The Bet Smart team blogs regularly about the iGaming & Betting Industry, product development, design & user experience, and the latest technology trends.

At Bet Smart, we always have exciting yet complex projects on the go. Whether they are projects for other companies under our services business, or internal projects to build out our own products, we need to be organized. A focus on organization is especially important since we are often running multiple projects in parallel.

Luckily, there is a bevy of project management and collaboration tools out there to help us work in a more organized, collaborative manner. We’ve spent the last 12 months using one of the more popular tools, Basecamp, developed by the team at 37signals (who maintain the must-follow blog, Signal vs Noise). Basecamp is wildly popular, effective, and easy to use. However, our internal workflows have evolved, and with that we have outgrown the capabilities of Basecamp.

We spent a fair bit of time researching other options, reading user reviews, and taking the top ones for a test drive to see how the team here adapted to each. After the dust settled, we decided to make the switch from Basecamp to Asana, a relatively new entrant in the project management & collaboration space (which was started by one of Facebook’s original co-founders, Dustin Moskovitz).

Since adopting Asana as our go-to for project management, we have noticed quite a few benefits over Basecamp. Here are the top 5 reasons why it made sense for Bet Smart to switch from Basecamp to Asana:

1. Asana’s 3-column view lets us see everything at once

Asana lets you see everything in a single interface that uses a three-column structure of projects, tasks, and discussions. Basecamp requires users to navigate pages in order to switch between project tasks, making it difficult to see where that task fits in within the context of others. With Asana, every project is a single click away. Within each project, every task is immediately visible, and all comments, actions and files for a task are neatly organized in one place.

If you’d rather focus on just one project or a single task, Asana has recently upgraded its interface to let you minimize some columns to give the others more screen real estate.  This is really helpful when reading long discussions or modifying multiple nested task lists.

2. Google Drive integration

When a more detailed document is needed for a task, we often use Google Drive to collaborate on things like specification documents, spreadsheets, and architecture diagrams. Basecamp has its own text editor to create and save text documents relating to projects, which is basically just a notepad. Asana lets us easily attach these Google Drive files to tasks, which is a very handy feature for us. This is also useful since we often share those documents with external project stakeholders.

3. You can ditch your mouse when using Asana

Using Basecamp meant clicking around – a lot. Asana has eliminated the need to leave your keyboard when you are organizing and creating tasks using a series of available keyboard shortcuts for common actions.

To measure the impact of this, we can compare the steps needed to create a to-do list and add a task using each product:

In Basecamp:

1. Click ‘Add a todo list”
2. Type the title
3. Click “Save and start adding todos”
4. Type the todo
5. Click “Add this todo”

In Asana:

1. Type the title, ending with “:”
2. Type the todo

With keyboard shortcuts, there are fewer steps to getting things done in Asana. Over weeks and months of managing projects, these little time saving steps add up!  Asana can be navigated purely with keyboard shortcuts, and it saves all your text as you write it.

4. Internal Linking of Tasks is Clean

Asana gives each new task a unique url, but when linking between tasks it uses anchor text with the name of the task.  Clicking an internal link opens the task without reloading the entire page, which makes everything feel very connected and organized. Basecamp requires users to paste an entire url, which is much less clean and is difficult to understand in the context of a discussion.  

5. It’s free!

Basecamp is not prohibitively expensive (plans start at $20/month), but Asana has a free service tier that actually provides more than enough to meet our needs.  Asana has a premium tier which allows for private projects, more tools, and guest accounts.  Even for the free accounts, Asana is rapidly upgrading and plugging more services into their product.  Hardly a week goes by where Asana doesn’t announce an upgrade or fix on their blog.

—

Reviews and the opinions of other users were great in helping us narrow down our choices for new project management software to try, but in the end, the one that we enjoy using the most and get the most out of is best for us.  Day to day project management is now faster and more organized than when we used Basecamp. Asana is a perfect companion to our progressing workflows as we manage new and exciting projects moving forward.

Jordan Tarasoff is a Product Manager at Bet Smart.