Tasks and projects
Asana feels fast in demos but bogs down once a project crosses a few hundred tasks, with drag, subtask loading and view switching all suffering.
What people actually say
✕Once a project exceeds roughly 500 tasks, dragging tasks up and down takes several seconds and basic editing becomes laggy.
Source: Asana Forum, extremely slow UI thread ↗✕Users with hundreds of projects report 3-4 minute load times when opening Asana, with subtasks especially slow to render.
Source: Asana Forum, loading speed thread ↗✕Reviewers consistently flag that Asana can freeze when switching between views on larger projects, hurting day-to-day flow.
Source: G2 Asana reviews ↗✕Reference projects built for ongoing operational work start running slowly as task counts grow, with no workspace-side levers to fix it.
Source: Asana Forum, reference project slow with lots of tasks ↗
A bespoke build runs tasks on a real Postgres schema with composite indexes on the columns you actually filter by (assignee, due date, status, project) so a project with 50k tasks opens in under a second. We virtualize the list and board views in Next.js so only visible rows render, batch-fetch subtasks on demand, and shape the data model around your domain rather than forcing everything through a generic task table.