I was in two jira cloud projects this year and in my current project we're using Asana. I've used Asana on and off over the years and I kind of prefer it. Jira is just a constant pain in our industry. It seems what process heavy product people gravitate too. So, I'm well familiar with it; know how to customize it (you have to); and know how to work with it instead of against it.

Asana is pretty complex these days and neither is perfect. Both are kind of slow. But crucially, bulk editing tickets in Asana is just a lot nicer. This is the single reason I prefer it over Jira because anything bulk is just a hell of multi modal dialogs: click, wait, click, wait, etc. It completely sucks the life out of me and makes me curse at my laptop.

Asana feels more like a spread sheet when you are bulk editing. I can switch to the list view, multi select a few tickets and e.g. add some tags, assign to the same person, etc. Boom done. This is so satisfying. I also love bulk inserting tickets in the list view: type, enter, type, type, etc. No modal dialogs involved for two key activities. No process bureaucracy imposed. This is why I like it so much. Jira does not even come close to enabling this level of efficiency.

I'm mostly a developer but seem to always end up taking on a lot of product management tasks as well. Comes with the job when you hit a certain amount of seniority. I tend to be vastly more experienced than some of the junior PMs I work with as well (by some decades). So, inevitably, I end up spending quality time with whatever ticketing system is used and translating their business requirements into actually actionable tickets suitable for consumption by developers (i.e. doing their job). I'm experienced enough to know that the tool is rarely the problem or the solution (it's always the process) but the tools do bias the process (jira and scrum-butt go together real well) and tend to become part of the problem. PMs preferring Jira because that's all they know is usually the reason it's used.

A pain point with Asana is that it is indeed quite slow for some things. E.g. drag and drop of tickets is very sluggish on Firefox. Initial page load is also not great; but once loaded things are reasonable. However, Jira cloud is painfully slow in comparison. I've seen 10-20 second page loads for ticket detail pages. That's appallingly bad and IMHO completely unacceptable for a paid product. It looks to me that they UI is doing lots of REST requests all the time and some use cases seem to end up doing way too many of those.

So any time they get busy, the seconds add up. It's what makes using Jira such a miserable experience because absolutely everything involves multiple such page loads. If you can avoid having to go to detail screens, it helps. Unfortunately, inevitably the fields you care about are scattered over different views.

Asana is much less painful in this respect. But both have challenges on this front. Jira is the more feature rich (in the everything and the kitchen sink sense); but the features that matter to me (as opposed to the gazillions of crap bolted onto Jira over the past 20 years) are all there in Asana. Also, it seems to be a bit more opinionated on what the UI should be in the sense that you don't end up spending a lot of time heavily customizing it; which is a thing in all Jira projects I've been on.

I can work with both but prefer Asana.

An issue with both is that they integrate poorly with things like Github pull requests and version control in general. These days what I look for and have not really found yet (despite lots of plugins) is deep integration with and visibility into CI/CD. IMHO the life cycle of an issue includes events from these. At some point PRs are created, CI tests them, the PR is merged (and thus closes the issue), and CD deploys the change to production. I'd love to have a Github issue tracker style integration into either Asana or Jira. In fact with a little feature work to adopt some asana like features, the Github issue tracker could end up being superior.