Asana for architects: where it works, where it breaks
Asana is a genuinely good generic task manager, and plenty of architecture firms run their whole practice on it. The honest answer: it works fine until the work becomes specifically architectural — drawing revisions, correction letters, submittals, plan check — and then you're rebuilding structure Asana doesn't have.
This isn't a takedown. For internal to-dos, hiring, marketing, and coordinating people, Asana is a strong tool and there's no reason to fight it. If that's most of your need, keep it.
But an architecture project isn't a generic list of tasks. It's sheets and sets that revise, correction letters that come back from the city, submittals that cycle, and a plan check you either pass or repeat. Asana has no native concept of any of those — so architects who rely on it end up maintaining elaborate manual workarounds that quietly go stale.
| Plan Proof | Asana | |
|---|---|---|
| Generic tasks & to-dos | Handles project work with AEC context | Excellent — this is what it is built for |
| Drawing revisions | Understands sheets, sets, and revisions | A task is a task — no concept of a drawing |
| Correction letters | Findings map to sheet + code / checklist item | Copy-paste into a checklist by hand |
| Submittals | Built for the AEC submittal flow | A board of cards you maintain manually |
| Plan check | Predicts city corrections before you submit | No concept of plan check at all |
| Pricing | $39 / check · plans from $59/seat/mo | Free tier; paid from ~$11/user/mo |
When Asana is the better choice
For anything that isn't drawing-specific, Asana wins on polish and flexibility. Company operations, business development pipelines, hiring, event planning, cross-team coordination — Asana's boards, timelines, and automations are excellent, and Olumba isn't trying to be a general-purpose work manager. If your main need is organizing people and generic tasks, Asana is the better fit and you should keep using it.
Where Plan Proof wins
The break point is the drawing set. Asana can hold a task called 'address correction letter,' but it can't read the letter, tie each item to a sheet, or predict which corrections the city will send next time. Olumba does: Plan Proof forecasts your jurisdiction's likely corrections before you submit, and the workspace understands revisions and submittals as first-class objects instead of generic cards you maintain by hand.
Why generic task managers quietly fail on drawing work
The failure isn't dramatic — it's erosion. Someone sets up a beautiful Asana board for a project, and for the first few weeks it's accurate. Then a set revises, a correction letter comes in, a submittal cycles, and updating the board by hand becomes one more chore nobody owns. Within a month the board no longer reflects the drawings. That's not an Asana defect; it's what happens when a tool has no model of the underlying artifacts. Olumba is built around those artifacts, so the structure maintains itself instead of depending on discipline.
Plan check is the piece no generic tool can fake
You can approximate a submittal board in Asana with enough columns. You cannot approximate plan check, because it requires knowing what a specific jurisdiction flags on a specific building type — something learned from real correction letters, not modeled as a task. That's the core of Plan Proof: upload a set, and in about 90 seconds see the corrections your city is likely to send, each tied to a sheet and the code or checklist item behind it. No generic task manager, however well configured, can produce that.
Frequently asked questions
- Can architects use Asana?
- Yes, and many do. Asana is a strong generic task and project manager — for internal to-dos, marketing, hiring, and non-drawing work it's genuinely good. It starts to break when the work is specifically architectural: drawing revisions, correction letters, submittals, and plan check have structure Asana has no model for, so you end up rebuilding it by hand every project.
- Where does Asana break for architecture firms?
- At the moments that define an AEC project. Asana has no concept of a sheet or a set, so a revision is just a renamed task. It has no idea what a correction letter is, so you transcribe it into a checklist. Submittals become a manually maintained board. And it can’t tell you what your jurisdiction will flag, because plan check isn’t a category it understands.
- Is Olumba a replacement for Asana?
- Not exactly — it's a replacement for the architecture-specific workarounds you built inside Asana. Olumba understands drawings, correction letters, submittals, and plan check natively. Some firms keep Asana for general company tasks and use Olumba for the actual project and plan-check work.
- What does Olumba cost compared to Asana?
- Olumba is $39 for a single Plan Proof check with no subscription, and monthly plans start at $59/seat/mo for firms filing regularly. Asana has a free tier and paid plans from roughly $11/user/mo — but it’s a general tool, so the AEC-specific work is on you to model.
Plan Proof
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Comparison based on publicly available information as of July 2026. Competitor pricing and capabilities are self-reported by each vendor and may change — verify current details on each vendor's site.