Project management that speaks architecture.

Asana is a beautifully designed project management tool used by hundreds of thousands of teams. The task management is best-in-class — assigning work, tracking progress, managing dependencies, and keeping teams aligned. The workload management and reporting features are genuinely excellent. For software teams, marketing departments, and operations groups, Asana is often the right choice.

The mobile apps are polished on both iOS and Android. The integration ecosystem is huge. And Asana scales well — from small teams to large organisations. There’s a reason it’s one of the most popular PM tools in the world.

Architecture practices are a different story. Your work doesn’t break down neatly into tasks and subtasks. It moves through stages — concept design, schematic design, design development, documentation, construction. Each stage has deliverables. Each deliverable has versions. Alongside the project, there are client decisions to record, documents to manage, time to track against fee structures, and budgets to monitor.

Asana’s task-centric model forces you to flatten this rich structure into lists and boards. The nuance gets lost. And because Asana has no built-in time tracking or billing, you end up integrating Harvest or Toggl for time, and something else entirely for invoicing.

Setout was built around architecture project structure from day one. Stages, deliverables, decisions, and documents are first-class concepts, not custom fields bolted onto a task manager. Time tracking and billing are integrated, with fee structures that match how architects actually work — fixed, percentage-of-construction-cost, and hourly.

If your practice needs a general-purpose tool that works across departments, or you’re already deeply embedded in Asana’s ecosystem, its versatility is a real strength. But if your core challenge is managing architecture projects and client relationships, Setout gives you purpose-built structure without the workarounds.