take and share meeting notes – including photos, drawings, recorded audio, etc. – and were always frustrated that there was no easy, organized way to do that. We tried using a Blog, Wiki, etc. but nothing really resonated as a good solution for this.
- The Wiki tool is weak, providing rigid structure but with few options. A Community can only have a single Wiki, for instance. Wikis are weak in the mobile app as well; they’re not even easy to navigate. Users ended up ignoring Wikis completely despite our efforts to get them to convert documents like guidelines, policies, procedures, handbooks, etc. into Wiki form.
- The Windows Explorer plug-in was useful but required a lot of manual intervention to setup. For instance, once a user joins a Community in Connections, the Community also has to be manually added to the Explorer plug-in so the user can find, open and edit files with it. We felt this process should be much more automated.
- Tagging is only relevant in the web UI and, to a lesser extent, in the mobile app. However, in the Windows Explorer plug-in, Tags are not usable at all making it difficult to find things that were easy to find in the web UI.
- IBM Docs was not included in the on-premises deployment; it was an additional license so we did not test it. Documents, mainly Microsoft Office files, are still the single most common way our user community creates, shares, edits and presents information. That proved to be a major gap for our users, and slowed user adoption considerably. We considered testing it, but IBM Docs would only work for about half of our users so we found ourselves wondering if we really wanted to support two document editing platforms. IBM Docs also offers no way to work offline as far as we could tell. This also meant we would need to keep licensing Microsoft Office which is not cheap.
- Consulting costs are high because the back-end environment is complex. Installing, administrating and even patching Connections is a fairly complex process. We needed to hire consultants to install our test environment and any major upgrades would’ve required additional consulting fees. Any 3rd party add-ons we looked at were highly technical in nature meaning…you guessed it, more consulting costs.
- Administrating IBM Connections requires editing XML files in a specific, secure way that is typically done in a console. I love consoles as much as the next admin, but when you only use a console once every 2 months it means looking up all the documentation and re-educating yourself. A single change could take me 2 hours to implement. 3rd party admin dashboards do exist, at an additional cost, but IBM really should provide a much easier way to manage the environment.
- The lack of in-person or online training courses, materials, videos, etc. really discouraged a lot of users. The only decent training we could find (marketing videos aside) was a single video series on Lynda.com which, of course, was an additional cost. In the end that video didn’t really help our users much beyond introductory concepts.
- IBM includes reporting, but it’s a massive Cognos system requiring some serious hardware and Cognos expertise. We had neither, and would have ultimately opted for a 3rd party add-on for reporting and statistics.
- An often overlooked concern is eDiscovery. Our contracted eDiscovery service extensively works with various ECMs, but had no idea how they would handle Connections data. The cloud version of Connections offers an add-on for eDiscovery, but as far as we could tell IBM offered nothing for on-premises deployments.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesPricing Details
Asana
General
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level set up fee?
Optional
$10
Starting Price
$50 per month
Asana Editions & Modules
Edition
Premium | $13.491 |
---|---|
Business | $30.491 |
- per month
Additional Pricing Details
—HCL Connections
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—HCL Connections Editions & Modules
—
Additional Pricing Details
—Likelihood to Renew
Asana
Asana 9.6
Based on 35 answers
- Mobile + Desktop capabilities - Able to use it anywhere, anytime.
- Task management - Easy to view projects and their progress.
- Time management - Easy to see what elements require time / how they interrelate and manage the project on an overall basis.
- Company management - Be able to see from a master dashboard perspective where each project is in its stages of completion.
- Clear communication - It's visually documented who is doing what at what time so that the whole project gets done.
CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
Simply Heaven DesignMarketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 7.7
Based on 7 answers
Connections has continued to more than meet our needs from a collaboration point of view and we are currently working on integration with our IBM Websphere portal platform to provide an integrated collaboration solution. This scenario will provide our users the best both products have to offer in a single interface.

Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology
Sports Company, 501-1000 employeesUsability
Asana
Asana 9.0
Based on 22 answers
It is very user-friendly. Takes a new employee an hour to start figuring out how the system works. That's an important factor. You don't want to encounter the issue where employees need a week to understand how the system works. For example, JIRA, I tried using it for a week and I still don't understand the complicated layout. Asana has a simple interface. Once you see it, you get it type of program.

