Asana vs Jira: marketing versus product

Asana buries its HIPAA clause at the top of its price ladder — Jira ships it at the bottom

Asana’s HIPAA Business Associate Agreement opens only on Enterprise+, its highest paid tier, activated within 24 hours in the Admin Console; Jira includes the same agreement from Standard, its entry paid plan, though the agreement disappears again on Jira’s own government-cloud product, AGC. Both vendors also contradict their own marketing on regulated cloud: Asana’s help article states its FedRAMP status more cautiously than its Gov product page does, and Atlassian’s own pages describe Jira’s FedRAMP status as both achieved and coming soon. Scope compared, criterion by criterion. Checked 7 September 2026.

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Asana vs Jira: scope compared, criterion by criterion — checked September 7, 2026
Asana	Jira
What the tool answers
What it measures or produces
Progress: task status, goal advancement, and the gap between estimated and actual time, aggregated into charts	Issue progress across sprints: sprint health, days remaining, resolution time, and created versus resolved volumes
The job it equips
Project leadership and the PMO: the vendor describes team bandwidth surfaced at project level	The technical product or program manager arbitrating delivery dates and staffing allocation across teams
What it cannot tell you
Neither cost, margin nor project profitability without the paid add-on: only elapsed time against an estimate	The cost of a project: its time-tracking documentation mentions no hourly rate, no budget and no financial reporting
Running the work
Available views
List, board and calendar from the free tier. Timeline and Gantt start at Starter. Workload only begins at Advanced	Board, calendar and timeline from the base plans. The cross-project Plans timeline requires Premium or Enterprise
Task dependencies
From Starter up, with blocking and blocked-by links, and automatic date shifting that preserves the gap between tasks	They live inside Plans, with admins choosing which link types render as dependencies. No critical path is documented
Workload and capacity
The workload view requires Advanced. Universal workload and capacity planning are reserved for Enterprise and above	Capacity belongs to Plans. The plan comparison places it in Enterprise; the product documentation places it in Premium
Time tracking
Native from Advanced up, timer or manual entry, adding two fields to the project: estimated time and actual time	Manual entry, with configurable working hours per day and days per week. No stopwatch and no rebilling in the product
Automations
Rules begin at Starter. The pricing page says unlimited; the help centre caps them at fifty per project, at every tier	Monthly allowance counted in steps: 150 per subscription on Free, then 400, 750 and 1,000 per user by plan
Guest and client access
Guests are free and unlimited and do not count toward the membership total. View-only licences require Enterprise	No free guest tier: any user added to an app is billed, even if they never accept the invitation
Reports and dashboards
Up to twenty charts per dashboard: bar, line, burnup, burndown, donut and number, with up to four metrics each	Twenty-six preinstalled gadgets: activity streams, pie charts, sprint burndown and cross statistics, driven by filters and JQL
What comes out of it
Export formats
JSON or CSV for a project, and also a search view or My Tasks. Portfolios export to Google Sheets	From a search: CSV all fields, current fields or filter fields, plus Word and XML. About 150 issues per Word export
Shareable reports
Dashboards share inside the tool. Outward, sharing runs through a CSV, JSON or Sheets export	Dashboards and filters can be shared, publicly included, through a dedicated site administration setting
API access
Open even on the free tier at one hundred fifty requests per minute, against fifteen hundred on a paid domain	Bursts of one hundred read requests per second, fifty writes, and twenty per-issue writes every two seconds
What it connects to
Native integrations
A directory of over two hundred partners. The three that matter: Slack, Google Drive and Microsoft Teams	Over four thousand Marketplace apps. On Google: Jira Cloud for Sheets, Smart Chips for Docs and Slides, and Bitbucket
Google tools it connects to
Single sign-on on every tier, Calendar sync, Drive attachments, tasks from Gmail, portfolio exported to Sheets	An official add-on imports Jira data into Sheets by filter or JQL. The vendor advises against a direct export
Bringing your existing data across
Import through a CSV file, with documented paths from monday.com, Trello, Airtable, Smartsheet, Wrike and ClickUp	Documented imports cover CSV, JSON, Bitbucket and Trello. Neither Asana nor monday.com appears in that official list
Getting started, and the fine print
Support
A chatbot, then a ticket. The two-business-hour response commitment is English-only, and Enterprise-only	Support in English and Japanese only, though the interface is translated. Nine business hours on Standard, 24/7 on Premium
Where the data is hosted
European residency in Germany with backup in Ireland, but profile data stays in the US. Enterprise+ or a paid add-on	EU and Germany residency from Standard per the dedicated page, Enterprise per the comparison. Seven data categories stay out of scope
What happens if you leave
Thirty days after termination to request the export. Past that, the vendor has no obligation to retain anything	The site stays accessible for fifteen days after the subscription ends, then is deactivated. No retention window is quantified
Minimum seats billed
Two seats at the floor, then fixed buckets: three, four, five, then steps of five, ten, twenty-five and fifty	On annual billing you buy a user tier, not seats: the vendor writes that the tier cannot be altered or changed
Data residency and regulated cloud
Asana claims a FedRAMP Moderate “authorized” status for Asana Gov, which its own help article states more cautiously, without that word. A HIPAA BAA is obtained on the Enterprise+ tier, activated within 24 hours in the Admin Console. Contradiction: its privacy page lists the US among its data centers; its Trust Center page does not.	Jira: one US location ('USA'), from Standard. FedRAMP Certification (Class C) and GovRAMP Moderate (ex-StateRAMP) via AGC. HIPAA BAA from Standard, absent from AGC. Atlassian contradiction: FedRAMP 'achieved' vs 'coming soon.'
Interface languages shipped
Two of Asana's help pages disagree: one lists fourteen interface languages, the other thirteen, omitting Bahasa Indonesia. English stays a single entry, with no US or UK variant and no partial translation flagged.	Jira lists 28 languages, US English listed apart from UK English. Croatian, Serbian (Latin/Cyrillic), Slovenian, and Slovak: help center/portal only, not the app. Documentation and support exist only in English and Japanese.
What it costs
The entry price and what it includes
$10.99 per user per month billed annually on Starter, $13.49 monthly. No workload and no time tracking at that tier	Free up to ten users. Beyond that the vendor publishes $8.60 per user per month for the first hundred seats, tapering after
What pushes the bill up
Rounding up to the next seat bucket: a team of thirty-two pays for forty seats. Then the jump to Advanced	Every added user bills even when inactive, crossing an annual tier forces the next one, and Marketplace apps stack up
Sales tax and nexus
Asana charges sales tax at state and local level from the billing address, no published state list; only exemptions are named, a form for New York, an affidavit for Colorado. The Terms place the tax burden on the customer.	Atlassian charges US sales tax based on billing address, across 36 named states/territories (Colorado, New York, Texas...). Exemption needs documentation. No nexus allocation or local calculation; Jira isn't a sales tool.

