Best European Alternatives to Asana
Looking for a European alternative to Asana? While great for project management, Asana is a US company storing your work data on American servers.
European project management tools offer similar capabilities with data stored in Europe and full GDPR compliance.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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1
European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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2
Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
8 European Alternatives to Asana
Factro
German project management with task management
OpenProject
Open-source project management with Gantt charts
Zenkit
Flexible project management with multiple views
awork
Project management from Hamburg with tracking built in
Teamwork.com
A European alternative to Asana, monday.com, Basecamp
Tenzu
French open-source agile PM, the Taiga successor
Key takeaways
- Asana has an EU data centre in Frankfurt, but only on Enterprise and Enterprise+, arranged through sales.
- Asana, Inc. is American, so even the Frankfurt region leaves the provider reachable under the CLOUD Act.
- The free plan stops at ten users; factro is free to ten and MeisterTask free to three per project.
- MeisterTask is the closest match in feel, with ISO 27001 and Frankfurt hosting on every plan.
- OpenProject is the only one here that replaces the portfolio and reporting half rather than the task half.
Why people leave Asana
Asana is the best-looking work tracker in this market and the one non-technical teams adopt fastest. People rarely leave because the product disappoints them.
They leave because of where it sits. Asana, Inc. is a US corporation, so the CLOUD Act reaches it, and while there is a real EU data centre in Frankfurt, it is an Enterprise and Enterprise+ feature you reach by contacting sales. A department on Starter has no European storage option at all.
The second reason is the shape of the pricing. The free plan stops at ten people, and portfolios, workload and goals, the features that make Asana more than a task list, sit on the tiers above. Teams end up paying for a platform to get a timeline.
- The EU data centre is behind the Enterprise door Asana opened a Frankfurt data centre and it is genuinely an EU region, not a promise. What it is not is available: it applies to Enterprise and Enterprise+, it is arranged through sales, and the whole organisation has to sit in one region. Compare that with Jira, where residency is a self-service toggle included from Standard. If EU storage is a requirement, on Asana it is a procurement project.
- And Frankfurt does not change the jurisdiction Even on Enterprise, the data resting in Germany does not alter who can be compelled to produce it. Asana, Inc. is American, so a valid US order reaches the company wherever the servers are. For an organisation whose concern is disclosure rather than storage location, the upgrade buys the wrong thing, and it is the more expensive thing.
- Ten people, then the tiers begin The free plan covers up to ten users, which is exactly the size at which a team stops being a team. Above that you are on Starter, and portfolios, workload and goals are further up again. European tools on this page start free for ten users, free to self-host without a seat limit, or from around €6.50 per user, and several include what Asana reserves for its upper tiers.
- It tracks work but does not manage projects Asana is superb at who is doing what by when, and thin at what it costs and whether it is on budget. There is no native time tracking, no cost tracking, and a timeline rather than a real critical path. Teams that grow into project management, rather than task management, hit that wall and start pricing add-ons.
What you have to replace, not just match
Decide which half of Asana you use, because the two halves have different answers on this page.
The first half is the work tracker: tasks, assignees, due dates, sections, a board and a timeline, used daily by people who are not project managers. Every tool here covers it, and the deciding factor is which one your team will open.
The second is the management layer: portfolios, workload, goals and reporting, read weekly by somebody above the teams. Only OpenProject genuinely covers that, and it covers it differently, with budgets and baselines instead of goals and portfolios. If you use both halves, look there first and accept the change in feel.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | MeisterTask | Munich area, Germany | Free tier / from about €6.50/user/month | EU (Germany) |
| #2 | factro | Bochum, Germany | Free for up to 10 users / from about €7.99/user/month | EU (Germany) |
| #3 | Taiga | Madrid, Spain | Free self-hosted / cloud from about €5/user/month | EU (Spain) |
| #4 | OpenProject | Berlin, Germany | Free Community Edition / Cloud from about €5.95/user/month | EU (Germany) |
| #5 | Zenkit | Karlsruhe, Germany | Free plan / from about €9/user/month | EU (Germany) |
| #6 | awork | Hamburg, Germany | From €5/user/month billed annually (€8 monthly), Standard €12, Professional €22 | EU (Germany) |
| #7 | Teamwork.com | Cork, Ireland | Free up to 5 users / $9.99/user/month (Basics) / $24.99 (Accelerate), billed yearly | EU (Ireland) |
| #8 | Tenzu | France | Free self-hosted / cloud on a pay-what-you-want model | EU (France) |
How each alternative compares to Asana
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Asana is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (Frankfurt).
