Do you wanna Asana, or will you thrive with Hive? Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
I've been a longtime user of Asana, which has quickly become one of the most popular project management tools in the world. Recently, I was introduced to Hive, and I have been very impressed as I’ve been trying things out, managing a few mini projects within the Hive space.
In today’s video, I want to give a few comparisons between Hive and Asana to see if you might want to try out Hive for yourself. Here we are with a test project in Hive, and at first glance, you’re probably saying this looks a little bit more like Trello.
We’ve got a Kanban view of this particular project with unstarted tasks in one column, tasks in progress in another, and completed tasks in a third. Of course, in Asana, you can have a board view just like this as well, but when you create a project in Asana, you have to choose between a list or a board.
Change Layout
Unfortunately, you cannot have both; it’s either/or. One of the great things about Hive is that you can view your work in so many different ways.
Up here on the right-hand side, we have an area called Change Layout, and as you can see, there are six different ways in which we can view our project. For example, maybe you want to view your project in a Gantt chart.
Perhaps you want to see where things are laying out, and I just have a few tasks with due dates here, but you can see that, just like a typical Gantt chart, I can change things on the fly. I can drag things to the right or left and see how the duration of the test project will last.
Don’t want a Gantt chart? Maybe you prefer to see a team view.
This might be my favorite view within Hive, where I can see everyone's work in a nice, concise list. Sometimes when you’re looking at things in a Kanban view, you need a filter or some other way to see who is doing what, but I really like this team view within Hive.
It allows me to get a good grasp of how many tasks I have compared to my coworkers or others I’m working with. This Change Layout option is very flexible, with six different ways to view your projects.
Integrations
Another area where I’ve been very impressed with Hive is how it integrates with so many other tools. Of course, Asana integrates with a number of applications, but beyond integrations, isn’t it great when an application just does what you want out of the box?
Let me introduce you to something you can do in Hive: create a form without needing to interact or integrate with anything else. Here you can see, by selecting your profile picture and going to Forms, you can add a custom form.
I’m not going to start a new form because I’ve already created one, so let me just hit the edit button to show you all the goodness within the form creator. You can give it a title, a description, and choose from all these options on the right-hand side, from checkboxes to radio buttons, short text, long text, and more.
You can even give it a custom confirmation message. But the beauty of any form within a project management tool is being able to tell it what to do with that information.
You can see here that once the form is submitted, I’ve checked the box that says each time a form is submitted, it will be added to a selected project and assigned to a team member. I’ve selected my project here and assigned it to myself.
You can even add a template if you want, though I’m not going to add one now. I’ll just save that, and then we get a link we can share with customers, coworkers, or whoever this form is intended for.
Let’s copy that link, open a new tab, and paste it in. Here we are with our custom form, which could be sent to customers, team members, or anyone else.
This is just a very simple form I’ve created here. It says “Feature Request,” and asks for the type of request and details about it.
I’m going to say it’s a bug fix and write, “I don’t like the way it looks.” After I hit submit, you can customize the thank-you message.
Now, let’s go back to our Hive project, and you’ll notice something new in the unstarted column. Here is that feature request, and just as we told it to, it’s been assigned to me.
I’m going to open this up, and here is all the information that was submitted in that form. Whether you’re a support team or need unsolicited information from others in your organization, you can have it brought directly into your project.
Now maybe I need to follow a specific workflow or do something with this particular task. Speaking of a particular task, let’s open one of our tasks here within Hive.
Tasks
I want to show you some of the features and functionality. A lot of this may look very similar to Asana or other project management tools, such as adding a description, progress stage, comments, attachments, or labels.
Sometimes it’s the small things that make the biggest difference, and one of the things I’ve really appreciated about Hive is the date feature. If I click on Dates, by default, this is a due date, and I can select it with no problem.
But something that many people, including myself, are always looking for is the ability to quickly and easily select a start date. In Asana, you can select a due date, but there’s no easy way to select a start date from this screen.
In Hive, all I have to do is select “Add a Start Date,” and now I can say, “I’m going to start that on Thursday.” With two quick clicks, I can see the duration of this task.
After I hit close, there are my dates right there. When I go to another view, such as the Gantt chart, I can see that start date for the task.
Here’s the “Write report for new product” task, and it makes sense that I can’t view it in the Gantt chart without a duration. I can see that right here, and I can click on any of those items in this new view to adjust or change the duration of the task.
Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference. I might also add that I personally prefer, and this might be because of my experience with Trello, having the view of your task front and center.
In Asana, we often have this left and right view. Most of the time, you have your list on the left-hand side, with a somewhat squished view of your task on the right-hand side.
Of course, you can expand this to full screen if you want, but I really appreciate that when I click on a task in Hive, it comes up full screen. It takes up most of the screen, making it a lot more comfortable for me to work with my tasks in Hive.
Conversations
One of the last things I want to share with you has to do with having a conversation within Hive. Of course, any project management tool worth its weight will have the ability to communicate directly with other team members.
Inside a task, we have this comment section, and these comments will be linked and kept here within this particular task, similar to Asana. Asana has a Conversations tab where you can have a conversation with everyone within the project.
However, I’ve always found that the Conversations tab seems a little static. I have to leave the rest of my list, and these almost feel like individual posts rather than an actual conversation.
In Hive, instead of just integrating with something like Slack, which is very popular with Asana users, Hive has a very good built-in chat group. Here you can see, as I’ve expanded this area, that I can have a discussion with my team while viewing my project on the right.
This is what I’m really looking for: having that conversation while I’m looking at our individual tasks. Maybe I prefer the Kanban view while I’m chatting, while Landin is viewing the Gantt chart because that’s what he prefers, and Barb is looking at the team view.
Whatever works well for them, but I like having this chat built right into the application. I don’t want to have to integrate with Slack or another tool as an add-on.
If I don’t want to view the chat, I can just minimize it and return to my regular view. It’s a nice addition to the Hive atmosphere.
So there you have it, a quick overview of Hive and some comparisons with Asana. I’d love to hear what you think, especially if you’ve already spent some time with Hive.
If you’d like to learn more, I’ll leave a link to Hive so you can try it out for yourself. I would love to hear your feedback and comments.
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Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it’s very simple.
