August 10, 2026
Collaborators are one of those Asana features that seem obvious until you need to explain them. People confuse them with assignees, assume project members already get task updates, and end up either drowning in notifications or missing the one that mattered.
This guide covers what collaborators actually are, how they behave, and the specific places the model trips teams up.
A collaborator is someone following a task. The closest everyday equivalent is being CC'd on an email thread. They can see the task, they get notified when things change, and they can comment, but being a collaborator does not make anyone responsible for doing the work.
A task can have as many collaborators as you need. This is the mechanism Asana gives you for keeping interested people informed without pretending they own the work.
This is the single most common point of confusion, and it comes down to one rule: an Asana task has exactly one assignee, and any number of collaborators.
| Assignee | Collaborator | |
|---|---|---|
| How many per task | Exactly one, or none | Unlimited |
| What it means | This person is responsible for doing it | This person wants to follow it |
| Shows in My Tasks | Yes | No |
| Counts toward workload | Yes | No |
| Gets notified of changes | Yes | Yes |
| Can comment and edit | Yes | Yes |
The practical consequence: if you need two people to do a piece of work, adding the second as a collaborator does not assign it to them. It will not appear in their My Tasks and it will not count toward their workload. If the work genuinely splits, it needs to be two tasks or a task with subtasks, each with its own assignee.
That constraint frustrates people, but it is deliberate. One assignee means there is never ambiguity about who is on the hook.
On desktop, open the task and look at the bottom of the task detail pane, below the comment box. There is a Collaborators section with a plus button. Click it, start typing a name, and pick the person.
On mobile, open the task and scroll to the same Collaborators row at the bottom of the task.
You can also add collaborators while creating a task, which is worth the habit. Adding them later means the people you add missed everything that already happened on the task.
Several actions add someone as a collaborator automatically, which explains most cases of "why am I getting these notifications".
Commenting on a task adds you as a collaborator. Being @mentioned in a task description or comment adds you. Creating a task makes you a collaborator on it, and so does being assigned it.
This is usually helpful and occasionally noisy. If you answered one question on a task six months ago, you are still following it.
The Collaborators field accepts one person at a time. Add three people and that is three separate interactions, each with its own typing and selecting.
There is no native way to add a whole team in one action, which is the gap that gets frustrating on projects where the same group of eight people should follow certain tasks. We cover the way around this further down.
Hover over the person's avatar in the Collaborators section and click the x that appears.
To remove yourself, the fastest route is the Leave task option, or removing your own avatar the same way. Doing this stops notifications for that task without affecting anyone else, and it does not remove you from the project.
Worth knowing: if you leave a task and then comment on it again, you are added straight back as a collaborator.
Collaborators receive Asana Inbox notifications for the meaningful changes on a task: new comments, status changes, completion, attachments, due date changes, and completed subtasks.
They do not get notified about everything. Small field edits generally do not produce a notification, which is intentional and stops the Inbox becoming useless.
Notifications land in the Asana Inbox. Whether they also reach email depends on each person's own notification settings, which Asana controls per user rather than per project. This catches teams out: adding someone as a collaborator does not guarantee they see an email, because they may have email notifications turned off.
This is the second big misconception, and it matters.
Being a member of a project means you can see the project and find its tasks. It does not mean you are following every task inside it. Project members get notified about project-level events, such as status updates, not about activity on individual tasks.
So if a project is shared with twelve people and something important happens on one task, those twelve people are not notified. Only that task's collaborators are.
If you want a specific group informed about a specific task, they need to be collaborators on that task. Project membership will not do it.
For one task and two people, the manual flow is fine. It stops being fine in three situations.
A standing group that should follow certain work. If every incident task should be followed by the whole support team, someone has to add all of them, every time, and will eventually forget one.
Recurring tasks. Collaborators do not always carry across the way people expect, so a recurring task can quietly lose the audience it had.
Handovers. When work moves between teams, the receiving team is not following the task, so the history that would bring them up to speed is sitting somewhere they never get notified about.
The common thread: the person adding collaborators has to remember who cares, every single time, and the cost of forgetting is invisible until something is missed.
Astogi's Team Collaborators integration turns the repetitive part into a single action.
Once the integration is enabled, you add the Astogi team collaborator user to a task as you would add any collaborator. Astogi sees that, looks at which projects the task belongs to, finds the team that owns each of those projects, and adds every member of that team as a collaborator on the task.
One person added, the whole team following.
A few details that matter in practice:
The related Team Alias integration covers the adjacent case: keeping a team informed about a task's progress rather than adding every member as a follower. If you are deciding between them, use Team Collaborators when you want everyone formally following the task, and Team Alias when you want the team kept in the loop.
Can a task have two assignees? No. Asana allows exactly one assignee per task. Adding someone as a collaborator does not assign them the work, and the task will not appear in their My Tasks. Split it into subtasks if two people genuinely own separate pieces.
Do collaborators need to be project members? Not necessarily. Someone can collaborate on a task in a public project without being a member of it. For private projects they need access to the project to see the task.
Why am I getting notifications for a task I never joined? You almost certainly commented on it or were @mentioned, both of which add you automatically. Leave the task to stop them.
Does removing a collaborator delete their comments? No. Comments stay. Removing someone only stops future notifications.
Can I add a whole Asana team as a collaborator natively? Not with a single native action, no. You add people individually. That is the gap the Team Collaborators integration fills.
Do collaborators see private projects? Being added as a collaborator on a task does not grant access to a private project it lives in. Project permissions still apply.
Will collaborators get an email? Only if their own notification settings allow it. Asana Inbox notifications are reliable; email depends on each person's preferences.
If your team keeps adding the same group of people to the same kinds of tasks, that is exactly the repetition the Team Collaborators integration removes. It is one invite per project and no ongoing maintenance.
For everything else Astogi adds to Asana, the integrations overview has the full list.
You can try Astogi for free on your first project. Need more? Get more for just €29/month.
If you have any question or need support, feel free to contact us, our team is always happy to come up with the best solutions to your problems.
Overvoorde 49,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Made with ❤️ in the Netherlands
©Astogi 2026
Registered at the
Chamber of Commerce #42271509