Asana Templates: Project Templates That Save Setup Time

Asana templates come in three kinds. Gallery templates are ready-made projects Asana publishes for common jobs. Custom project templates are projects you save from your own work, with sections, tasks, roles, relative due dates, fields, forms and rules, so every new project starts the same way. Task templates live inside a project and stamp out one recurring kind of task. Project templates are available on every plan; custom templates need a paid plan, and Asana’s own feature page is not consistent about which one. The fastest route to a template that works is to run one real project, tidy it, and save it, rather than designing a template from scratch.

The kinds of Asana template

• Gallery templates. Asana’s template gallery↗ (opens in a new tab) is organized by team, including marketing, operations and PMO, design, IT, product and engineering, HR, and sales and customer experience, and by use case such as campaign management, content calendars and IT ticketing. Asana says it has over 80 ready-made templates for common workflows.
• Custom project templates. A project you save as a template. When someone creates a project from it, they get its structure: sections, tasks, assignees, due dates, dependencies, rules and fields, according to Asana.
• Task templates. Set up once inside a project and used from the Add new menu or the plus button beside a section. Asana’s help center says a task template can set the task type (task, milestone or approval), title, assignee, relative due date, dependencies, custom fields, description, collaborators, subtasks and attachments.
• Bundles. Not called templates, but they do a similar job across many projects at once: a set of rules, fields, sections and task templates you apply to several projects.

Which plans include Asana templates

Asana’s project and task templates page↗ (opens in a new tab) says that project templates are available to all customers. It then gives two answers about the rest. One answer says more advanced template features, including task templates, come with the Starter, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise+ plans. Another, on the same page, says custom project and task templates come with Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Those disagree about Starter. If custom templates are the reason you are choosing a plan, check inside a trial workspace before you buy rather than relying on either line.

How to make your own Asana template

1. Run the process once as an ordinary project. A template designed in the abstract always misses the step everyone actually does.
2. Tidy it: remove one-off tasks, rename sections to stages, and write task descriptions as instructions to a stranger.
3. Save it from the drop-down menu next to the project name with “Save as template”.
4. Replace fixed dates with relative ones. Asana can pre-fill due dates from the project’s start date or due date, with the option to skip weekends.
5. Replace named people with project roles, such as “Account lead” or “Designer”, so the right person gets the work even when the team changes.
6. Add the forms and rules the project should start with (next section).
7. Edit it as you learn. Asana says changes to a published template apply to future uses of that template.

Rules inside templates

A rule is a trigger and an action: when a task moves to a section, assign it; when a form is submitted, set a field. Asana’s rules page↗ (opens in a new tab) describes building them from a project’s Customize menu, with several actions allowed from one trigger, and lists rules on the Starter, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus plans. Rules saved in a project template come along into every project created from it, which is where much of a template’s value lies: the routing is set up before anyone forgets to set it up.

• Keep a template’s rules few and obvious. Three rules everyone understands beat ten that move tasks nobody expected to move.
• Name each rule after what it does: “Approved → move to Scheduled”.
• Test the template by creating a throwaway project and walking a task through every section before you share it.

How Asana’s rules compare with monday.com’s recipes is covered in Asana vs monday.com.

Creating projects from a template with the API

If projects start from another system, such as a signed deal in your CRM, you can create them from a template through Asana’s API. The project templates documentation↗ (opens in a new tab) explains that a template can carry date variables and template roles, which you fill in when you instantiate it.

curl -X POST "https://app.asana.com/api/1.0/project_templates/TEMPLATE_GID/instantiateProject" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ASANA_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "data": {
      "name": "Onboarding: Lakeside Dental",
      "privacy_setting": "private_to_team",
      "requested_dates": [{ "gid": "1", "value": "2026-10-05" }],
      "requested_roles": [{ "gid": "ROLE_GID", "value": "USER_GID" }]
    }
  }'

The instantiate endpoint↗ (opens in a new tab) does not return the project straight away: it returns a job that creates it asynchronously, so poll the job before you add anything to the new project. requested_dates is required when the template has dates in it. If an AI assistant should do this for you, see Asana’s MCP server with Claude.

Three templates, written out

Each one is short on purpose. Sections are stages, offsets are business days from the project start, and roles stand in for people.

Roles: Account lead, Specialist, Billing
Section: Kickoff
  Send welcome email and kickoff invite        Account lead   day 0
  Kickoff call: goals, contacts, first deadline Account lead   day 2
Section: Setup
  Collect logins and brand files (form)        Specialist     day 3
  Set up billing and send first invoice        Billing        day 3
  Build first deliverable plan                 Specialist     day 5
Section: First delivery
  First deliverable to client for review       Specialist     day 10
  30-day check-in call                         Account lead   day 30
Rules: form submitted -> assign to Specialist
       task moved to "First delivery" -> notify Account lead

Roles: Project lead, Developer, Content owner
Section: Content
  Final copy for every page                    Content owner  day 0
  Image alt text and page titles               Content owner  day 3
Section: Build
  Redirect map from old URLs                   Developer      day 3
  Forms send to the right inbox                Developer      day 5
  Accessibility pass (keyboard, contrast)      Developer      day 6
Section: Launch
  Launch checklist: analytics, sitemap, DNS    Project lead   day 8  (milestone)
  Post-launch broken link check                Developer      day 9
Rules: task completed in "Build" -> move to "Launch" review

Roles: Editor, Writer, Designer
Section: Plan
  Pick topics for the month                    Editor         day 0
Section: Write
  Draft post 1 / post 2 / post 3 (task template) Writer       days 3-12
Section: Review
  Edit and fact-check                          Editor         2 days after each draft
  Header image                                 Designer       with the edit
Section: Published
  Share on social and in the newsletter        Editor         publish day
Task template "Blog post": subtasks Outline, Draft, Sources, Image, SEO title

Getting your work out

Asana’s help center describes exporting a project to CSV or JSON from the drop-down menu next to the project name, under Export/Print. To take a template’s content elsewhere, create a project from it and export that. According to the same help article, a CSV export carries fields such as task name, assignee, due date, tags, notes and parent task; plan to rebuild rules and forms by hand in whatever tool comes next.

If you need less than Asana

Asana templates earn their setup time when many projects run the same process with dates, roles and rules. If what you mostly need is a single board your team and its AI assistants work from, fenbs is smaller by design: four lanes (To Do, Next Up, In Progress, Completed), three kinds of task, and a priority from 1 to 10. It has no due dates, no settable assignee and no rules, so none of the templates above translate one for one.

It does have its own board templates you can copy in one press, such as the client project board and the bug tracker. For a checklist of your own, paste it into Add many and each line becomes a task, with feature:, enhancement: or bug: at the start of a line setting its kind. The full comparison is on fenbs vs Asana.