Leaving Asana is mostly a question of what you are prepared to leave behind. Asana makes it easy to get project data out, and every serious alternative has a way to get it in. But no route carries everything, and the parts that fall through are the ones a team leans on most: the section a task sits in, the custom field a report filters on, the rule that routes new work, and the task that lives in three projects at once. Decide what you need before you pick a route.
1. What Asana Lets You Export
Asana's projects page says you can export a project as a JSON or CSV file. A complete JSON backup of an entire organization is listed on its pricing page as Organization exports, part of the Compliance management add-on for Enterprise. For most teams, that means exporting project by project. Plan for it: list the active projects, archive the ones you will not move, and export each of the rest.
2. The Parts Most Likely to Fall Through
Four things deserve a check before you choose a tool. Multi-homed tasks: an Asana task can sit in up to 20 projects at once, while most tools give a task one home. Sections, which usually become columns or groups, but not always. Custom fields, which rarely survive. And rules, which no importer we read carries. ClickUp, for example, says its Asana importer brings projects, tasks, people, sections, completed tasks and attachments when selected, but does not automatically import freestanding tasks, nested subtasks or tasks shared between projects, and that automation rules and recurring tasks must be set up again. It also notes that an import can take from a minute to a few hours depending on data volume and Asana's rate limits.
3. What Kavanah Carries
Kavanah has two routes. The direct importer, on the Asana card in Settings, Integrations, is run by a workspace admin with a connected account or a Personal Access Token that is used for that request and not stored. Each chosen project becomes a new Kavanah project, with task names, descriptions, completed state, assignees matched by email or name, due dates and subtasks up to three levels deep, up to 25 projects and 2,000 tasks per run; re-running skips projects already imported. It does not bring sections, custom fields, tags, comments, attachments or dependencies, and a task that lives in two imported projects is created in both. The second route is an Asana CSV export, which Kavanah reads by Asana's column names and which turns each section into a board column, up to 1,000 rows per import; it keeps only the first tag and does not read parent-task, dependency or custom-field columns.
4. Shared Tasks Need Rethinking, Not Copying
Asana allows one assignee per task and recommends splitting shared work into subtasks or adding people as followers. If you move to a tool that allows several assignees, as Kavanah does, do not copy the workaround across. Turn a parent task with one subtask per person back into one task assigned to each of them, so it appears in each person's own work list.
5. Keep Asana as the Archive
Comments, attachments and the history of a task are the long tail every route drops or thins out. Do not try to carry all of it. Keep the exports, keep Asana readable for a period you choose, and say in the new tool where the old record lives. Then rebuild what matters by hand: the custom fields your reports use, the dependencies on your timeline, your rules as automations and your forms as intake pages.
A clean move off Asana is a short list made in advance: what moves, what you rebuild, and where the rest is kept. For the full comparison of what Kavanah, ClickUp and monday work management bring across from Asana, see our Asana alternative page.
