Podio & Asana as a CRM: Which one should hold your customer relationships?
Friday, about half three. The Asana board looks lovely. The website build’s on track, the designer knows what’s next, and someone has finally got round to chasing the client for photos.
Then you spot a proposal that went out a fortnight ago and has had no reply. Did anyone chase it? You thought Sam had. Sam, it turns out, thought you had.
So delivery’s fine. Sales has fallen down the gap between two people, which is really what this comparison is about.
Can Podio and Asana work as a CRM?
Both can, up to a point. Podio will do the job if someone owns the build and keeps it maintained. Asana copes with simple sales tracking. The harder test is whether follow-ups still happen in a busy week.
Two decent tools that started life doing different things
People sometimes dismiss Podio as “not a real CRM”, which seems a bit harsh. It’s a work management platform you configure yourself, and plenty of businesses have built their customer records in it. Contacts, enquiries and projects can each be their own app, linked so that one enquiry points to the right people and the right job.
Where that really helps is when your process is a little unusual. We’ve seen enquiries involving three properties, a couple of decision-makers and a landlord who has to approve everything (usually slowly). A plain contact list gives up quite quickly in that situation. Podio doesn’t.
You get automation too, depending on what you pay. Advanced Workflows come with Plus and Premium, and the more capable Workflow Automation tool is Premium only. Configured well, it’ll create tasks from dates, send emails and notifications, and update linked records on its own.
Somebody does have to build it, mind. They’ll be deciding how everything links together, what runs automatically, and who sorts it out when the process changes next spring. Some businesses have a person who genuinely enjoys that. In a lot of founder-led firms, though, the person in question is the founder, who is also selling, delivering and doing the VAT return on a Sunday night. Podio’s flexibility then becomes one more thing on a list that was already too long.
Asana comes at it from the opposite direction. Organising work is what it does best: every task has an owner, a deadline and enough context that your team can get on without pinging you every half-hour. Asana’s own advice is to set customers up as tasks or projects with custom fields for each pipeline stage, and they offer a sales pipeline template as a starting point.
If you’re a small team and your sales process is fairly simple, honestly, that might be all you need. Don’t let anyone talk you into another subscription purely because your current setup doesn’t sound grown-up enough.
What we’d suggest is poking at the edges a bit. Where does the email history end up? What happens when the same client has two separate opportunities on the go? If a prospect replies on a Tuesday evening, who actually sees it? Integrations and careful setup can often fix these things. Better to find out now than three months in.
What this looks like in a small Leeds agency
Picture a web design agency in Leeds with six people. (It’s an illustration rather than a client story, though a few readers may wince in recognition.)
Website builds go through Asana and, to be fair, it works nicely. Discovery, design, development, testing, everyone clear on their part.
Enquiries live on a different board. Each prospect gets a task, a proposal deadline and a reminder to chase. Nothing wrong with any of that.
Then a client they haven’t heard from in two years emails about a second site, and halfway down the same message asks roughly what a maintenance package would cost. Now there’s a fresh task, an old archived project, and a fairly valuable thread sitting in the owner’s inbox where nobody else can see it. One person on the team knows about the maintenance question. The person writing the website quote doesn’t.
No dramatic failure. It just got harder to follow the relationship than to follow the work, and it was the best part of a week before anyone clocked it.
The real choice is what you want to be responsible for
When you line up Waggle Dance CRM vs Podio and Asana, the natural instinct is to tally features and pick the biggest number. Most of us chose a broadband contract that way at some point and lived to regret it.
What you’re actually choosing is how the business remembers things and hands them over, particularly when everyone’s stretched. Features matter to that, but less than you’d expect.
Software can remind people, but it can’t decide for them
A sales system that works will tell you, quickly and reliably, who someone is, what they’re after, what’s been agreed and what should happen next. That information needs to hold up during a chaotic fortnight. It can’t rely on the founder being free to explain why some deals are orange and others are a slightly different orange.
This is the bit where behaviour counts for more than the tool. Lots of owners put off following up because they don’t want to come across as pushy, even if they’d never say so out loud. Or a deal sits in “Proposal sent” for a month because no one ever agreed when it should move on, or be closed. A reminder will nudge someone. It won’t settle a decision nobody made in the first place.
Because Waggle Dance is a behaviour-led growth consultancy, we tend to start by watching how your team really sells, before anyone talks about switching platforms. Occasionally Podio needs stripping back. Occasionally Asana is perfectly good at its job and has simply been asked to carry the customer relationship as well, which it was never really designed for. And now and then the software is completely fine and nobody owns the follow-up.
