Airtable vs Asana in 2026 A table you shape, or tasks you pass around.

Both can run a small team's work. They start from different places: Airtable from a table of records you design, Asana from a task with an owner and a due date.

Jacky Fakkeldij Building Driftto, on his own · Updated 23 October 2026

I build Driftto, an iPhone app for getting a thought into the right place without first finding the app, waiting for it to open and picking where it goes. Airtable and Asana are both places it writes to, so I had a reason to read how the two differ when the question is which one a small team should keep its work in.

In October 2026 I went through Airtable's help center and pricing page, Asana's pricing, plan and feature pages, and both US App Store listings. Asana's help center loads its article text in the browser, so for Asana I leaned on its own marketing pages and on search excerpts of its help articles. Where a page says nothing about a feature, I say so instead of guessing.

The short answer

Pick Airtable if your work is a pile of records, like leads, stock or a content plan, and you want to design the table yourself. Pick Asana if your work is tasks with one owner and a due date that people pass around. Asana costs less per person; Airtable's free plan stops at 1,000 records per base.

A table of records or a list of tasks

Airtable calls itself "the easy way to create your own connected apps" in the App Store. You make a base, the base holds tables, and each table holds records with the fields you choose. Records can link to records in other tables. Everything else, including a to-do list, is a table you set up.

Asana starts one level up. The thing you make is a task, and tasks live in projects. A task can sit in more than one project at once, and Asana's help center says it is still one task: a change to its due date or a comment shows in every project it belongs to.

That is the whole choice. In Airtable you get freedom and build the task part yourself. In Asana the task part comes ready, and you work inside its shape.

Owners, due dates and My Tasks

In Asana, a task has one assignee, says the help center, and it recommends giving every actionable task an assignee and a due date. Everything assigned to you lands in My Tasks, under a Recently Assigned section, and you can add sections like Today, Upcoming and Later. My Tasks is on every plan, Personal included.

In Airtable, the pages I read describe fields, views and records, and don't describe a built-in task, assignee or due date. You add those as fields in your own table, and you build whatever view of "my work" you want.

Views and planning

Airtable lists the views as grid, which is the default, plus form, calendar, gallery, kanban, timeline, list and gantt. Its help page doesn't say which plan each view needs. It does say personal and locked views, view sections and favorite views are only on paid plans.

Asana's free Personal plan has list, board and calendar views. Timeline and Gantt views come with Starter. Asana's pricing page also puts custom fields and reporting dashboards on Starter, and unlimited portfolios on Advanced.

Forms and automations

Airtable forms are for collecting input from anyone. Each submission becomes a new record in the table, and the person doesn't need an Airtable account unless you ask who submitted. A form can only add records, not update them. Airtable's automations start from a trigger, such as a record created or a form submitted, and run actions such as sending an email, updating a record or posting to Slack.

Asana's pricing page lists forms and unlimited automations on Starter, with branching and customization on Advanced. The pages I read don't give a limit on how many runs you get.

Price and free-plan limits

Airtable's Free plan allows 1,000 records per base, 1 GB of attachments per base and 100 automation runs per workspace per month. It limits editors and creators to five, and extensions aren't supported. Team is $20 per user per month billed annually and allows 50,000 records per base. Business is $45 per user per month billed annually and allows 125,000. Airtable charges only for people who can edit at least one base. Read-only collaborators, form submissions and share links cost nothing.

Asana's Personal plan is free and capped at two seats per project and team, with unlimited tasks and projects. Starter is $10.99 per user per month billed annually, or $13.49 billed monthly. Advanced is $24.99 billed annually, or $30.49 billed monthly. Both paid plans have no user limit.

For a team of five that all edit, that is $100 a month on Airtable Team and $54.95 a month on Asana Starter, both billed annually. For one or two people, Asana's free plan has no record cap, while Airtable's stops at 1,000 per base.

On an iPhone

Both apps are free to download in the US App Store. Airtable needs iOS 17 or later and also runs on iPad and Apple Vision. Asana needs iOS 18 or later and runs on iPad. The listings don't show a Mac or Apple Watch app for either.

In Airtable's iPhone app, the help page says calendar, gallery, grid and kanban views work and gantt, list and timeline don't. It also says you can't create or view a base form in the app: you open the form's share link in a browser. Airtable's listing adds an Omni AI assistant you can type or speak to.

Asana's listing says the app has list, board and calendar views and a My Tasks list, and it sends you to the web app for Portfolios. Asana's own pages describe a widget that shows your top five tasks for today, and forwarding an email to Asana's intake address creates a task from it, with the subject as the task name and the body as the description.

Everything else, side by side

The rest, checked against Airtable's and Asana's own pages and App Store listings in October 2026.

Which one I'd pick

If the thing you track is not really a task, use Airtable. A customer list, a stock sheet or a content calendar with its own columns fits a table better than a to-do. Check the record limit on the plan you start with, and remember that a table you design is a table you maintain.

If you mostly hand work to people with a date on it, use Asana. Tasks, owners, My Tasks and the board come ready, and the free plan covers two people. Move to Starter when you need timeline views, forms or custom fields.

If neither is a plain personal list, I looked at those in the best to-do list apps for iPhone. Whichever you choose, it only works if things actually get into it.

Capture into the one you picked, in one step

Into Airtable: open the app, find the base and the table, and add a record by hand. Forms can take input from anyone, but on an iPhone the form opens in a browser.

Into Asana: in the app, tap New task in a project or in My Tasks, add a name and any assignee, due date or photo, then tap Create. Or forward an email to Asana's intake address.

With Driftto, you open it to a capture field with the keyboard already up, type or speak the thought, and tap where it goes: Asana into the project you picked, or Airtable into the table you picked. One capture can go to both. In Asana the whole note becomes the task name, and a photo is attached. In Airtable the note becomes a new record, written into the table's first column, the one Airtable shows as a record's title. Nothing else goes into the record, and no photo. Driftto only adds new items. It never reads or changes what is already there.

Driftto asks for the base and the table once, at setup. It leaves out tables whose first column can't hold text, such as a formula or a number, because a note would be refused there. You can also say "Hey Siri, new capture in Driftto" and it goes to the destination you picked for Siri.

Questions

Driftto is in the App Store now.