We present a comparison of parallaxes and radii from asteroseismology and Gaia DR1 (TGAS) for 2200 Kepler stars spanning from the main sequence to the red-giant branch. We show that previously identified offsets between TGAS parallaxes and distances derived from asteroseismology and eclipsing binaries have likely been overestimated for parallaxes <~5-10mas (~90%-98% of the TGAS sample). The observed differences in our sample can furthermore be partially compensated by adopting a hotter Teff scale (such as the infrared flux method) instead of spectroscopic temperatures for dwarfs and subgiants. Residual systematic differences are at the ~2% level in parallax across three orders of magnitude. We use TGAS parallaxes to empirically demonstrate that asteroseismic radii are accurate to ~5% or better for stars between ~0.8-8R_{sun}_. We find no significant offset for main- sequence (<~1.5R_{sun}_) and low-luminosity RGB stars (~3-8R_{sun}_), but seismic radii appear to be systematically underestimated by ~5% for subgiants (~1.5-3R_{sun}_). We find no systematic errors as a function of metallicity between [Fe/H]~-0.8 to +0.4dex, and show tentative evidence that corrections to the scaling relation for the large frequency separation ({Delta}{nu}) improve the agreement with TGAS for RGB stars. Finally, we demonstrate that beyond ~3kpc asteroseismology will provide more precise distances than end-of-mission Gaia data, highlighting the synergy and complementary nature of Gaia and asteroseismology for studying galactic stellar populations.