6 Tips for Creating a Jira and Asana Integration (+ Guide)
If you’re anywhere near the tech world (or my LinkedIn profile), you’ve probably heard of Jira and Asana.
Both project management platforms lend themselves to different use cases. Asana markets itself as a collaborative work management platform that tracks tasks and works with Kanban-style views, while Jira leans into bug tracking and the Agile project management sphere.
Why I Have Used a Jira & Asana Integration
Both Jira and Asana have their individual strengths, which is why it’s common for companies to have some teams using Jira and other teams using Asana. A Jira and Asana integration can bring these worlds together. I have seen firsthand improved cross-team collaboration thanks to a well-orchestrated integration.
In this article, you’ll discover what you need to know to connect Jira with Asana (including a step-by-step guide on setting up your integration
By the time you finish reading, you’ll also know:
- The benefits of integrating these two platforms
- Some best practices for getting the most out of your integration
- How to use the integration to leverage productivity across departments and teams
And just for fun, we also threw in an overview of these two popular project management platforms.
Note: This article focuses on integrating with Jira Cloud, as Atlassian will stop supporting Jira Server in February 2024.
Jira Overview
Jira is often used for technical projects like software development, bug tracking, or engineering project management. Founded in April 2002 in Sydney, Australia, by parent company Atlassian, the product was instantly successful and has become one of the most popular project management tools for organizations that use Agile methodologies, according to the 16th Annual State of Agile report.
Jira offers many helpful features that make it a favorite for project managers, including:
- Scrum or Kanban views – Having two different views allows you to set up your project in the way that works best for your team and its workflow.
- Options to create rules and automation – Creating rules and automation takes some of the manual work of Jira, like assigning to another team member or transitioning statuses, off of the people so you can spend more time executing the things that matter.
- Create custom fields and statuses – One size does NOT fit all and Jira knows that, too! With the ability to create custom fields to track data or statuses unique to your organization, Jira allows you to customize and track your project in a way that gets you the information you care about.
Asana Overview
Asana is used for more general project management by teams like Marketing, Customer Success, or Product. Founded in 2008 in San Francisco, CA, the product launched in April 2012. Asana’s flexible platform allows users to create workflows that work best for their needs.
Asana allows users to create easy, customizable workflows in many ways, including:
- Organizing work in different views – Similar to Jira, Asana offers multiple view options, like List and Kanban, so that users can organize and view information in a way that works best for them and their team.
- Create subtasks – Sometimes, you need to break down the work. By allowing users to create subtasks, Asana encourages accountability and time management by taking bigger tasks and allowing them to be completed in bite-sized pieces.
- Assign and filter tasks and subtasks – Asana allows you to assign tasks and subtasks to teammates and enables users to filter by a teammate in the main view of a project. This set of features makes allocating work and tracking who is working on which tasks is easy.
What is a Jira & Asana Integration?
An integration is the process of connecting one app to another for optimizing and exchanging data, usually via API. What does this mean? Simply put, it’s a way for two separate apps to talk to one another and share information.
This is valuable because the ability to have your tech stack applications talk to each other not only improves visibility and accessibility but also complements the way your teams operate with each other to save time and allows business to run efficiently.
6 Tips for a Jira & Asana Integration
Integrating Jira and Asana allows an organization to combine the strengths of both platforms to create a singular world that multiple departments or teams can work out of without impeding on each other’s workflows. Connecting the two platforms allows teams to achieve many different tasks without having to master two separate platforms. Here are some benefits and need-to-know tips for best leveraging an integration between Jira and Asana.
1. Improve communication between teams
Integrating two powerful applications like Jira and Asana allows for seamless collaboration between the two products and sharing of data that might otherwise be separate or siloed. But to facilitate this improved collaboration, you must integrate the two platforms thoughtfully. (More on how to do that in the next section.)
When setting up your platform, you’ll want to avoid configurations that complicate your workflow by sending over duplicate data or forcing redundant communication between teams about what task is in which status, what needs to be done, what needs to happen next, etc. Properly integrating the two applications allows you to get the information you need (and nothing more) without needing direct access to both platforms.
