Depentra vs Asana
Asana is work management for teams of every kind, with projects, portfolios and goals. Depentra is a planner built around dependencies: what links to what, what a delay moves, and what to do about it.
Last verified 1 October 2026 against Asana's public documentation.
Choose Asana if you coordinate many teams' work, goals and requests, and plans are mostly sequences of tasks with due dates.
Choose Depentra if your schedule has real logic in it: lags, float, dependencies between projects that move dates, and delays you want to test before they happen.
This compares Asana projects with dependencies, timeline and Gantt view.
Dependencies and scheduling, side by side
| Capability | Depentra | Asana |
|---|---|---|
| Dependency types | All four: FS, SS, FF and SF, on every plan, including Free | All four: FS, SS, FF and SF[1] |
| Lag and lead | Yes, on every plan, including Free | No dependency lag setting, per Asana's community (August 2026)[2] |
| Total float on every task | Yes, on every plan, including Free | Not described in the documentation we reviewed |
| Critical path | Yes, on the Standard plan and up | Yes, on the timeline[3] |
| Baselines | Yes, on the Professional plan and up | Yes, Compare Baseline in Gantt view[4] |
| Dependencies between projects | Yes, in Programs, on the Standard plan and up | Tasks can depend on tasks in other projects; per community answers, dates do not shift across projects[5] |
| Simulate a delay without changing the plan | Yes, the What-If Delay Simulator, on the Professional plan and up | Not described in the documentation we reviewed |
"Not described in the documentation we reviewed" means we could not find it in Asana's help pages, not that it is impossible. If something here has changed, tell us and we will correct it.
Where Asana is the better fit
- Work management for every team, with requests, rules and goals around the projects.
- Portfolios and goals that connect projects to company objectives.
- A polished, widely adopted interface.
What Depentra does differently
- Every dependency type with lead and lag, and total float on every task, on every plan, including Free.
- The What-If Delay Simulator: delay any task and see what moves, the new finish date and the float used, without touching the live plan, on the Professional plan and up.
- Dependency analysis that shows how a delay travelled, task by task, and what sits downstream of any task, on the Standard plan and up.
- Programs that roll projects up and link tasks across them, so a dependency between two teams sits in one place, on the Standard plan and up.
- Pentra, Depentra's AI assistant, answers questions about your plan in plain language.
Depentra does not do automatic resource levelling or time tracking, and has no public API.
Moving a plan to Depentra
Export the project to CSV, then import it into Depentra; import from Excel or CSV is on every plan.
To see your own plan's dependencies first, paste its rows into the free delay simulator: no account needed.
Sources
- Asana Forum: Mastering advanced task dependencies in Asana
- Asana Forum: Dependencies with lags
- Asana Help: Critical path on timeline
- Asana Forum: Introducing Gantt view
- Asana Forum: Dependencies between tasks of different projects
Asana is a trademark of its owner. Depentra is not affiliated with or endorsed by Asana's owner.