Asana is excellent project management for one team and one audience. Agencies have two audiences in every conversation. Workhouse is built around that — visibility flag on every task, client portal built in, no per-guest fees stacking up as your roster grows.
Free during beta · Migration help included · 30-second setup
Asana is a polished, fast, well-designed tool — for an internal team. The agency tax shows up in how you bring clients in. Asana's guest access is workspace-level on the lower tiers and per-project on higher tiers, but either way it's billing-friction with structural friction stacked on top. Most agencies on Asana end up running a separate Asana workspace for client-facing work, or a separate tool entirely.
And even when you do invite clients, the visibility model isn't there. There's no per-task internal/external flag at the data layer. You manage it by which project the task lives in. Tasks duplicate. Status drifts. The Friday status update is still a Friday status update.
Asana is a great PM tool. It's just not an agency PM tool. Workhouse is.
The dimensions that matter when an agency is the audience.
| Asana | Workhouse | |
|---|---|---|
| Per-task visibility for clients | Project-level only (and guest fees apply) | Per-task flag, enforced in SQL |
| Client portal | Invite as guest to specific projects | Scoped per-client, branded as yours |
| Per-guest billing | Yes — guests count against project limits or seats | Client contacts are not seats |
| Approvals workflow | Available on Business tier and above | Native, on every plan |
| Audit log | Enterprise tier only | Immutable, included on every workspace |
| Weekly status reports | Status updates feature; manually written | AI-drafted from the week's actual activity |
| Internal vs. client tasks | Separate projects + manual sync | One task, one visibility flag |
| Pricing model | Per-user, tier-gated features (approvals, rules, custom fields) | Free during beta |
We're built for agencies. Asana is excellent for everything else.
Beta migration is hands-on. We do the first one for you.
Asana exports projects as CSV or JSON. The data covers tasks, status, assignees, due dates, custom fields, and comments.
Send to migrate@workhouse.app. We'll review your project structure and identify your existing visibility convention (most agencies have separate internal/client projects).
Paired internal/client projects collapse into one Workhouse project per client, with visibility flags set per task. Custom fields map onto Workhouse task fields. Comments come over.
Each client contact gets a portal invite. The visibility flag does the rest.
“We ran Conversion Factory in Notion for years. Two databases, hundreds of dollars a month in Zapier glue, copy-pasting client comments into Slack to discuss them. At some point we realized we were building a whole new app on top of Notion — badly, with duct tape. So we built the app instead.”
Asana is built for internal teams. Workhouse is built for teams working with external clients. The difference shows up in the data model: Asana has projects and members; Workhouse has projects, members, and a visibility flag on every task and comment. Clients in Workhouse get a portal scoped to their own work — no guest seats, no project-level membership, no extra cost as your client list grows.
Yes. Export your projects as CSV or JSON, email us, and we'll handle the migration during beta. We typically collapse paired internal/client Asana projects into one Workhouse project per client.
Yes — approvals are native on every Workhouse workspace, free during beta. No tier-gating.
Workhouse generates AI-drafted weekly status reports per project from your actual activity. For longitudinal reporting across projects, our reporting view is more focused than Asana's portfolios — but that's intentional. Agencies report per-engagement, not per-portfolio.
Workhouse is free during beta. Even at paid pricing, no per-guest fees means agencies with many client contacts will pay less for the client-facing seats specifically.
Each client gets a portal scoped to their own work. They see tasks marked client-visible, can comment on them, approve deliverables, and submit requests. They never see anything internal — the visibility check is in the database, not the UI.