- Source code. Closed source, as Asana is.
- Independently checked. ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA.
Best for: Teams who like Asana and need the data in Germany without an Enterprise contract
MeisterTask is built by MeisterLabs GmbH near Munich, hosted in Frankfurt and certified to ISO 27001 alongside GDPR and CCPA compliance. Against Asana the point is not that it does more; it is that the thing Asana reserves for Enterprise is standard here.
Asana's Frankfurt data centre is real and it is an Enterprise and Enterprise+ arrangement you reach through sales. MeisterTask is in Frankfurt on every plan including the free one, from a German company, with an external audit behind it.
What you lose is the management layer. No portfolios, no workload view, no goals. For a team that used Asana as a shared task list with a timeline, that is nothing; for an organisation that ran portfolio reviews on it, it is the whole thing.
What MeisterTask does better than Asana
- Frankfurt hosting on every plan, where Asana puts its EU data centre behind Enterprise and a sales call
- A German operating company, so no US corporation holds the data at all
- ISO 27001 with regular external audit, which Asana does not put in front of you at this price
- Time tracking included on paid plans, where Asana needs a separate integration
- From about €6.50 per user per month, below Asana's paid tiers
Where MeisterTask is a step down from Asana
- No portfolios, no workload view and no goals
- The free tier caps at three members per project, narrower than Asana's ten users
- Less polished than Asana, which is the thing Asana is best at
- A much smaller integration catalogue
Standout against Asana. It puts an audited ISO 27001 certificate and a German data centre on the free plan, which is the combination Asana sells as an Enterprise upgrade.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Asana is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (exclusively).
- Source code. Closed source, as Asana is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: German-speaking organisations that want one country for company, servers and support
factro is built by Schuchert Managementberatung GmbH & Co. KG in Bochum and hosted exclusively in Germany. It is free for up to ten users, which is precisely where Asana's free plan stops, and about €7.99 per user per month after that.
The argument against Asana here is alignment rather than features. Company, servers, support and law all sit in one country, and there is no region to request and no plan to upgrade to get it. For an organisation whose procurement rules ask where the supplier is established, that is a one-line answer.
It is less polished than Asana and strongest in German-speaking markets. Both are fair criticisms and neither is the reason people choose it.
What factro does better than Asana
- Free for up to ten users, matching Asana's free tier without the US corporation behind it
- Hosting exclusively in Germany, with no region to request and no Enterprise plan to reach it
- German company, so establishment rather than adequacy or a transfer mechanism
- Tree structures and project hierarchies that Asana approximates with sections and portfolios
Where factro is a step down from Asana
- Less polished than Asana, and that shows on the first morning
- Strongest in German-speaking markets, with a smaller English-language community
- A modest integration catalogue
- No goals feature of the kind Asana ties work to
Standout against Asana. It is the only tool here whose company, servers, support and jurisdiction are all in the same country, with nothing to configure to make that true.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Spain). Asana is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Europe (cloud) or self-hosted anywhere.
- Source code. Open source, where Asana is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Development teams using Asana sections as a sprint board
Taiga comes from Kaleidos Ventures SL in Madrid under an MPL 2.0 licence, free to self-host and available on a European cloud. It does Scrum and Kanban as first-class concepts: backlogs, sprints, epics, user stories and burndowns.
Against Asana the difference is that a sprint is a thing rather than a convention. Plenty of engineering teams run two-week cycles in Asana by making a section called "Sprint 24" and moving tasks in and out of it, which works right up until somebody asks for velocity.
For everybody else on an Asana account, this is the wrong tool on the page. Marketing, operations and client work fit badly into a product built around user stories.
What Taiga does better than Asana
- Sprints, backlogs and burndowns as real objects instead of sections named after them
- Open source under MPL 2.0, so the deployment and the code are yours
- Spanish company with EU hosting, or self-hosted, with no Enterprise tier to unlock it
- Free to self-host and free on the hosted plan for open-source projects and non-profits
Where Taiga is a step down from Asana
- Built for software teams, so most Asana users are not the audience
- No portfolios, no workload, no goals
- Reporting beyond the sprint is thin
- A small company and a small ecosystem
Standout against Asana. It is the only tool here that measures velocity, which is the question that eventually breaks an Asana section pretending to be a sprint.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Asana is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (EU) or self-hosted.
