Task Statuses Compared: Asana vs Trello vs ClickUp
completed true/false. Trello uses the list a card sits in, plus a dueComplete flag. ClickUp has real statuses, grouped into Not Started, Active, Done and Closed — and in ClickUp, Done and Closed are deliberately different.Three models
| Asana | Trello | ClickUp | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status field on a task | None — completed boolean | None — the card's list (idList) | Yes, custom statuses |
| "Finished" | completed: true | dueComplete: true | A status in the Done or Closed group |
| Workflow stages | Sections (board columns) | Lists | Statuses within groups |
| Archived | — | closed: true | — |
| Approval | approval_status on approval tasks | — | — |
Asana: complete or not
Asana's API describes the field plainly: completed is "True if the task is currently marked complete, false if not," with completed_at recording "The time at which this task was completed, or null if the task is incomplete."
Workflow stages in Asana are sections of a project, shown as columns on a board — they are where a task sits, not a property of the task itself.
The interesting case is approvals. Tasks of subtype approval carry an approval_status of pending, approved, rejected or changes_requested, and Asana's specification says "This field is kept in sync with completed, meaning pending translates to false while approved, rejected, and changes_requested translate to true." In other words, a rejected approval counts as a completed task. That makes sense from the approver's side — their job is done — but it catches out anyone counting completed tasks as delivered work.
Asana also had a per-assignee scheduling field, assignee_status (today, upcoming, later, new, inbox), which its specification now marks Deprecated.
Trello: the list is the status
A Trello card has no status either. Its position in the workflow is idList — "The ID of the list the card should be in." Moving a card between lists is how Trello users change "status."
Two booleans sit alongside. dueComplete is "Whether the status of the card is complete" — the checkbox on a card's due date. And closed means archived: "Whether the card should be archived (closed: true)."
The consequence for anyone building on Trello data: "Done" is whatever a board's owner decided to call their last list. Two boards can mean completely different things by the same list name, and nothing in the card says it's finished unless dueComplete was ticked.
ClickUp: four groups, and Done isn't Closed
ClickUp has statuses, and every one belongs to a group. Its help centre lists "three default task status groups":
- Active — "Tasks that are currently being worked on."
- Done — "Tasks that are done, but need to remain open." "Tasks in this status group are not considered overdue."
- Closed — "Tasks that are totally completed." "Complete is the default Closed status."
A fourth, Not Started, "is activated through a ClickApp."
The split between Done and Closed is the design choice worth studying. ClickUp's example: "all engineering is completed on a sprint task, but marketing and technical writing teams still need access to it." Closing it would hide it — "If the status is marked as Complete, the task is automatically hidden from most views. Using a Done status instead will keep the task visible!" A Done status also unblocks work: "Waiting on Dependencies will be cleared when a blocking task is moved to a done status."
The Closed group is locked down: "You can't create custom Closed statuses, but you can rename them."
What to take from this
- A boolean is a legitimate status model. Asana has built one of the largest work-management products on
completedplus sections. If your product's workflow varies by team, don't force a status list on everyone. - If you let users define stages, give them fixed categories underneath. ClickUp's groups, like Linear's categories, keep reports meaningful whatever users name their statuses. Trello doesn't have them, which is why "done" is unreliable in Trello data.
- Separate "finished for me" from "finished for everyone." ClickUp's Done/Closed split and Asana's rejected-counts-as-complete are two answers to the same problem: work can be over for one person and still matter to others.
Method and limits
Asana's fields are from its official OpenAPI specification on GitHub (Asana/openapi); Trello's from its published REST API specification; ClickUp's from its help centre articles on task statuses and Done statuses. All read on 2026-09-24. Each product also has custom fields, which teams often use as a status; we covered only the built-in model. We have no affiliation with any of the three.
Sources
- Asana — OpenAPI specification
- Trello — REST API specification
- ClickUp — Manage task statuses
- ClickUp — Use Done statuses
Researched by SaaSReadyit, which writes AI-generated validation reports for software ideas. Related: Issue statuses: GitHub vs Jira vs Linear.