Asana vs. Notion vs. Progress Chef

The usability of Asana is broad since it's available in a variety of platforms that are widely used nowadays. I think that it would be great for people who are constantly on the move and switching devices, since it has allowed me to work from my phone, too. I also think that Asana has proven itself to handle a large quantity of work

If you want a customizable solution that can be adapted for just about any scenario, I recommend using Notion. If you need a solution that's easy to share with people outside your organization, Notion is great and allows individual or team permission-setting. If you want a turnkey solution, Notion might not be the best since it requires a fair bit of set-up. There are templates that can be purchased to handle this, but I haven't found them very helpful.

Incentivized

Chef is a fantastic tool for automating software deployments that aren't able to be containerized. It's more developer-oriented than its other competitors and thus allows you to do more with it. The Chef Infra Server software is rock-solid and has been extremely stable in our experience. I would definitely recommend its use if you're looking for an automation framework. And it also offers InSpec which is a very good tool for testing your infrastructure to ensure it deployed as intended.

Incentivized

• Through it, we were able to communicate and cooperate with the rest of the team to complete the work in the required manner and at the appropriate time.
• Available for free on Android and iPhone.
• Asana has a simple and easy user interface

• I love that you can create nested pages, allowing for separate sections to organize information as needed.
• I appreciate the convenience of effortlessly uploading images to any section.
• I appreciate that when adding links, you can embed them so the website displays directly on the page.

Incentivized

• Chef is great at deploying code to both small and large groups of servers.
• We use chef to standup new servers as well as deploy updated code to existing servers and it does this very well.
• Being able to make a change and have it push manually or automatically to any subset of servers has changed the landscape of how our IT teams operate.

Incentivized

• Asana is not really a project management tool, it is good for simple projects only
• UI has some glitches (doesn't save preferences, etc.)
• Integration with other tools (Office 365, MS Project)
• No reminders if the working period you entered is on holidays

Incentivized

• I use Notion on my personal tablet, and unlike on the computer, I have a lot of difficulty editing backgrounds, GIFs, and page dividers. It's not as user-friendly, and often the elements end up cut off or misaligned, which is frustrating.
• While the current calendar feature is helpful, I'd love to see more customization options. The Google Calendar style isn't always ideal, especially for tasks without specific times or for ongoing projects that require daily maintenance.
• It would be fantastic to have more flexibility in customizing Notion pages. For example, I'd love to create planners with the freedom to add illustration boxes, stickers, or GIFs without being restricted to a fixed layout.

Incentivized

• Chef could do a better job with integration with other DevOps tools. Our company relies on Jenkins and Ansible, which took some development and convincing for plug-ins to be created/available.
• It would be nice if kitchen didn't only have a vagrant/virtual-box prerequisite. Our company one day stop allowing virtual-box to run without special privileges, and that caused a lot of issues for people trying to do kitchen tests.
• Chef could use more practice materials for the advanced certification badges. There was not a lot of guidance in what to study or examples of certain topics.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We're too settled in the ecosystem and we have no major complaints with it. No reason to move unless you have a burning pain point

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Very easy to use (I learned how to use everything on my own) and I was able to set up an entire ecosystem without any courses or other tools. I often say that Notion is like Lego for adults, because there we can use all the available tools to create a multitude of things, from funnels to projects with calculated deadlines and tags.

Incentivized

The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation

Incentivized

Working with Asana on a daily basis

It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.

Incentivized

Asana is a top-tier project management software that helps us organize and track projects from start to finish. It allows us to apply tasks/to-dos to multiple projects without duplication, divide complex projects into smaller tasks, and track project progress. It also helps us organize work on Kanban boards or linear lists. It stands out from the crowd in a big way compared to the competition.

The company uses both Notion and Trello within the company. Notion is more for North America employees while Trello is used between Operation team overseas and in North America. Sometimes it's a preference of how the tools look like for project management. I would say both Notion and Trello are nice tools and serves our needs.

Incentivized

We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.

Incentivized

The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure

Incentivized

I used this tool on a daily basis at work and it runs as a solid rock

The entire professional services team was great to work with. The curriculum was tailored to our specific use cases. The group we worked with were very responsive, listened to our feedback, was very easy to schedule and accommodate. I cannot say enough good things about our professional services experience

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It has streamlined our processes across various teams to all work from a signle source of truth
• Maintaining this source of truth is a full time job
• It has reduced our overall tool set by completely eliminating two other softwares we were paying for

Incentivized

• Chef is a good tool for baselining servers. It will be a good ROI when there are huge number of servers. For less number of servers maintaining a master will be an over head.
• One good ROI will be that the Operations Team also gets into agile and DevOps methodologies. Operational teams can start writing scripts/automations to keep their infra more stable and their application stack more reliable.
• Implementation of Chef eliminates the manual mode of doing things and everyone aligns to automation mind set. It helps in change of culture.

Incentivized