Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp are excellent tools. Microsoft Project 2024 is a different kind of tool entirely. The comparison only gets useful once you understand that distinction — because buying the wrong one wastes time and money regardless of which way you get it wrong. Here’s what each does well, where each breaks down, and which type of work belongs in which product.
Why these tools keep getting compared
All four products appear in the same category searches, often sit in the same software shortlists, and get compared directly in procurement conversations. The confusion is understandable — they all deal with tasks, timelines, and teams.
But they emerged from completely different design traditions. Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp are work management platforms: they centralise task visibility, team communication, and workflow coordination across an organisation. Anyone on the team can log in, see what’s happening, update their own work, and track progress against shared goals. The user is the whole team.
Microsoft Project is a scheduling engine. It models complex dependencies, calculates critical paths, quantifies the impact of delays, and manages resource allocation across a project timeline. The user is typically the project manager — one person building and maintaining a plan that others execute. The application rewards expertise and depth over speed and accessibility.
The overlap is real — both deal with tasks and deadlines. But the design intent is different, and that difference drives almost every practical comparison between them.
Are you managing work — coordinating tasks across a team, tracking who’s doing what, keeping projects visible? Or are you managing a project schedule — modelling dependencies, identifying the critical path, analysing the impact of delays, levelling resources against constraints? The right tool depends on which problem you actually have.
What Microsoft Project does that the others don’t
These are the capabilities where Project Professional 2024 has no meaningful equivalent in any of the three SaaS alternatives.
Critical path analysis
Project calculates which tasks are on the critical path — the sequence of dependent tasks that determines the earliest possible completion date — and shows you exactly what happens to your delivery date if any of them slip. Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp all support task dependencies and timeline views. None of them calculate float, none identify the critical path automatically, and none can tell you that a two-day delay on task 14 pushes the final delivery by nine days. For construction, engineering, IT infrastructure, and manufacturing projects where schedule risk is consequential, this gap is significant.
Resource levelling
Project Professional can identify resource over-allocations across a schedule — where a team member is assigned more work than available hours — and resolve them automatically or with manual guidance. Monday.com has workload views; Asana has capacity charts; ClickUp has time tracking estimates. These are visibility tools — they show you a problem. Resource levelling in Project solves it by adjusting task timing against the constraints of the schedule. Not the same capability.
Baseline tracking and earned value
Project lets you snapshot the plan at a point in time — the baseline — and then measure schedule variance and cost variance against it as work progresses. This is the foundation of earned value management: are we delivering more or less work than planned for the money spent? None of Asana, Monday.com, or ClickUp have any equivalent to baseline comparison or earned value metrics. For projects with formal reporting obligations, this is often a hard requirement.
Offline working
Project Professional runs fully offline once installed and activated. Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp are cloud-only — no internet connection means no access. For site-based work in construction or manufacturing, secure government and defence environments, or project managers who work heavily on trains, this isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s the difference between the tool working and not working.
File ownership and long-term portability
Project files (.mpp) are stored locally, owned by the organisation, and remain usable indefinitely. If Microsoft changes pricing or discontinues a plan, the files and the application continue working. SaaS data lives in the vendor’s cloud — if pricing changes, the product pivots, or the company is acquired, your project history is subject to decisions you don’t control.
What Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp do that Project doesn’t
This is not a one-sided comparison. The SaaS tools do things Project genuinely doesn’t, and for the right type of work they’re the better answer.
Real-time multi-user collaboration
Multiple people can edit the same plan simultaneously, with changes syncing instantly across every user’s view. Project Professional 2024 is fundamentally a single-user desktop application — files can be shared but it’s sequential, not concurrent. For teams where multiple people need to update their own tasks in real time, this is a real limitation.
Team-wide adoption
Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp are designed to be used by everyone on the team — not just the project manager. The interfaces are accessible enough for non-technical users to self-manage their tasks without training. Project Professional is a project manager’s tool; handing it to twelve team members to update their own progress is not how it’s designed to work.
Automation and integrations
Monday.com’s automation builder, Asana’s rules engine, ClickUp’s automations — these trigger actions, update statuses, send notifications, and connect to Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, and hundreds of other tools. Project Professional has no automation layer and limited third-party integrations. If your project management is embedded in a wider operational tech stack, the SaaS tools connect to it. Project largely doesn’t.
Visual flexibility
Kanban boards, calendar views, timeline views, list views, gallery views — switchable per user, per project. Project has views but the interface is structured around the Gantt chart and relatively fixed. Teams that work in different modes depending on context find the SaaS tools more adaptable to how different people prefer to work.
Mac and browser support
All three run in a browser, on Mac, and on mobile. Project Professional 2024 is Windows-only. There is no Mac desktop version and no browser version. If your team is mixed Windows and Mac, Project Professional immediately excludes half of them.
Lower barrier to entry
A team can be running in Asana or Monday.com within a day. Project Professional has a meaningful learning curve — Gantt scheduling, dependency management, resource allocation, and baseline tracking all take time to learn properly. For teams that need to be productive quickly without PM expertise, the SaaS tools win on speed of adoption.