2 . Stay in the “world” you love most
Your Jira and Asana integration should allow you to stay in the platform that you’re the most comfortable with. For instance, using Asana’s app-integration capability to integrate with Jira allows users in Jira to see which tasks in Asana coincide with Jira work. Users in Asana can also create tasks in Jira while still in Asana. This streamlined workflow allows for easy visibility between teams while staying in the apps they feel most comfortable with and protecting their project ecosystems while allowing collaboration.
3. Make sure the fields you need will sync properly
Many fields sync from Asana to Jira, but a few aren’t supported. It’s important to note that other fields only sync from Jira to Asana. Before integrating, you’ll want to ensure the fields you need will sync. You will also need to ensure that users have permission in Jira and Asana to create new issues and work with the fields most beneficial to your teams.
4. Understand your team’s workflow
A Jira and Asana integration might not be the best solution for every organization. Even though the two applications remain separate, allowing for the transfer of information between the two can lead to confusion for certain projects.
While each platform guides how to get the most out of the integration, like Asana’s reference chart that outlines how a field in that platform shows up in Jira, the value of the integration should still be a discussion that happens with thought to the goals and outcomes of the project.
5. Translating between two apps might be more trouble than it’s worth
Each application has its own jargon and status structure, so marrying the two worlds might require more mapping and translation than project leaders are willing to do. For example, a Jira Sprint can be exported to Asana, but a Sprint cannot be created in Asana and pushed back to Jira. Sometimes, this one-way communication might create more trouble than it’s worth.
6. Think about which platform works best for each team
At Visor, we use both Jira and Asana, so we’re no strangers to the incredible capabilities of both platforms. Our organization uses Asana to track one-on-one meetings, individual tasks, and design projects. We also use Jira to track our engineering tasks and projects because of Jira’s ability to integrate well with GitHub (we’ll save that integration for another day).
Since our Product and Design teams work in Asana, we’ll often link the Asana tasks to the corresponding engineering tickets in Jira. Linking tasks allows the Engineering team to see where Design and Product work is in the process so they have a good idea of what’s coming down the pipeline and when a project will be ready for coding.
Step-by-Step Guide for Setting Up a Jira & Asana Integration
Step 1: To integrate the Jira Cloud app with Asana, you need a Jira Cloud account and edit access to the Jira project you are working with.
Step 2: In Asana, navigate to the “Customize” button in the top-right corner of your Asana project screen.
Step 3: From there, navigate to Apps and click “Add App.” Select Jira Cloud and then click “Add to project”. You can then authorize your Jira account. Asana users can open an Asana task, create a Jira issue from Asana, or link to an existing Jira issue.
Step 4: To sync data from the Jira Cloud to Asana, you can decide whether you want to update information from Asana to Jira, from Jira to Asana, or on a project level only. Inside Asana, you will see an option to choose your integration preferences.
Step 5: To sync data from the Jira Cloud to Asana, you can decide whether you want to update information from Asana to Jira, from Jira to Asana, or on a project level only. Inside Asana, you will see an option to choose your integration preferences.
For teams leveraging Jira Server, Asana offers a plugin for Jira integrations. Not only is this a more complicated process, but Atlassian will no longer support Jira Server by February 2024. Jira Data Center users also have a separate integration process, as noted by Asana in its documentation.
Other Ways to Connect Teams With Integrations
Integrating Jira and Asana isn’t the only way to connect teams with different priorities and workflows in your organization.
Some tools, like Visor, offer bidirectional integrations that can pull in information from your favorite project management software, like Jira, and push data back out.
Since the integrations with Visor are bidirectional, you can draft Jira issues, add custom fields that only live in Visor and don’t sync to Jira, use Jira data to create visual datasets like resource allocation graphs or Gantt charts, or color-code by key fields such as assignee or status.
Unlike most project management systems, Visor requires minimal training or onboarding since the application features an easy-to-use spreadsheet, making it accessible to all team members regardless of technical ability.
If you need extra support, Visor’s Customer Success team will happily book a quick 30-minute chat or training session. You can reach us via chat in the Visor app.