Get real-time Asana updates in Slack, GitHub, and more

We love Asana (obviously), but we know it’s not the only tool your team needs to get work done. To truly enable your team to work together effortlessly, Asana integrates with many of the other tools you use at work. You’ve long been able to connect your apps to Asana, and now those connections will be faster and more efficient, since we implemented webhooks.

What-hooks?

Webhooks are pretty cool. In short, they let apps like Asana push updates directly to other apps right when they happen, instead of each app pulling data from one another periodically. With Asana integrations that use webhooks, changes to your Asana tasks or projects will sync in real time to the other app. Webhooks also make it easier for developers to build on our platform, so we can grow the number of apps that work with Asana to support a wide array of teams’ needs.

Before, we built scripts to request the changes, which was a seriously resource-consuming effort, especially at scale. Now, with webhooks, we simply tell Asana to update Slack when something relevant has changed, no mess, no worry.”

Apps that use webhooks

Slack, Unito, tray.io, and Instagantt use our webhooks API today. These integrations should feel faster now, and as more partners use Asana’s webhooks, those apps will be faster too. Here’s how webhooks made our Slack and Unito integrations even better.

Slack and Asana go together like peanut butter and jelly—each amazing on its own, but even better together. In addition to the /asana command, which lets you create, complete, or comment on a task from Slack, you can also receive notifications in any Slack channel when a task is created, completed, or commented on in Asana. Before we implemented webhooks, it took 30–60 minutes for Asana updates to appear in Slack channels. Now this happens instantaneously so your team is updated about work in real time.

Unito lets you manage your GitHub issues in Asana as tasks, and vice versa. When you sync an Asana project with a GitHub repository, the tasks/issues, assignees, comments, tags, and more will be updated across both apps any time a change is made. This saves you time spent switching between tools, and enables easy collaboration between teammates who spend more of their day in GitHub and those who spend more time in Asana. With webhooks, these updates sync in real time, so everyone will always be up to speed, no matter which tool they’re in.

Webhooks for developers

If you’re a developer, or if you have a developer on your team, you can build your own custom integrations with our webhooks API. Webhooks let you receive event notifications from Asana with HTTP callbacks, so you don’t have to keep polling periodically for Asana updates. Just register a webhook and Asana will deliver the update to you as soon as it happens.

There are many ways webhooks can be used to bring Asana data into other apps. Here are some we thought of:

• Post a comment in a chat room every time a project is added to Asana.

• Sync new comments from Asana into another system, like a ticketing or CRM tool.

• Show a real-time list of the most recently completed tasks.

You can also use webhooks to trigger events in other apps. For example, one of our teammates here at Asana built an integration that creates a task when a new staging cluster is created, and when the task is marked complete, the staging cluster is destroyed.

We leverage webhooks as sync triggers, to keep data fresh across apps as soon as a change occurs. This improves the responsiveness of our sync engine without impacting performance.”

If you have an app that responds to events in Asana (or you want it to), check out our API Reference Guide, and consider implementing webhooks. If you haven’t built an integration with Asana before, learn more about building on our API.

Check out all of our integrations

We recently announced some new integrations to add to the growing list of apps that connect to Asana. Be sure to check out all the apps you can use with Asana to help your team track everything you’re working on—and get great results.