Four gallery templates earn their place for most teams: Campaign management for marketing, Work requests for intake, Product launch for cross-functional releases, and Event planning when events are on the calendar. Beyond those, the template that changes how a team works is one you save from your own best-run project, and that is a paid feature.
The gallery is big because it is a marketing asset
Asana’s template gallery is sorted by team, marketing, operations and PMO, design, IT, product and engineering, HR, and sales and CX, and it keeps growing. Part of that size is genuine range, and part of it is that every template page also works as a search landing page for Asana. That mix matters when you are shopping, because a good number of entries are little more than a project with a few named sections and some placeholder tasks. You could build that yourself in ten minutes and skip the cleanup.
I set up Asana for client teams for a living, and my shortlist has barely moved in years. The templates worth deploying are the ones that arrive with real scaffolding: sensible custom fields, an intake form, and a workflow already wired in. That structure saves genuine setup time. A named-columns board does not. The skill is telling the two apart before you commit a team to one.
The gallery templates I actually deploy
Campaign management
The strongest thing in the gallery and the one I install most. It gives a marketing team a structure for tracking deliverables across channels with status fields already in place. Two edits every time: delete the sample tasks before anyone sees the project, and cut any custom field the team will not commit to updating weekly. A field nobody maintains is worse than no field, because it makes the board look current when it is not. Pair the template with a real reporting rhythm, my guide to Asana status updates and progress reporting covers the cadence that keeps these projects honest.
Work requests, Creative requests, and IT requests
These three are one idea aimed at different teams: a form on the front, a triage board behind it. If your ops, design, or IT team currently takes work through Slack messages and hallway asks, any of them pays back the setup time inside a week. The failure mode is stopping at intake. A request queue with no capacity planning behind it just moves the pileup from your inbox to a board column, the same problem I solve with the monday.com workload management setup on that platform. Build the queue, then decide who has room to take the work.
Product launch
Worth it because launches are cross-functional and repetitive, which is exactly what templates are for. The value is the checklist effect: product, marketing, and sales see the same sequence every release, and nothing hinges on one person remembering step nine. Use Asana’s version for your first launch, then save that finished project as your own template. Your second-release template will beat the generic one because it carries your teams, your fields, and your actual handoffs.
Event planning
Worth using if events are a regular fixture, because event work is deadline-driven in a way that punishes winging it. The template keeps budget, vendor details, and day-of tasks in one project. One discipline: do not run several events in a single project. Duplicate it per event and archive each one when it wraps, so last quarter’s conference is not cluttering this quarter’s board.
Kanban board and Goal setting: think twice
The Kanban board template is a blank project in board view with columns already named. Creating a new project and choosing the Board layout gets you the same thing without deleting sample cards first. Goal setting is better served by Asana’s actual Goals feature, which lives on the Advanced plan; as a plain project template it tends to become a list of ambitions nobody ever marks complete. Neither is harmful, but neither earns a spot on a real shortlist.
Which template fits which team
| Template | Best for | Plan reality |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign management | Marketing teams tracking multi-channel work | Its custom fields and forms need Starter or higher |
| Work / Creative / IT requests | Intake for ops, design, and IT | Forms and rules need Starter or higher |
| Product launch | Cross-functional release coordination | Timeline view needs Starter or higher |
| Event planning | Deadline-heavy, recurring events | Basic structure usable on any plan |
| Goal setting | Quarterly objectives | Prefer the Goals feature on Advanced |
| Your own saved templates | Any process you repeat monthly or more | Creating them needs Starter or higher |
One caveat runs through the whole table. The gallery opens on every plan, but the templates worth having lean on custom fields, forms, and rules, and those are paid features. On the free Personal plan you get the section-and-task skeleton, not the workflow underneath it. That gap is why the free-plan experience of “the best Asana templates” feels thinner than the gallery marketing suggests.
Custom templates are the feature that matters
The gallery gets the search traffic, but saving your own projects as templates is what changes how a team operates. A saved template can carry tasks, milestones, subtasks, due dates, assignees, sections, custom fields, forms, and rules, so your intake form and automation replicate with every new project instead of being rebuilt from memory each time. That is the difference between a template that documents a process and one that runs it.