- Source code. Open source, where Asana is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Organisations that use Asana portfolios, workload and reporting
OpenProject is AGPL-licensed software from OpenProject GmbH in Berlin, free to self-host with no seat limit or hosted from Germany from about €5.95 per user per month.
It is the only tool on this page that answers the management half of Asana rather than the task half, and it answers it in a different language. Instead of portfolios and goals you get work packages across projects, Gantt charts with baselines, budgets, and time and cost tracking, with a permissions model built for organisations.
It is also the only one that can run entirely on your own servers, which settles the jurisdiction question rather than moving it. The price is weight: this is not a tool a team adopts on its own.
What OpenProject does better than Asana
- Budgets, baselines and cost tracking, where Asana has a timeline and no native time tracking at all
- Self-hostable under AGPL with no seat limit, so no provider holds the data and no Enterprise plan is involved
- German company and German hosting on the cloud edition, available on every plan
- Cross-project reporting without the tier upgrade Asana asks for portfolios
- From about €5.95 per user per month hosted, below Asana's paid tiers
Where OpenProject is a step down from Asana
- Far heavier than Asana, and adoption is the risk that decides migrations like this
- No goals feature of the kind Asana ties work to
- Setup and administration are real work, especially self-hosted
- The interface is competent rather than pleasant, and Asana users notice
Standout against Asana. It is the only tool here that puts a budget and a baseline on a project, which is what an organisation asks for right after it outgrows a task tracker.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Asana is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (EU).
- Source code. Closed source, as Asana is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Teams where the list view was never quite the right view
Zenkit is made by Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH in Karlsruhe and hosted in Germany. The same records can be a board, a table, a calendar, a mind map or a hierarchy, with each person choosing how they look at the work.
Against Asana that lands on a specific annoyance. Asana gives you list, board, timeline and calendar, and the person who wanted to filter and sort like a spreadsheet keeps a parallel file anyway. Zenkit makes the table a first-class view of the same data.
It is a smaller product than Asana with a smaller ecosystem, and it does not have the management layer. It also costs nothing to test, which for a team unsure about leaving is worth more than a feature list.
What Zenkit does better than Asana
- German company and German hosting on every plan, with no Enterprise tier to reach it
- Table, mind map and hierarchy views over the same records, which Asana does not offer
- A free plan for small teams, and no US corporation in the chain
- Notes and databases in the same suite rather than in another subscription
Where Zenkit is a step down from Asana
- No portfolios, workload or goals
- Less polished than Asana
- From about €9 per user per month, the most expensive European option here
- A much smaller integration catalogue
Standout against Asana. It ends the parallel spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet is one of the views rather than the thing somebody keeps beside the tool.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Asana is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany, on Microsoft infrastructure.
- Source code. Closed source, as Asana is.
- Independently checked. ISO 27001.
Best for: Teams who liked Asana and need the servers in Germany without buying Enterprise
awork is built by awork GmbH in Hamburg and hosted on ISO 27001 certified Microsoft servers in Germany. It is the best-looking tool on this page and the one an Asana user recognises fastest: projects with phases, tasks with owners, a timeline, and time tracked against the work.
Against Asana it adds the two things Asana never did and asks you to integrate: time tracking and a workload view across people. Asana has a workload feature on its upper tiers; awork puts capacity in front of you as the default question.
On hosting, say it precisely. Asana operates an EU data centre in Frankfurt available on Enterprise and Enterprise+, arranged through sales. awork is a German company with German servers on every plan. The infrastructure provider underneath is Microsoft, which is a shorter chain than Asana's but not an entirely European one.
What awork does better than Asana
- German servers on every plan, where Asana puts its Frankfurt data centre behind Enterprise and a sales call
- A German company, so the contracting party is not a US corporation
- Time tracking built in, which Asana leaves to an integration
- Workload across people without a tier upgrade
- From EUR 5 per user per month annually, below Asana's paid tiers
Where awork is a step down from Asana
- Runs on Microsoft infrastructure, so a US provider sits under a German company
- No goals feature of the kind Asana ties work to
- No free plan at all, where Asana covers ten users
- A smaller integration catalogue than Asana by a wide margin
Standout against Asana. It gives you the Frankfurt hosting Asana reserves for Enterprise, on the cheapest paid plan, from a company that is itself German.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Ireland). Asana is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. AWS, in both US and EU regions.