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Project Pro 2024 | Asana | Monday.com | ClickUp |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scheduling & planning | ||||
| Critical path analysis | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Gantt chart | ✓ | ✓ paid tier | ✓ paid tier | ✓ paid tier |
| Task dependencies | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Baseline tracking | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Earned value management | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Resource management | ||||
| Resource levelling | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Workload visibility | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Budget & cost tracking | ✓ | Limited | Limited | Limited |
| Collaboration & access | ||||
| Real-time multi-user editing | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Works offline | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Mac & browser support | ✗ Windows only | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Automation & workflow rules | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Third-party integrations | Limited | ✓ extensive | ✓ extensive | ✓ extensive |
| Licensing & cost | ||||
| Licence model | Perpetual — buy once | Per-user subscription | Per-user subscription | Per-user subscription |
| Works after you stop paying | ✓ permanently | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Data stored locally | ✓ | ✗ cloud only | ✗ cloud only | ✗ cloud only |
Cost over five years — the subscription reality
Microsoft Project Professional 2024 is a one-time purchase. Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp are priced per user per month. For a single project manager, the arithmetic over a five-year horizon looks like this.
Pricing is illustrative based on published UK rates at time of writing. Actual costs vary by team size, tier, and billing cycle. Verify current pricing directly with each vendor before purchasing: Asana pricing, Monday.com pricing, ClickUp pricing.
Even ClickUp — the most affordable of the three — costs considerably more than Project Professional 2024 over five years for a single user. At the Asana Business or Monday Pro tiers, the gap is substantial. The SaaS pricing model makes more sense when you’re paying per-seat across a large team that all need access — the per-user cost is shared across the value delivered. For one or two project managers who need the scheduling depth, the perpetual licence is hard to argue against on cost alone.
Which tool for which type of work
The right choice is determined by what the work actually requires, not by brand preference or which tool you saw demoed first.
- → Your project has complex dependencies where sequencing is critical to delivery
- → You need critical path analysis and formal schedule risk management
- → Resource allocation across tasks and team members needs to be modelled and levelled
- → You work in construction, engineering, IT infrastructure, or manufacturing
- → You work offline regularly — on site, while travelling, or in secure environments
- → You want to own the software and avoid per-user monthly costs
- → You need baseline tracking and earned value reporting
- → You’re managing one or two project managers who need serious PM tooling
- → Your team needs a shared workspace where everyone tracks their own tasks
- → Fast onboarding without PM training is a priority
- → Real-time collaboration between multiple users is the core requirement
- → Your projects are really ongoing workflows, campaigns, or sprints
- → You need automation between project management and other tools
- → Your team is on Mac or primarily browser-based
- → Stakeholders need live visibility into progress without opening a desktop app
- → Per-user subscription costs are acceptable within your software budget
Many organisations use both: Project Professional for the project managers who build and maintain schedules, and Asana or Monday.com for the wider team who track their own tasks. The PM builds the plan in Project; the team executes against it in a tool they find easier to use daily. This is a legitimate setup and often more practical than trying to force everyone into one application.
The honest verdict — Project 2024 vs each tool
Common questions
For some use cases, yes. For structured project delivery with complex dependencies, critical path analysis, and resource management, no. Asana handles task coordination, cross-team visibility, and workflow management very well. It doesn’t do critical path analysis, it has no resource levelling, and it has no baseline tracking or earned value. If those capabilities are part of your project management practice, Asana is not a replacement — it’s a different tool for a different job.
No. Monday.com has timeline views and task dependencies, but it does not calculate the critical path, does not calculate float, and cannot show you the schedule impact of a delay on a specific task. Critical path analysis is a feature of dedicated project scheduling tools — Microsoft Project, Primavera P6, and similar applications — not work management platforms. If critical path is a requirement for your projects, Monday.com is not the right tool.
For structured construction project management — sequencing phases, managing subcontractor dependencies, critical path scheduling, and resource allocation across a site programme — yes, significantly. Construction projects are characterised by long dependency chains, constrained resources, and schedules where delays in one area cascade through the whole programme. Project Professional’s critical path analysis, resource levelling, and baseline tracking are built precisely for this environment. ClickUp’s Gantt view and dependency features are adequate for simpler project tracking but don’t provide the scheduling depth that construction programmes require.
Yes, and it’s a common setup in larger organisations. The project manager maintains the master schedule and critical path in Project Professional; the wider team tracks their tasks and communicates in Asana or Monday.com. The two tools serve different purposes and don’t need to be in conflict. There’s no native integration between them — updates don’t sync automatically — but the workflow of using a desktop scheduling tool alongside a team collaboration platform is well established and practically sound.
Depends on what you’re managing. If Monday.com is handling your team’s work management well and you’re finding that you need more from the scheduling side — critical path visibility, resource levelling, formal baseline tracking — then Project Professional alongside Monday is a reasonable combination. If Monday is working for everything you need, adding Project is unnecessary overhead. The question is whether you’re hitting the ceiling of Monday’s scheduling capabilities in practice, not whether Project is technically superior in those areas (it is).
For a single project manager, Project Professional 2024 is cheaper from year two onwards against any of the paid tiers of Asana, Monday.com, or ClickUp. The one-time licence cost is fixed; the subscriptions compound annually. Over five years, the difference for one user is substantial — and if you’re comparing against team-level SaaS pricing where each seat is billed separately, the gap widens further. The SaaS model makes more economic sense when the per-user cost is spread across a large team that all genuinely need access. For a small number of project managers who need serious scheduling tools, the perpetual licence is the more cost-effective route.
Gary Walsh is the Head of Tech Support at Software Supplies, with more than 20 years in the IT industry. Fully Microsoft-certified and experienced across the full business software stack — from Windows and Office to cloud infrastructure and device management — Gary delivers practical, no-nonsense advice that helps users and businesses get the most from their technology.