This is gated to paid plans. The free Personal plan has no Save as template option and caps you at two users. To create templates you need Starter, which runs $10.99 per user per month billed annually, or $13.49 billed monthly, per Asana’s pricing page. Advanced, at $24.99 annually ($30.49 monthly), adds portfolios, native Goals, and workload management, but nothing template-specific that justifies the jump on its own. If templates are your reason to upgrade, Starter is the honest answer.
Two behaviors are worth knowing before you rely on this. When you save a project as a template, Asana switches its permissions to comment-only, so nobody quietly edits the master copy. And due dates inside a template are relative: they recalculate from each new project’s start or due date, so a six-week cycle stays accurate no matter when you launch it. Both are documented in Asana’s Help Center article on saving a project as a template.
The mistake I see most: a team saves its biggest, messiest project as the template because it is the one with the most in it. Everything present at save time replicates forever after, including the dead tasks and the abandoned fields. Clean first. And if your process leans harder on automation than on structure, read my comparison of Asana vs Airtable for task automation before you template anything, because rule-heavy workflows sometimes belong in a different tool entirely.
How to create a project from a gallery template
- Click Create in the top bar of Asana, then choose Project.
- Select Use a template.
- Your organization’s saved templates appear under your team’s tab; open Explore templates to browse Asana’s curated gallery by use case.
- Click any template to preview its structure, then click Use template in the top-right corner.
- Name the project and set its start date or due date, since every relative deadline recalculates from that anchor.
How to save your own project as a template
- Open the project you want to reuse and clean it: delete one-off tasks, clear stale assignees, and remove fields that never got used.
- Click the drop-down arrow next to the project name in the header.
- Select Save as template. Permissions on the template switch to comment-only automatically.
- To build one from scratch instead, open your team’s Templates section and click New template.
- Find saved templates later under your team, or in the Use a template list the next time you create a project.
When to skip the template and build from scratch
A template codifies a process, which is only useful once the process is stable. If it is not, the template locks in the mess and hands it authority. I tell clients to run a workflow manually at least three times before templating it. By the third pass you know which fields matter, which steps were theater, and who actually does the work.
Build from scratch when the project is genuinely one-off, when it has fewer than ten or fifteen recurring tasks (duplicating a clean project beats maintaining a template at that size), or when a gallery template’s structure fights your reality. If you catch yourself renaming half the sections, you should have started blank. And when the real need is cross-project reporting rather than project structure, no template solves it, that is a dashboard problem. It is worth seeing what a dedicated reporting layer looks like in my ClickUp dashboards setup guide before you decide Asana’s per-project views are enough.
Common questions about Asana templates
Are Asana templates free to use?
The gallery opens on every plan, and you can create projects from Asana’s curated templates on the free Personal plan. The catch is that most templates rely on custom fields, forms, and rules, which Personal does not include. What you actually get on the free plan is the section-and-task structure, not the workflow that makes the template useful.
Can I create my own templates on the free plan?
No. Saving a project as a template and building templates from scratch both start on the Starter plan, at $10.99 per user per month billed annually. The free-plan workaround is duplication: keep a clean master project and use Duplicate project each time. It works, but nothing stops a teammate from editing the master by mistake.
What can an Asana project template include?
Tasks, milestones, subtasks, descriptions, due dates, assignees, sections, custom fields, forms, and rules, per Asana’s Help Center. In practice the high-value pieces are the form, the rules, and the fields, since those take longest to rebuild by hand and they replicate perfectly into every new project you spin up from the template.
Do template due dates adjust automatically?
Yes. Deadlines inside a template are stored relative to the project’s start or due date, and Asana recalculates every task date when you create a new project from it. Set that anchor date deliberately at creation. Skip it and you will spend an afternoon dragging dates around the Timeline to fix what the template would have handled.
What is the difference between project and task templates?
Project templates replicate an entire project structure. Task templates live inside one project and standardize a recurring work item, like a bug report with required fields. If your repetition happens at the task level, where the project persists but individual items repeat, task templates are the lighter and more accurate tool for the job.
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