Mainline vs Asana
Asana is a generic project management tool. It is used by marketing teams, ops teams, customer success teams, legal teams, and engineering teams, with roughly equal effectiveness. Its data model - task, project, milestone, assignee, due date - is the lowest common denominator across knowledge work. That generality is the product.
Mainline is the opposite design choice. It is project management for engineering teams that practice trunk-based development, continuous integration, and continuous delivery, and it is unsuitable for any other kind of team. The data model encodes the practice: stories on a story map, two-person activation, lead-time distributions instead of due dates, deploy-versus-release distinction, unreleased inventory tracked as waste.
If your engineering team is using Asana because the rest of your company uses Asana, the tool is being asked to do something it was not designed to do. If your engineering team is using Asana because you specifically want generic task management with no opinions about how engineering work flows, then Asana is fitting your situation correctly and you should not switch.
| Mainline | Asana | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary unit of work | User story on a story map | Task in a project |
| Estimation model | Lead-time distributions from your team's actual history | None native; manual fields if you want them |
| Backlog | None. A backlog is a landfill. | First-class concept (sections, sub-tasks, dependencies) |
| People per story | As many as are working on it. Solo, pair, or ensemble. | One assignee. You cannot put a second person on a task. |
| What "done" means | Released to users | Marked complete |
| Deploy / release lifecycle | Deploy and release are separate events. A story cannot be released until it has been deployed. | No distinction - tasks are marked complete |
| Who can see what | Every view is the same view, including the manager's | Configurable views, manager-specific reports |
| Per-developer metrics | None. Surveillance is not a feature. | Available via the reporting surface |
| WIP enforcement | One active story per person - enforced as a database-level unique constraint, not a soft limit | None |
| Pricing model | Flat. Free for one person. $99 / 8 people. $179 / 16 people. | Per seat. $11-$25 / user / month. |
| What happens if your team grows past the price band | Start a second Mainline | Per-seat cost grows with headcount |
| Data export | Full JSON export including complete event history | CSV export (task-list-shaped) |
| Worldview encoded in the data model | Continuous flow with paired delivery | Generic task management for any team |
When to choose Mainline
Your engineering team has its own process and its own tool budget. You are willing to use a tool that is uniquely shaped for your work, not one shared with marketing and ops. You practice trunk-based development and continuous delivery, or want to.
When to choose Asana
Your company has standardised on one project management tool across all departments and you want engineering work visible alongside everything else. You don't have opinions about how engineering work should flow and don't want a tool that imposes them. You value cross-team coordination over engineering-specific workflow. For these situations, Asana is the right answer.
We also have comparisons against Jira and Linear. If you'd like to see Mainline compared to a tool we haven't covered, email us.
Or see Mainline running in the demo -- no signup, read-only.
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