Stack replacement
Replacing Asana and Notion
A project brief in the tracker, a project page in the doc tool, and a client who has read one of them.
What the move costs
Asana and Notion overlap on purpose: Asana projects carry briefs and descriptions, Notion pages carry the same context in more detail, and neither is authoritative. Asana has no Polaris importer or connector, so projects export to CSV and are rebuilt as workstreams. Notion pages import within fixed caps. Neither tool provides team chat, which consolidation adds.
- Asana
- CSV export, manual rebuild
- Notion
- Imports, 25 pages per run
- Gained
- Team chat, in the same place as the work
Two tools that both think they hold the brief
Asana projects have an overview with a brief, a description field, and often a set of tasks whose descriptions carry more context than anyone intended them to. Notion has a page for the same project, with the research, the decisions and the version the client saw.
Neither is wrong and neither is complete. The account manager works from the Notion page. The person doing the delivery works from the Asana task. When the scope changes, one of the two gets updated, and which one depends entirely on where the conversation happened.
The other thing worth naming is the absence. There is no chat tool in this stack. Coordination runs through email, through Asana task comments, and through direct messages on whatever people already have open, which means half the decisions about a project are in an inbox that nobody else can search.
Where the pieces end up
Notion is the half with an import path. Asana is the half with the work.
| Source | Destination | How it gets there |
|---|---|---|
| Notion project pages | Docs, nested | Imports. Images, tables and databases are skipped |
| Asana projects and sections | Workstreams with lanes | Rebuilt by hand from a CSV export |
| Asana tasks with owner and date | Tasks in lanes | Rebuilt. Fast, because the data is already clean |
| Asana custom fields | Labels | Categorical fields only. Numeric and formula fields do not move |
| Asana portfolios and workload | Nothing equivalent | Does not move. Assign the reporting to a worker instead |
| Asana project briefs | Merged into the Docs page | Manual, and this merge is the point of the migration |
| Email and direct-message coordination | Team chat | New capability. Nothing to migrate |
A four-stage move for a client-services team
Sequenced so that no live client project is ever mid-migration.
- 1
Import Notion first and read the skipped count
Twenty-five pages per run, sub-pages three levels deep, sixty pages and fifteen hundred blocks in total. If the skipped-block count comes back high, your project pages were mostly screenshots and embedded tables, which tells you how much of the brief was never text in the first place.
- 2
Merge each Asana brief into its Notion page
Do this before touching tasks. One page per project, holding everything, with one date at the top saying when it was last true. This single act removes the ambiguity that made the stack confusing, and it is worth doing even if you stop the migration here.
- 3
Rebuild only projects that started this quarter
Export everything from Asana to CSV for the archive. Recreate as workstreams only the projects with live delivery, and let finished client work stay in Asana read-only. Client projects that ended do not need to exist twice.
- 4
Move coordination into chat and hire for the reporting
The status emails become messages next to the work. The weekly client update that somebody assembles by hand becomes a standing task for an AI worker with the connections it needs, delivered as a comment with a file, closed by the account manager after reading it.
Read next
An Asana alternative for teams pushed off the free plan
The third person on the team is now a billing event. That is why this search exists.
A Notion alternative for teams tired of maintaining the database
Notion is the best place to write the plan. The question is who executes it once the page is written.
Asana pricing, checked August 2026
One of the few vendors that prints both billing rates, and the gap is twenty-three percent.
Notion pricing, checked August 2026
Two seat prices and a second meter for AI, which is the part that surprises people on renewal.
Replacing Asana and Slack
Rules that fire into Slack, replies that never come back, and a portfolio view built for people who do not do the work.
Replacing Notion and Trello
A page describing the project and a board describing the same project, kept in step by somebody's memory.
Polaris for agencies
You already know what an hour of delivery sells for. This is a page about what it costs.
Questions people ask
+Which tool do we move first?
Notion, because it is the only one of the two with an importer and it takes minutes rather than days. Once the pages are in Polaris Docs, merge each Asana project brief into the matching page. Only then rebuild tasks, so the tasks get created from a single agreed description rather than two competing ones.
+Does anything import from Asana?
No. Asana is not in the Polaris connection catalog and there is no importer. Asana exports projects to CSV and JSON, which serves as an archive. Live projects are rebuilt as workstreams with lanes, and for a client-services team that usually means only the current quarter's work.
+We coordinate by email today. Is adding chat actually an improvement?
It is when the decision needs to sit next to the work rather than in one person's inbox. This stack loses scope changes to email threads that only two people can see. Whether that is worth changing how your team communicates depends on how often somebody has had to forward a thread to explain what was agreed.
+What about client access?
Polaris software is free with no seat count, so adding people costs nothing regardless of how much they read. On a per-seat tracker, client-facing collaborators are one of the more expensive line items, which is why agencies often keep clients out of the tool entirely and end up back in email.
+Can an AI worker write our weekly client update?
It can be assigned that as a standing task with acceptance criteria, given the connections it needs from the catalog. A cloud machine wakes for the task, works the tool loop, ticks the criteria as it goes and delivers the update as a comment with a file. A person reads it and closes the task, because the machine never marks its own work done.
Related
An Asana alternative for teams pushed off the free plan
The third person on the team is now a billing event. That is why this search exists.
A Notion alternative for teams tired of maintaining the database
Notion is the best place to write the plan. The question is who executes it once the page is written.
Asana pricing, checked August 2026
One of the few vendors that prints both billing rates, and the gap is twenty-three percent.
Notion pricing, checked August 2026
Two seat prices and a second meter for AI, which is the part that surprises people on renewal.
Tool stack cost for a 25-person team
The size where paying monthly instead of annually costs $1,650 a year on its own.
Replacing Asana and Slack
Rules that fire into Slack, replies that never come back, and a portfolio view built for people who do not do the work.
Replacing Notion and Trello
A page describing the project and a board describing the same project, kept in step by somebody's memory.
Polaris for agencies
You already know what an hour of delivery sells for. This is a page about what it costs.