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Internet Company, 1-10 employeesHCL Connections
HCL Connections 9.0
Based on 4 answers
Connections combines all the most useful abilities from various social networks. This makes it useful of course, but it also reduces user adoption time initially by allowing users to get comfortable with basic features. Once they are comfortable, it's easy for users to start exploring. They find new people in the organization to contact, new sources of information, etc. Before you know it, about half of the users are contributing back in some form -- and all with little or no training needed by IT.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesReliability and Availability
Asana
Asana 8.4
Based on 4 answers
Working with Asana on a daily basis
Project Manager
ClickSoftwareComputer Software, 501-1000 employees
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 10.0
Based on 2 answers
Once Connections was installed, patched, etc. it was ALWAYS up. We only had to bring it down for OS updates to the servers. That seems to be typical of anything that runs on WebSphere; it's bulletproof and could probably run for months and years if the underlying OS didn't require constant patching.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesPerformance
Asana
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 9.0
Based on 2 answers
IBM Connections web UI, mobile app (data sync to / from the device), and file transfer speeds were almost always very fast. It was rare for a slow-down of any kind, even when doing searches.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesSupport Rating
Asana
Asana 5.9
Based on 81 answers
I haven't had to use their support so I can't rate it. The fact that I haven't needed them reflects the ease of use of the product. I would recommend that any new users schedule a complete demo of the product to ensure that they are using it to it's fullest (there's a lot of useful features).
Director of Marketing & Communications
787 NetworksMarketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 8.0
Based on 8 answers
IBM Support has ALWAYS been quick to respond, regardless of the product. Even first level techs seldom provide "canned" responses and they really try to help. If they can't help, they don't wallow around but engage the right person immediately. It's very rare that the first level tech needs to escalate, and even more rare when they do escalate and the next person engaged cannot solve it. We have been more than satisfied with IBM support's quick and professional responses to our issues.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesImplementation Rating
Asana
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 7.3
Based on 2 answers
Try to understand you will never find a product which suites all your end user for 100%. IBM Connections is the best of all breeds but if you go look on each functionality on its own there are better example out there. But as IBM COnnections delivers it all in just one platform makes it the best example about integration of different functionality into one platform.

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Government Administration Company, 10,001+ employeesAlternatives Considered
Asana
I like how extensive the capabilities are for Asana. With other softwares it seems there are many things lacking. I feel like Asana is also a very user friendly platform and aesthetically pleasing which is important in a modern office. We have many young people entering our workspace and it is important to have software that is ahead of the times in functionality and efficiency.
Brand Development & Culture Specialist
SIRIUScreatorGraphic Design, 1-10 employees
HCL Connections
From the few times that I have used MS SharePoint, I can say that it doesn't seem to hold a candle to the robust features of IBM Connections. The out-of-the-box capabilities of IBM Connections are amazing and are more easy to access and use than what I've seen with MS SharePoint.
Lead Consultant
Best MethodsInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees
Scalability
Asana
Asana 8.2
Based on 1 answer
I used this tool on a daily basis at work and it runs as a solid rock
Project Manager
ClickSoftwareComputer Software, 501-1000 employees
HCL Connections
HCL Connections 7.0
Based on 2 answers
Scaling UP is never an issue with IBM's core technologies like WebSphere, DB2, etc. as long as you have or can find the technical resources to implement it. Where IBM seems to fail is scaling DOWN for smaller organizations. Connections 5.0 on-premises would have required us to create 7 servers -- yes, they would be virtualized, but still that's 7 OS licenses, 40 virtual CPU cores, 80GB RAM, and a few TB of hard disk space. All to replace Quick which runs on 1 server with 1 OS license, 4 cores, 8GB RAM and 600GB of disk. Granted, there are major differences in capabilities between the two, but how do you get a CFO understand why features like a mobile app, file sync, and social sharing require 10x the back-end resources?

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Plastics Company, 1001-5000 employeesReturn on Investment
Asana
- Productivity - Most of all, it allows me to be more productive and have a good sense of where I am with projects and deadlines.
- Easy to use - I can make the most of my time to get up (and stay) up and running.
- Project coordination - Allows me to assign tasks to my interns and communicate directly within the platform to keep the work train moving.
Chief Do-Gooder
SignifyMarketing & Advertising, 1-10 employees
HCL Connections
- Positive - Using IBM Connections has reduced the number of directories and file share repositories previously used for collaboration.
- Positive - The direction is to stop relying on email for the only method of communicating and sharing knowledge. IBM Connections is in the right step.
Project Management Office (PMO) Manager
CarestreamMedical Devices, 5001-10,000 employees