- Source code. Closed source, as Asana is.
- Independently checked. ISO/IEC 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type 2.
Best for: Agencies tracking billable hours in an Asana project
Teamwork Crew Limited has been in Cork since 2007 and holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type 2. It is the most established European alternative here and the only one where the commercial side of a project is part of the product.
Against Asana the gap it closes is money. Asana tracks who does what by when and has nothing to say about what it costs or what you can invoice. A large share of Asana accounts are agencies doing exactly that, with the billing living in a spreadsheet beside the tool.
The caveat is the infrastructure: Teamwork states its servers are with AWS in both US and EU regions. The company is Irish and outside the CLOUD Act, the hosting provider is not.
What Teamwork.com does better than Asana
- Billable time, budgets, retainers and invoicing as objects, none of which Asana has
- ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type 2 certification
- Irish company, so the contract sits inside the EU with no Enterprise upgrade for that
- A free plan for five users and $9.99 per user after that
Where Teamwork.com is a step down from Asana
- Hosted on AWS across US and EU regions, so an American provider is in the chain
- Denser and less polished than Asana, which is Asana's strongest suit
- No goals feature
- Aimed at client services, so an internal product team uses half of it
Standout against Asana. It is the only tool here that can produce an invoice from the work, which is the half of an agency's job Asana has never modelled.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Asana is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Europe (cloud) or self-hosted anywhere.
- Source code. Open source, where Asana is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Developers whose Asana project is a sprint with sections
Tenzu is built by BIRU, a French worker cooperative, under AGPLv3, free to self-host and pay-what-you-want on their European cloud. Scrum and kanban with backlogs, sprints and stories as actual objects.
It belongs here because Asana is excellent at task tracking and has no concept of a sprint. Engineering teams inside an Asana organisation end up making a section called "Sprint 12" and counting velocity by hand, or not at all.
For everyone else on an Asana account this is the wrong entry on the page, and awork or MeisterTask above it fits better.
What Tenzu does better than Asana
- Sprints, backlogs and burndowns as real objects, which Asana does not have at all
- Owned by a worker cooperative, so no investor decides the product's future
- AGPLv3 and free to self-host, with no seat limit
- European hosting on every plan, with nothing to request
Where Tenzu is a step down from Asana
- Built for software teams, so most of an Asana account is not the audience
- Founded in 2024, the shortest track record here
- No portfolios, no workload, no goals
- A small ecosystem and little third-party integration
Standout against Asana. It measures velocity, which is the number the engineering team inside your Asana organisation has been estimating in their heads.
What actually breaks when you switch
Tasks travel and structure does not. Asana exports to CSV and JSON and everything here imports CSV, so tasks, assignees, dates and custom fields arrive intact. Subtask hierarchies often flatten on the way, and attachments usually need re-uploading.
Rules, forms and portfolios are the work. Automation rules do not export, intake forms have to be rebuilt, and portfolio structures map differently onto every tool here because none of them uses that concept in Asana's shape. Decide how that maps before you start moving projects.
And be honest about the drop in polish. Asana is the nicest product in this comparison, and the teams who used it daily will say so within a week. That is a real cost, it lands on the people who did not ask for the migration, and it is best answered with time rather than with a memo.
Asana has a Frankfurt data centre. Is that not enough?
It depends which requirement you are meeting, and the two get confused constantly. If a procurement rule says customer data must be stored inside the EU, the Frankfurt region meets it, and Asana genuinely offers it.
The catch is access rather than existence. It applies to Enterprise and Enterprise+ only, it is set up through sales rather than in settings, and the whole organisation has to move at once. For a fifty-person company that is a pricing conversation, not a checkbox.
And if the requirement is about who can compel disclosure, Frankfurt does not address it. Asana, Inc. is a US corporation and a US order reaches the company regardless of region. Only a provider established in Europe changes that answer.
Which of these has portfolios and workload like Asana?
