The Asana integration for Microsoft Teams lets you turn Teams messages into Asana tasks, create and assign work straight from the composer, embed a project as a channel tab, and route Asana notifications into chat. You install it from the Teams Apps store, sign in with your Asana account, and pick a workspace to connect. It runs on paid plans on both sides.
Before you install: plan and admin requirements
The first thing that trips teams up isn’t technical. According to Asana’s own documentation, the integration runs on paid Asana tiers only — Starter, Advanced, and the Enterprise plans. If your organization is on the free Personal plan, the app won’t connect, and reinstalling won’t change that. You need a paid Asana plan first. On the Microsoft side, the free version of Teams doesn’t support third-party app installation at all, so a paid Teams plan is required too.
There’s an admin gate as well. Your Teams administrator has to allow the Asana app before anyone can add it. If the app doesn’t show up when you search, that’s usually the reason — it’s blocked at the tenant level rather than genuinely missing. An admin can approve it from the Teams admin center by finding Asana under managed apps and switching it to Allow. Pinning it there also makes it easier for everyone to find later.
How to install Asana in Microsoft Teams
Use the Teams desktop app for this. A couple of the better features — embedded project tabs and in-meeting task creation — only work on desktop, so starting there saves you a reinstall.
- Open the Apps tab in the left navigation bar of Microsoft Teams.
- Search for Asana (it may appear as Asana Project management) and select it.
- Click Add to install the app for yourself. The Asana bot then appears in your 1:1 chats.
- Open the Asana bot chat. It prompts you to sign in — click through and authenticate with your Asana account.
- Verify or select the Asana workspace you want to connect. If you belong to more than one, this is where you choose; you can switch later with the bot’s change workspace command.
- Optionally, pin the Asana app to your left navigation so it’s one click away.
Sign-in runs on OAuth, and if your company uses Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) for single sign-on, Asana ties into it. Per Microsoft’s certification listing, the permissions the app requests are delegated and fairly narrow — reading basic team and channel names, reading chat members so it can add them as task collaborators, creating a Teams tab, and confirming who you’re signed in as. Asana attests that the app doesn’t store Microsoft customer data on its side.
What you can do once Asana is connected
Turn a Teams message into a task
This is the feature most teams install it for. On any message, open the More actions menu (the three-dot icon) and choose Add message to task. Search for the task you want, and the message is attached as a comment on it. To spin up a brand-new task from a message instead, use the create task option — you can set an assignee, a due date, and a project without leaving the conversation.
Create and search tasks from the composer
Click the Asana logo in the message composer to search your tasks, projects, and portfolios, then drop a link into the chat. Pasting any Asana URL also unfurls it into a preview with the relevant details. The + button in the Asana composer dialog opens a Create new task form, so you can log work mid-conversation and keep the thread moving.
Embed a project as a channel tab
To give a channel a live view of a project, click the + at the top of the channel to add a tab, search Asana, and pick the project to embed. Access control carries over exactly from Asana — people see only what their permissions allow, and they log in with their own credentials. One catch worth knowing up front: embedded project tabs render only in the Teams desktop app, not the mobile or web versions.
Route notifications into chat
You can link a project to a chat or channel so updates land in Teams. In the + menu, choose Link Project, then pick the project. Selecting My Tasks gives you personal notifications — when you’re assigned or unassigned work, when due dates shift, when dependencies complete, and when someone comments on a task you follow. For anything more targeted, Asana Rules can fire a Send channel message or Send direct message action on triggers like a status change or a new comment. Full Asana Inbox notifications inside Teams are an Enterprise-tier feature; other paid tiers rely on the project-linking route above.
The limitations worth knowing before you roll it out
A few rough edges show up once real people start using it day to day.
- Notification noise is real. Linking an active project to a busy channel can flood it. Because personal notifications cover comments, dependency changes, and due-date shifts, a chatty project generates a lot of pings. Link narrowly, and lean on Rules for specific triggers rather than linking whole projects by default. If notifications stop appearing entirely, that’s usually a linking or permission problem rather than a bug — the usual reasons Asana notifications aren’t showing up covers the fixes.
- Rules actions need Microsoft admin consent. The Send channel message and Send direct message rule actions require permissions authorized in Microsoft Entra. If a rule silently fails to post, check with your Microsoft admin before assuming the problem is on the Asana side.
- Desktop-only gaps. Embedded project tabs and in-meeting task creation don’t work in the Teams web or mobile apps. If your team mostly works from phones, that limits how much of this you’ll actually use.
- Meeting setup is order-sensitive. For Teams Meetings, the organizer has to add the Asana tab before the meeting starts. Add it mid-call and attendees won’t get it. Tasks created during a meeting also default to being visible only to the person who made them inside Teams — they always exist in Asana, but colleagues won’t see them in the meeting panel.
- View-only users are limited. An Asana view-only seat can sign in, set up and view project tabs, and see link previews, but can’t create or comment on tasks or use the AI chat.
FAQ
Does the Asana Teams integration work on the free Asana plan?
No. Asana’s official documentation lists the integration as available on paid tiers only — Starter, Advanced, and the Enterprise plans. The free Personal plan can’t connect it. You also need a paid Microsoft Teams plan, since free Teams doesn’t allow third-party app installation. Confirm the current tiers on our Asana pricing breakdown before committing.
Do tasks stay in sync between Teams and Asana?
Tasks you create or update through the integration are real Asana tasks. They live in Asana and appear in your Asana My Tasks list like any other. The integration isn’t a two-way mirror of Teams content, though. It creates and surfaces Asana work inside Teams; it doesn’t copy your Teams chat history back into Asana.
How is this different from the Slack integration?
The mechanics are similar — a bot, message-to-task, project notifications — but Teams adds embedded project tabs and in-meeting task creation that depend on the desktop app. If you run both tools, our Asana Slack integration setup guide covers that side, including its own paid-plan notification gate.
