In an Asana organization, a member has your company's email domain and takes a paid seat. A guest has any other email address, sees only what you share with them, and costs nothing. You don't pick which one a client becomes. Their email address does.
That's the whole guest vs member rule. The catch for agencies is what "only what you share" means in practice, because sharing one project shares every task in it.
Your client wants to know where their project stands. Your team runs it in Asana, alongside 11 other clients. The project has 140 tasks. About 30 of them are things the client should see. The rest are internal notes, reviews and the occasional blunt comment about the client.
So there are 2 ways to share Asana with clients. Invite them in as a guest, or send them a spreadsheet that shows only the tasks meant for them. Both work. They fail in different places. The rules below come from Asana's help center, checked on 5 November 2026.
The short answer
Invite the client as a guest when they need to work inside the project with you, commenting on tasks and ticking off their own. Guests are free in a paid Asana organization. They see every task in any project you share with them.
Send a filtered, view-only Google Sheets™ file when the client only needs to read status. A sync by tag or section puts just their tasks in it, and a client can't stumble into anything else.
Asana guest vs member, side by side
Asana sorts everyone in an organization by email domain. Its own example: michael@yourco.com is a member of the yourco.com organization, and anyone at @gmail.com or @anotherco.com is a guest of it.
| Member | Guest | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it is | Anyone with your company's email domain | Anyone with another domain, such as a client |
| Paid seat on an organization plan | Yes, each member needs one | No, guests don't count toward the member count |
| Sees | Their teams, plus any project or task made public to the organization | Only the tasks, projects and teams shared with them |
| Can create teams | Yes | No, and can't see or ask to join other teams |
| Can build rules and templates | Yes | No. Guests can trigger rules and pick a custom field value |
| Can be set to view-only | Yes | Yes |
| Can become an admin | Yes | No |
| Can switch to the other type | No | No |
The last row surprises people. Asana says you can't convert a guest into a member or the other way round. A client who joins your company would need an email address on your domain added to their Asana account. Only then are they a member, and only then do they take a seat.
One trap on the seat side. A person with your domain whom you add to only some projects in a team shows up as a "limited access member", and Asana says limited access members still count toward your seats. A limited access member is still a member, and still billed.
Workspaces work differently. A workspace has no company domain behind it, so Asana's comparison says you can add anyone as a member or a guest. On a workspace you choose, and the guest pricing answer below covers organizations only.
Asana guest access, task by task
Asana's Guests FAQ defines a guest as "a user in an organization who does not share the organization's email domain." If your team signs in with @youragency.com, a client at @theirco.com joins as a guest automatically.
What they see depends on what you share:
- Share a task, and they see that task only.
- Share a project, and they see that project and all the tasks inside it.
- Invite them to a team, and they see the projects shared with that team.
- Invite them to a portfolio, and they only see the projects in it that you invite them to.
The project case is the one that catches agencies out. Asana shares the whole project. Showing the client 30 tasks means showing all 140. Any internal task left in the client's project is open for the client to read.
Guests have other limits too. They can't create or own rules, edit custom field settings, create teams or edit task templates. They can still change a custom field's value on a task they can reach, such as moving Urgency from Medium to High.
2 more details from the same FAQ are worth knowing. Guests can invite other guests by sharing the tasks and projects they can reach. And 2 guests who aren't in the same project or team see each other as "private user", so 2 clients can't read each other's names by accident.
Asana guest pricing
On a paid Asana organization, guests are free. The FAQ answers it directly. "Do I have to pay for guests in a paid organization? No." Guests don't count toward the organization's membership. Asana adds that guests can be set to view-only, and a view-only guest still doesn't count.
There's one exception the FAQ notes. A client whose own company pays for Asana still holds a seat there, in their home organization. That's their bill, not yours.
2 caveats. Guests belong to organizations, which Asana builds around a shared company email domain. A team without its own domain collaborates in a workspace instead, and the FAQ's pricing answer covers paid organizations. On a workspace, ask Asana how guests count before you invite 20 clients.
Second, the client needs an Asana account to see anything. Asana accounts are free, but your client now has another login to remember, and another app to open every Monday.
Share Asana with clients through a filtered sheet
The other way keeps clients out of Asana altogether. You sync only their tasks into a spreadsheet, then share that spreadsheet with them as view-only.
Our Asana to Google Sheets add-on runs in the Sheets sidebar. A filtered sync narrows a project by section, assignee, tag, completion or a due window. Asana has no saved views that an outside tool can read, so the add-on keeps the filter itself.
A setup that works for most agencies:
- In Asana, add a tag such as client-visible to the tasks the client should see. Or keep client work in its own sections, such as Client review and Delivered.
- Create a new spreadsheet for that client. Use one per client, because sharing a spreadsheet shares all of its tabs.
- Run a filtered sync of the project into it, filtered on that tag or those sections.
- Hide any columns the client shouldn't read, such as followers or internal custom fields. Hiding is safe in a synced tab. Don't delete or move columns there.
- Share it. In Google Drive™, select the file, click Share, enter the client's email and choose Viewer.
- To stop the client downloading, printing or copying it, open Share, then Settings, and clear the box that allows it for viewers and commenters.
The client now has a link that opens in their browser. No Asana login. No internal tasks.
On our Pro plan the sheet refreshes every 3 hours. On Business, live sync pushes changes into the sheet within seconds of someone ticking a task in Asana. Live sync is the one feature where Asana's change notices pass through our server. Manual and scheduled syncs run inside your own Google account. Our post on keeping Google Sheets updated from Asana automatically covers the refresh options.