Asana Data Export: Good Formats, No Answers

Asana starts this report better placed than almost anything we have scored. JSON and CSV, available on every plan including the free one, with exports of Search Views and My Tasks as well as projects.

Then you look for what the file contains, and the documentation simply stops.

The absence

Asana's export article explains why you might want an export — backups, spreadsheet analysis, sharing with stakeholders, documentation requirements, integration with other systems. It lists which plans can do it. It shows you where the button is.

It never says what is in the file.

Not "comments are included." Not "comments are excluded." Nothing about attachments, custom fields, subtask nesting or task history, in either direction.

This is the weakest export documentation we have read, and the gap matters more here than it would elsewhere, because Asana is a product people configure. Teams build custom fields for their own reporting and hold years of decisions in task comments. Whether those survive an export is the entire question, and it is the one question the page does not touch.

A tension in our own scoring, stated openly

Asana scores 20. So does Teamwork.com. Trello scores 20 as well — and Trello's documentation is excellent, scoring full marks, because Atlassian states its limits plainly: a 1,000-action ceiling, no comments in CSV, archived cards excluded.

That produces an uncomfortable result. A product that discloses real losses can score no better than one that discloses nothing.

We have not adjusted the numbers to hide it, because the honest response is to say how to read them. A score built on disclosure tells you what you will lose. A score built on silence tells you only that you do not know. Trello's 20 is a measured 20. Asana's 20 is a 20 with error bars on it, and the error bars run in both directions — the export may well be excellent.

Which is why the checklist on this page is longer than most. When the vendor will not tell you, the test export becomes the documentation.

Project by project, with no register

There is no documented account-wide export. Exports are per project, plus Search Views and My Tasks.

For a small team with six projects that is a mild inconvenience. For an agency with sixty, it is an afternoon of repetitive clicking with no progress indicator — nothing in the product records which projects you have already exported, so the tracking is yours to invent.

Search Views are the underused answer here. A saved search that matches everything assigned to your team, or everything modified this year, exports as one file and cuts across the project boundary. If you are leaving Asana, build the search first and export that, rather than working down the project list.

Choose JSON, and know why

The format choice is more consequential in Asana than in most products, because of what Asana models.

Asana understands that tasks nest inside other tasks, that one task can block another, and that a piece of work can belong to a project and to a wider goal at once. That is genuinely relational structure.

A CSV is one flat table. It can hold a row per task and columns of values. It cannot hold a hierarchy, so subtask relationships either flatten into a column of parent references or disappear.

JSON can carry that structure. Whether Asana's JSON export actually does is, again, undocumented — but it is the format with the capacity, so it is the one to take.

What the free plan gets right

One clear point in Asana's favour, and it is worth stating because so many competitors fail it.

Export is listed on every tier, including the free Personal plan. There is no upgrade required to leave. Compare that with Trello, where CSV export and any workspace-level export require Premium, or Wrike, where the only complete export is limited to Business and above.

A company that lets free users take their data out is making a small statement about how it expects to keep them, and it is to Asana's credit.

The verdict

20 out of 30, and read it as a provisional score.

The mechanics are good: open formats on every plan, self-service, no documented caps. If the file turns out to carry comments, attachments and custom fields, Asana belongs in the low twenties alongside monday.com and Jira.

We cannot say that it does, and neither will Asana. So the practical advice is unusually simple: run one test export this week, while nothing depends on it. Twenty minutes now answers a question that otherwise gets answered during a migration, which is the worst possible time to discover that four years of discussion did not come with you.

If you are weighing Asana against its closest rival, the buying comparison is Asana vs monday.com — and monday.com's export, covered in its own exit report, documents its exclusions in a way Asana does not.