Overview

What can you achieve with Asana’s API?

Collaboration across teams and tools works best when everyone stays in sync and processes flow easily and without friction. This is why we have Asana’s API: it’s a platform to ensure all of your information is up to date and that your teams stay efficient and in the loop.

Asana’s API provides a means for software and scripts to read information from inside Asana, input information from outside Asana, and automatically react when things change. This can include:

• Consistently doing repetitive or tedious tasks.
• Chaining a process together by responding to changes.
• Creating reports on the state of tasks and projects.
• Staying in sync with other software such as Slack or Salesforce used in your organization.
• Pulling information from other locations like email or Evernote into Asana.
• Adding new features on top of Asana.
• Customizing Asana for your team’s processes and workflows.

The role of Asana’s platform is to allow Asana to meet your team where you are and how you work. Asana is built to be flexible and powerful, to be intuitive enough for all teams to adopt and maintain clarity on who is doing what by when. Asana’s platform enables you to specialize this flexibility to maximize efficiency. Here are some ideas for what you can build:

Doing repetitive work

Integrations and bots are great for making sure that repetitive tasks are always taken care of. Running a script with Asana’s API can quickly take care of work like moving cards between board columns, setting assignees or due dates based on the state of the task, or asking that all custom fields are set before work can begin on a task. This can save time and overhead when trying to keep your projects clear and correct.

Reacting to changes

Workflows with Asana often have a “when this task changes, do something” feel. An example is moving tasks between projects based on subtasks: if one team completes a subtask, move the parent task to the next team’s project. Integrations can be built to respond in near-real time to changes in Asana to move work forward to the next step.

Generating reports

Fetching the state of the tasks in a project or for your teammates can unlock the ability to create simple - or complex - metrics around how you are progressing. How many open tasks are there in the project? Who has the most tasks assigned? How often does the due date of each task get shifted back? Our platform enables pulling of data from Asana to make customized metrics to track your work.

Keeping in sync

Teams frequently use a multitude of software tools to accomplish work, from email to asset management to file storage. These specialized tools are often used with colleagues who don’t track their work with Asana; and even if they do, keeping all of your tools in sync makes the transitions between tools straightforward to minimize work about work.

Some of our integration partners, like Tray.io, Unito, and Zapier, offer syncing solutions out of the box with common workplace tools, or you could build your own solution in cases where you need more flexibility, such as when connecting to customized or internally-built software.

Capturing work

Asana is built for teamwork and knowing who is doing what by when. Having an easy way to capture information in Asana makes it less likely that work will slip through the cracks. For example, when communicating with people who work in other companies who aren’t members of your Asana organization, an integration like we built for Gmail lets you create follow-up tasks with just a few clicks.

Getting information into Asana in a quick and easy way is important for ensuring that you don’t drop the ball. Asana’s platform is a great way to pull information from many channels into Asana with minimum hassle.

Extending Asana

Asana is built to be a tool that works well for all teams, so we build features into our core product that aren’t overly opinionated about how you get work done. At the same time, there is opportunity for teams to use Asana in a specialized way or with specific additional features. When there are features that you’d like Asana to have, our platform is a resource to make them happen. As a matter of fact, some of our more successful integrations like Instagantt exist purely to provide additional features to Asana.

Customizing workflows

Integrations or scripts work great to maintain a custom workflow, saving a team member from having to continually pay attention to the state of tasks in Asana.

Whether it’s ensuring that custom fields are filled out, tasks are completed, tasks live in the correct board-view column, or automatically assigning tasks at certain stages in your process, integrations can react to changes in Asana to ensure that everyone is up to date. When processes mature around how you get work done, it’s a great time to use Asana’s platform to make sure everything stays consistent and clear.

Check out some examples of integrations we’ve built on Asana below:

• Reminder Bot - don’t let a task slip away!
• Q&A Response Times - measure goals and maintain a consistent process.

Learn more or submit an app you’ve built

Read more on how to get started building on Asana or submit an app to add to our apps page.