Key takeaways

A Business Associate Agreement that opens at opposite ends of the price list

Jira includes its HIPAA Business Associate Agreement from Standard, its entry paid plan. Asana requires Enterprise+, its highest tier, though it activates that agreement within twenty-four hours once requested in the Admin Console — a fast turnaround, gated behind the most expensive plan.

Government cloud, minus the clause that regulated buyers came for

Jira’s HIPAA Business Associate Agreement, present from Standard, is absent from AGC, Atlassian’s own government-cloud product, which instead carries a FedRAMP Certification at Class C and a GovRAMP Moderate authorization. A buyer moving toward the government-focused tier loses the HIPAA agreement rather than gaining anything further alongside it.

Two descriptions of the same authorization, from the same company

Atlassian’s own pages describe Jira’s FedRAMP status two different ways, one calling it achieved, another calling it coming soon. Both versions are reported here; neither is treated as the correct one.

Asana’s own help article underclaims what its product page claims

Asana Gov’s page claims a FedRAMP Moderate “authorized” status; Asana’s own help article for the same product states it more cautiously, without using that word. Its privacy page and its Trust Center page disagree as well, one listing the United States among Asana’s data centers, the other not.

Twenty-eight languages in the product, two in the support queue

Jira ships twenty-eight interface languages, listing US English apart from UK English; a handful, including Croatian, Serbian in both scripts, Slovenian, and Slovak, cover only the help center or the customer portal, not the application itself. Documentation and support, meanwhile, exist only in English and Japanese, whatever language the interface itself is set to. Asana’s own count is smaller and disputed: fourteen languages on one help page, thirteen on another, the difference being Bahasa Indonesia.

Whose sales tax, and who calculates it

Asana charges sales tax at the state and local level from the billing address, with no published state list, naming only two exemption routes, a form for New York and an affidavit for Colorado. Atlassian instead charges US sales tax based on billing address across thirty-six named states and territories, with exemption requiring documentation; neither vendor offers nexus allocation or a local-jurisdiction calculation for the customer’s own sales.

Frequently asked questions

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At which tier does a HIPAA agreement become available on Jira?

Jira offers a HIPAA business associate agreement starting at its entry Standard tier, though it is absent from Atlassian Government Cloud. Asana places that same agreement at the very top of its price ladder, the Enterprise+ tier, where it activates within 24 hours in the Admin Console once reached.

Does Jira distinguish US English from UK English among its languages?

Yes: Jira lists 28 interface languages, with US English named separately from UK English, though four of them — Croatian, Serbian in both scripts, Slovenian and Slovak — cover only the help center and portal, not the app itself. Asana, for its part, has its own help pages disagree with each other, one listing 14 languages, the other thirteen.

How many US states or territories does Atlassian name for Jira’s sales tax?

Atlassian charges US sales tax on Jira across 36 named states or territories, including Colorado, New York and Texas, based on the billing address, with exemption requiring documentation and no nexus allocation or local-rate calculation published. Asana, by comparison, names no state at all, limiting itself to two exemption paths, for New York and for Colorado.