An Asana alternative for people who plan in Gantt charts
Asana is a team task tracker. If what you actually need is timeline planning, resource capacity and what-if scenarios — offline, with no per-seat fee — shadow-planner is a different kind of alternative.
Asana is excellent at what it's for: keeping a team's tasks visible and moving. But a lot of people end up on Asana's paid plans because they needed a timeline with dependencies and a way to see who is overloaded — and those are exactly the features gated behind per-seat pricing.
shadow-planner isn't a task tracker. It's a planning and controlling tool: Gantt, resource utilisation, portfolio view, what-if scenarios, and an AI assistant that understands all of it. It's a desktop app, it keeps data on your machine, and the unlimited version costs €4,99 once.
Side by side
| shadow-planner | Asana | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Planning and controlling: timelines, capacity, scenarios | Team task and workflow tracking |
| Pricing | Free tier; €4,99 one-time, no per-seat fee | Free basic plan; paid plans per user per month for timeline, workload and portfolios |
| Where data lives | Locally on your machine (SQLite) | Asana's cloud |
| Collaboration | Single-user desktop app; share via export (XLSX / CSV / JSON) | Real-time multi-user, comments, notifications |
| Gantt / timeline | Core feature, with finish-to-start dependencies and cascade preview | Timeline on paid plans |
| Resource utilisation | Weekly capacity vs. allocation, cost roll-ups from daily rates | Workload on paid plans |
| What-if scenarios | Isolated scenarios, snapshots, templates | Not a concept |
| AI | Chat assistant over your data + planning agent; bring your own model (local Ollama or cloud key) | Asana AI on paid plans |
| Offline | Fully | Limited |
Who should switch
- Project managers who plan, then hand off. You build the timeline and the capacity plan; the team tracks execution wherever they already do. shadow-planner doesn't try to replace that tracker.
- Consultants and freelancers juggling several clients who need a portfolio view and a cost roll-up, not a seat license per client.
- Anyone doing what-if planning. "What if we lose Chloé for March?" is a thirty-second question in a scenario and an afternoon of duplicating projects in Asana.
- Teams with data they can't put in a SaaS. Everything stays local; the AI can run locally too.
Who should stay
- Your team needs a shared, real-time task board with comments, assignees and notifications. shadow-planner is single-user by design.
- You rely on Asana's integrations (Slack, email-to-task, forms) as the intake for work.
Plenty of people use both: shadow-planner to plan and steer, Asana to execute. The scenario export to Excel makes the hand-off straightforward.
Install shadow-planner for free — the Gantt, utilisation and AI assistant are all in the free tier.