To set up an intake form in Asana, open the project you want requests to land in, click the Customize menu, choose Add and then Forms, then build your questions and connect them to task fields. Publish the form and share its link, and every submission lands as a new task in that project.
That is the whole loop in one breath. The part that decides whether an intake process actually holds up is everything around it: which questions you ask, where the tasks land, who gets notified, and which of these features your plan even includes. I have built request pipelines in Asana for marketing teams, IT desks, and a couple of agencies, and the form itself is rarely where things break. Below is how I set them up now, including the limits I wish someone had told me before I promised a client something the free plan could not do.
Where Asana forms fit, and the plan wall you hit first
Forms are Asana’s built-in intake mechanism. Instead of chasing requests across email, Slack threads, and hallway conversations, you publish one link, and each response becomes a standardized task. Good for creative requests, IT tickets, event submissions, purchasing asks, anything with a repeatable shape.
The catch that trips people up on day one: forms are not part of the free Personal tier. Asana’s own documentation lists forms as available on Starter, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+. If you are on the free plan and planning an intake process, budget for at least Starter before you design anything. I break the tiers down further in our guide to Asana pricing, but the short version is that Starter covers basic forms and Advanced adds the parts that make them genuinely useful at scale.
Building the form, step by step
The setup flow is short once you know the menu path. From inside the project that should receive the requests:
- Open the project and click the Customize menu in the top-right corner.
- Under Add, click Forms. This opens the form builder.
- Rename the form and add a description. By default the form inherits the project’s name, which is almost never what you want a requester to see. The description field is where you set expectations, such as turnaround time or what counts as a complete request.
- Review the two default questions, Name and Email. Keep the email question unless you have a reason not to, because it drives the submitter’s confirmation email.
- Add your questions. Use short-answer, single-select, multi-select, date, and attachment types as needed. Under the Form content tab you can also drop in a Heading to group questions into sections, either from the Content list or by hovering and clicking + Add a heading.
- Open the Settings tab to choose which section tasks land in, pick a field for the task title, decide who can access the form, and optionally copy all answers to the task description.
- Click View form to preview exactly what submitters will see, then publish and copy the share link.
One setting worth turning on early: in the Settings tab you can automatically add the submitter as a collaborator on the task their submission creates. For internal requesters, that keeps them in the loop on status without anyone doing manual follow-up.
Mapping answers to task fields
A form that only fills in the task name and description is a glorified email. The value comes from connecting answers to custom fields so the request arrives already sorted. When you build a question, click the Connect to field box and pick an existing custom field, or start typing to create a new one inline with the + Add option.
Date questions map with a bit of nuance. Choose Single day and the answer feeds the task’s Due date; choose Date range and you get separate Start date and End date inputs. If you already have a project full of custom fields, skip the one-by-one work: from the Questions tab click Fields, select the fields you want, and add them in bulk. Getting this mapping right is what lets a rule sort incoming requests by priority or team without anyone touching the task first. I cover that routing layer in our guide to Asana automations.
Branching and conditional questions
Branching is where Asana forms start to feel like a real intake tool. It lets you show follow-up questions based on a previous answer, so a design request and a video request can live on the same form without every submitter wading through irrelevant fields. You add a branch off a single-select or multi-select question by hovering and clicking the Add a branch icon, and you can nest up to five levels of branches within branches.
Two honest limits here. First, branching keys only off single-select and multi-select questions, so you cannot branch on a free-text or date answer. Second, and this is the big one, branching is gated to Advanced and above. On Starter you get a flat form, full stop. If your intake genuinely needs to fork by request type, that is your signal to price out Advanced rather than fight the flat form.
What each plan actually gives you
Only the rows below are ones I confirmed against Asana’s current help documentation. Anything I could not verify, I left out.
| Feature | Starter | Advanced |
|---|---|---|
| Create forms and map fields | Yes | Yes |
| Attachment questions | Yes | Yes |
| Branching (conditional questions) | No | Yes |
| Multiple forms per project | No | Yes |
| Custom confirmation message | No | Yes |
For reference, Starter runs $10.99 per user per month billed annually ($13.49 monthly) and Advanced runs $24.99 billed annually ($30.49 monthly). The jump from Starter to Advanced is roughly where forms stop being a convenience and start being infrastructure.
The gotchas nobody puts in the marketing copy
These are the real ones, drawn from Asana’s own forms documentation and from watching them bite in practice.
Deleting the email question silently kills confirmations. Asana notes that removing the email field means submitters no longer receive the confirmation email tied to their submission. Handy to know before you trim the form for brevity and accidentally leave requesters wondering if anything happened.
Section mapping fails quietly. If you map submissions to a specific section and someone later deletes that section, the form reverts to dumping tasks into the first section of the project. No warning, no error. On a busy board this is how requests start disappearing into the wrong column.
Form mapping does not override rules. If you already have a rule moving form submissions to a section, that rule wins over the form’s own section setting. When tasks land somewhere unexpected, check your automations before you blame the form.
You are capped at 20 forms per project. Generous for most teams, but worth knowing if you were planning to run every department’s intake through one mega-project. Multiple forms per project is also an Advanced feature, so on Starter you get exactly one form per project.
It is not a full form platform. If you need payment collection, complex validation, conditional logic on text answers, or heavy custom branding, dedicated tools like Typeform or Jotform still outclass Asana forms. Asana’s strength is that the response becomes a task in your workflow with zero handoff, not that it is the most flexible form builder on the market.
Making intake hold up over time
A form is step one. What separates a pipeline that survives from one that decays is the layer underneath: a rule that assigns and prioritizes each submission, a clear section structure, and someone actually reviewing the queue. If you are inviting external requesters who do not have Asana seats, request tracking lets non-licensed users reply to submissions over email, which keeps clients in the conversation without buying them a license.
Once submissions are flowing, build a view that shows volume and turnaround so intake does not become a black hole. Our walkthrough on Asana reporting dashboards covers the charts I use for exactly that. And if you would rather not build the form from a blank slate, several Asana project templates ship with a ready intake form attached, which our roundup of the best Asana templates points to.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a paid plan to use Asana forms?
Yes. Forms are not included in the free Personal tier. Asana’s documentation lists them as available starting on the Starter plan, with branching, multiple forms per project, and custom confirmation messages reserved for Advanced and higher. Budget for at least Starter before designing an intake process.
Can external people submit a form without an Asana account?
Yes. Anyone with the form link can submit without an Asana license, and each response creates a task in your project. If you want two-way follow-up, Asana’s request tracking feature lets non-licensed submitters reply to updates over email, so external clients stay in the loop without a paid seat.
What happens to file attachments submitted through a form?
Add an attachment question and submitters can upload briefs, images, PDFs, and similar files. Any file attached through the form is attached to the task created when the form is submitted. You can allow multiple attachments per question and toggle whether the attachment is required before the form can be sent.
Can I have more than one form in a single project?
Only on Advanced and above, where you can create up to 20 forms per project to handle different request types in one place. On Starter you are limited to a single form per project. If you need separate intake paths, that limit is often the reason teams move up to Advanced.
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