OpenProject, and not in the same shape. It has portfolio-level reporting across projects, resource and cost tracking and real baselines, which is more than Asana offers on the management side, but it is expressed as project management rather than as goals and portfolios.
Zenkit and factro can report across projects at a simpler level, enough for a department but not for a PMO.
MeisterTask and Taiga do not try. If the weekly portfolio review is the reason Asana exists in your organisation, those two are the wrong end of this page.
Is any of these free for a team of more than ten?
Yes, two of them, and it is the most practical difference on this page. factro is free for up to ten users and OpenProject's Community Edition has no seat limit at all when you host it yourself. Taiga is also free self-hosted.
MeisterTask's free tier is narrower than Asana's, capping at three members per project, so for a team of eight it is a paid plan either way.
The honest arithmetic on self-hosting counts an administrator. Free software on a server nobody maintains is a liability rather than a saving.
Will the team notice the downgrade in polish?
Yes, and it is worth saying rather than glossing over. Asana is more refined than anything on this page, and refinement is why people open a tool on a Monday morning.
MeisterTask closes most of that gap and is the reason it ranks first here. Zenkit and factro are workmanlike. OpenProject is a different category of software and feels like one.
If the move is driven by compliance rather than by the team, plan for the friction: a week of someone sitting with them costs less than a migration people quietly route around.
Which one to pick
If the requirement is EU storage and you are not going to buy Asana Enterprise, MeisterTask is the straightforward answer: Frankfurt on every plan, ISO 27001, and close enough in feel that adoption is not the risk.
If you want company, servers and support in a single country and a free plan at the same ten users Asana gives you, factro is the more exact match.
If your Asana is portfolios, workload and a weekly review, OpenProject is the only tool here that replaces that, and self-hosting it also removes the provider from the question entirely.
And if the real complaint was always that the list view is not a spreadsheet, Zenkit fixes that specific thing and costs nothing to try.
Frequently Asked Questions
MeisterTask if you want the closest thing in feel, hosted in Frankfurt with ISO 27001 behind it. factro if a free plan for up to ten users matters and you want German-only hosting. OpenProject if you use portfolios, workload and reporting. Zenkit if people keep asking for a table or calendar over the same tasks. Taiga if the work is software sprints.
It can, on Enterprise and Enterprise+. Asana operates a data centre in Frankfurt and Enterprise customers can have their organisation's data hosted there, arranged through sales rather than in settings, with the whole organisation in one region. On the free, Starter and Advanced plans there is no EU storage option.
It can be used compliantly: Asana offers a data processing agreement and, on Enterprise, EU storage. What stays true regardless is that Asana, Inc. is a US corporation and therefore within the reach of the CLOUD Act, so a US order reaches the provider wherever the data is stored.
Asana is free for up to ten users, then Starter and Advanced per seat, with the EU data centre reserved for Enterprise. On this page factro is free for up to ten users and about €7.99 per user after that, MeisterTask from about €6.50, OpenProject's cloud from about €5.95, Zenkit from about €9, and OpenProject and Taiga are free to self-host with no seat limit.
Tasks yes, structure partly. Asana exports projects to CSV and JSON, and every tool here imports CSV, so tasks, assignees, due dates and custom fields arrive. Subtask hierarchies sometimes flatten, attachments usually need re-uploading, and rules, forms and portfolio structures have to be rebuilt.
Yes, and it is one of the few places where these tools are ahead. MeisterTask includes time tracking on paid plans and OpenProject has both time and cost tracking natively, tied to work packages and budgets. On Asana that is an integration with a separate subscription.
It is built by Schuchert Managementberatung in Bochum and is strongest in German-speaking markets, with hosting exclusively in Germany. The product itself is usable in English. If your organisation needs a supplier whose servers, company and support all sit in one country, that single-jurisdiction alignment is the reason it is on this page.
Two things. Goals tied to the work underneath them, which is a genuinely good feature and only OpenProject reaches from a different angle. And the integration catalogue, which is far larger than anything here, so a connection you rely on may exist there and nowhere else. Check that list before committing.
A single team is an afternoon. An organisation using portfolios, rules and forms across departments should plan several weeks, and most of it goes on rebuilding rules and deciding how portfolios map onto whatever the new tool calls them, not on the tasks themselves.
Who worked on this review
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