The kitchen drawer problem
Nearly every house has one. Batteries, old takeaway menus, a key that opens nothing anyone can remember, and chargers for phones you got rid of in 2019.
You can usually find what you want in it. Ask a visitor to fetch the spare charger, however, and you’ll find yourself directing them from the other side of the kitchen.
Customer records go the same way over time. Everything’s technically there, but only one person can lay their hands on it quickly. That’s manageable until they go on holiday, or a colleague leaves, or enquiries suddenly double. A fair test: could someone else pick up a live customer conversation without phoning you while you’re on a sun lounger in Crete?
How to decide without losing a fortnight to demos
Sitting through another demo of features you’ll never open isn’t a great use of an afternoon. These four checks use your own enquiries instead.
Trace a recent enquiry
Choose a real one and follow it from the first message to wherever it’s got to. Find the emails, the proposal, who owns it and what happens next. Then hand the same job to a colleague and stay out of it.
If you both land on the same answer without much fuss, you’re in reasonable shape. If it takes three tabs, a WhatsApp search and some educated guessing, you’ve found something concrete to fix. We cover what those gaps tend to cost in Why Small Businesses Fail Without a CRM (And How One Could Save Yours).
Test an ordinary interruption
Say whoever is handling a particular opportunity calls in sick tomorrow. Would anyone else be able to see what was promised, and by when?
Replies are worth testing as well. A prospect answers one of your automated emails: does the right person notice, and does the sequence actually stop, or does it carry on cheerfully sending “just checking in”? When you’re looking at new software, ask them to show you that specific scenario. Not the highlights.
Add up the whole cost
The licence fee is the easy part to compare. Then there’s setup, training, any extra tools, ongoing maintenance and a fair chunk of your own time, which people nearly always forget to count. Check which plan genuinely includes what you need, because messaging, integrations and specialist setup sometimes cost extra.
The cheaper option may well still be right for you. Just compare two working systems, rather than one bare subscription against somebody else’s finished build.
Pilot a small slice first
Move a handful of live enquiries across before shifting everything. Keep the stages simple, give each opportunity a single owner, and make a dated next action compulsory.
Give it a few weeks, then look at what people are really using. If a field is left blank every single time, it’s either pointless or nobody understands what it’s for. Adding another six fields won’t help in either case.
Today's Deep Dive
What to do next
First, pin down what’s slipping. Is it that information is scattered, that handovers go wrong, or that follow-ups quietly don’t happen? They need quite different fixes, so it pays to know before you spend anything.
If Podio, or whatever you’re using now, is roughly right, CRM optimisation is probably where we’d start. There’s no need to bin something you’ve already paid for and half built.
Where the trouble is mostly lead handling and inconsistent follow-up, Waggle Dance CRM could be a good fit. It runs on GoHighLevel and is set up for UK service businesses, so customer records, pipelines, messages and automation sit together rather than across four tabs. If you’re curious about the platform choice, we explain it in Why We Built Waggle Dance CRM on GoHighLevel.
You wouldn’t necessarily drop Asana. The Leeds agency, for instance, could quite happily keep it for delivery and use a CRM for the commercial side. Running two systems does mean agreeing where customer details live and exactly how a won deal turns into a project. Check any integration against how you really work, too, because two apps “connecting” doesn’t guarantee the handover between them goes smoothly.
Sometimes the issue is less about software and more about habits, priorities or who’s accountable for what. Coaching alongside the system tends to help there, and Why We Use CoachAccountable for Business Coaching explains how we keep agreed actions visible between sessions.
FAQs
Can I use Podio as a CRM?
You can, and plenty of businesses do. It has configurable apps, linked records and automation, so a sales process can be built around it. How well it works comes down to how carefully it’s set up, and whether anyone keeps it up to date once the novelty wears off.
Can Asana replace a CRM?
For a simple process, often yes. Asana handles basic customer and pipeline tracking without much trouble. If you need communication history in one place or automatic follow-ups, try those out in your own setup before relying on them, as you may end up needing integrations or a separate CRM.
What is Waggle Dance CRM?
It’s our CRM, built on GoHighLevel and set up for UK service businesses. You get customer records, pipelines, messaging and marketing automation together. It’s there to manage the commercial relationship, so you might well keep your existing delivery tools.
How much does Waggle Dance CRM cost?
£149 a month plus VAT for the CRM on its own, or £499 a month plus VAT with fortnightly business coaching included. Do check the scope, and whether your setup involves any extra charges, before you sign up.
Still weighing up whether to keep Podio, tidy up Asana or bring in a proper CRM? Book a free Clarity Call, and bring along one enquiry that’s got awkward to keep track of. We’ll start there rather than with a feature list
