Etapero vs Asana
Asana is strong at team collaboration on tasks. Etapero is strong at the project plan, dates and portfolio, and runs on your server.
What Asana is
Asana is a cloud service for team collaboration on tasks and projects. It has Timeline and Gantt views; according to Asana, the Gantt view can highlight the critical path. Portfolios group several projects with dashboards and status updates; according to the site, they come with Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise+. According to Asana’s help, the Gantt view can compare the plan with a baseline. We found no self-hosted option.
Asana’s strengths
- Easy task setup. Teams start working quickly, with no long configuration.
- Collaboration. Comments, statuses and updates are visible to everyone.
- Portfolios. Several projects with dashboards and status reports on one page.
- An ecosystem. Integrations with cloud services and mobile apps.
What users say
Asana is praised for easy task setup, while scheduling in it is a frequent topic of discussion. On Hacker News users say they add a separate service, Instagantt, on top of Asana for a Gantt chart; others write that they moved to another tracker but keep Asana for its Gantt chart. There are also stories of moving to Jira — because that was easier for management, for example.
On Asana’s official forum in 2026, a law firm describes how it spent five years building client work in Asana around “teams”, and a product update broke the structure it had built; according to the author, no rollback was offered. The story shows a risk common to cloud services: product changes reach every customer at once.
On Reddit in the Asana community (2023), a user calls it a good task system but not reliable enough for formal Gantt planning: dependencies do not always recalculate, there is no separate duration field, and weekends have to be handled by hand. A team of about twenty choosing a system for projects and portfolios liked Asana’s portfolio view but was put off by the lack of a full activity log.
For Russian users, availability is a separate topic. On vc.ru in 2022, an integrator of another system described Asana blocking a Russian company’s account because its name matched an organisation on a sanctions list. In 2025 the author of another vc.ru piece writes that Asana closed access from Russia by IP address and data could only be exported to CSV. We found no independent confirmation of these accounts, so we give them as the authors’ experience.
Stories of adoption and moving
The most detailed story of a move in Russian sources is Angstrem, described by an integrator on vc.ru: after the account was blocked, the system was rebuilt in another platform in 20 working days; among the losses the authors name the Gantt chart, which the new system lacked. The piece was written by the integrator, so its conclusions are worth reading with that in mind.
A practical tip follows from these stories: whichever cloud system you choose, keep a regular export of your data and know in advance how to move the plan to another system.
How Etapero differs
Asana answers “who is doing what”; Etapero answers “will we make the date and what is moving it”. In Etapero the plan is a work breakdown with phases, work packages, milestones and goals, four dependency types, a critical path and baselines, and slippage shows on every row and milestone.
The second difference is where the data lives. Asana is a cloud service, while Etapero installs on your server as one Docker image with PostgreSQL, so access does not depend on an outside provider’s decisions.
The third is Jira. Etapero does not replace the tracker but builds a plan on top of it: issues come in read-only and are checked against plan work statuses. If team collaboration on tasks in the cloud matters most, Asana remains a convenient tool.
At a glance
| Etapero | Asana | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | On your server: one Docker image and PostgreSQL; the demo runs in the cloud | A cloud service; we found no self-hosted option on the official site |
| Gantt chart | Yes: all four dependency types, lead and lag | Yes: Timeline and Gantt views |
| Critical path | Yes, worked out automatically | Yes: highlighting in the Gantt view |
| Baseline | Yes: forecast slippage shows on rows and milestones | Yes: baseline comparison in the Gantt view |
| Project portfolio | Yes: every project’s goals on one timeline, progress, risks and problems | Portfolios — Advanced, Enterprise, Enterprise+ |
When to choose Asana
- Team collaboration on tasks in the cloud comes first.
- You need ready integrations with cloud services and mobile apps.
When to choose Etapero
- Data must stay on your own server.
- You need a work breakdown, a baseline and slippage against it by milestone.
- Teams work in Jira and you need a read-only plan on top of it.
Moving a plan over
The work breakdown can be loaded into Etapero from Excel or CSV: it understands column headers and outline levels, including the MS Project export layout, and shows what will change before anything is written.