Pros & Cons
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- Flexible kanban approach
- Highly intuitive
- Suitable for teams of all sizes
- Easy-to-use automations
- Useful AI integrations
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- Not suitable for managing traditional projects
Trello Specs
| @ Mentions | |
| Android App | |
| API Available for Customers | |
| Automation | |
| Custom Fields | |
| Free Account Offered | |
| Free Version Available | |
| Gantt Charts | |
| Guest Accounts | |
| iOS App | |
| Number of Collaborators in Free Account | 10 |
| Pre-Built Templates | |
| Price Per Month | $5 per person per month (billed annually) |
| Supported by Zapier |
Trello is an extremely easy-to-use work management app that enables you or your team to create and assign tasks, track progress, and ultimately plan out what needs to happen on a daily or longer-term basis. Automations are simple to implement, and tons of add-ons and extensions are available to help you tailor the experience to your needs. Although Trello isn't suitable for managing large and complex projects, it's still flexible and scalable enough to handle everything from your personal tasks to straightforward, ongoing work across even large groups. That said, our Editors' Choice winners for work management remain Asana and Todoist, both of which provide slightly deeper feature sets than Trello for competitive prices.
What Is Trello?
Is it fair to call Trello both a task management and a project management app? That depends on how strict you are about the word project. By most definitions, a project is a group of tasks with a start date, end date, and final product. Not all work is a project. Building a house is a project. Answering calls at a call center is not a project. Trello works best for managing ongoing personal or work tasks, as well as projects that aren't overly complicated. Trello does have a Gantt chart-like Timeline view, a standard feature of traditional project management apps, but that still doesn't make it proficient at managing multiple, huge projects.
(Credit: Trello/PCMag)You could also call Trello a kanban app, which is accurate. Kanban is a method for organizing, tracking, and managing work by writing tasks on cards and placing those cards in columns that correspond to various stages that the work goes through. Imagine a board with three columns (Trello calls them lists) called To Do, Doing, and Done. You write a task you need to do on a card and pin it in the To Do column. When you're ready to do that task, you move it into the Doing column. When you finish the task, you put the card in the Done column. This setup works well for multiple people, too. Think of a family dividing up household chores; each member is responsible for doing certain tasks and moving the corresponding cards through the stages.
Kanban is a great system for limiting the amount of work any one person has on their plate at a time. It's also a good system for giving everyone visibility into the state of the work that each member of a group needs to do. This level of insight promotes accountability and allows for the possibility of helping team members who are falling behind.
Of course, for Trello to be an effective collaboration tool, you and your team need to establish the rules and conventions for using it. In that way, it's like Asana; both are incredibly flexible and can, therefore, be daunting at first.
Pricing: Affordable and Clear
With a free Trello account, you can create just 10 boards. File attachments can't exceed 10MB in size, and app integrations aren't available. This tier also limits you to 250 automated command runs (instances of an automation) per month. Trello used to limit the number of Power-Ups you could use for free, but no longer. Power-Ups are à la carte features you can add to your boards. Two examples are custom fields and time tracking. However, these features are so basic that it's hard to give the app credit for having them.
The Standard plan ($5 per person per month, billed annually) unlocks 1,000 workspace command runs per month, advanced checklists, built-in custom fields, saved searches, single board guests, and an unlimited number of boards. You can upload an unlimited number of files, but none can exceed 250MB.
(Credit: Trello/PCMag)The Premium plan ($10 per person per month, billed annually) supports more board views (Calendar, Dashboard, Map, Table, and Timeline) and two new workspace views (Calendar and Table). At this level, you can access special templates, organize boards into collections, and run as many commands as you want. This tier also unlocks Atlassian Intelligence (or AI) features, which we discuss later.
Finally, Enterprise pricing starts at $17.50 per person per month (billed annually) for up to 250 users. The price per user goes down steadily after that until 5,000 users, at which point you need to contact the company for a custom quote. This plan is for organizations that need to connect work across numerous teams. It lets you invite guests to multiple boards, includes more granular permission settings, and supports an unlimited number of Workspaces.
Trello’s prices are in line with competitors'. Todoist, for example, also has a relatively capable free tier. It's Pro ($4 per user per month, billed annually) and top-end Business ($6 per user per month, billed annually) plans both cost around the same as Trello's Standard plan. Asana has a free plan, too. Its cheapest paid Starter plan ($10 per user per month, billed annually) is most equivalent to Trello's Premium plan. Like the others, Airtable has a free tier. However, it charges much more for its base paid Team tier ($20 per user per month, billed annually). Of course, Airtable has database-like capabilities in addition to work management features.
Interface and Ease of Use: Highly Versatile
You can use Trello on the web or download dedicated apps for all major desktop (macOS and Windows) and mobile platforms (Android, iOS, and iPadOS). The web app works smoothly and has great drag-and-drop capabilities, including for uploading attachments. However, the desktop apps have some advantages, such as the ability to quickly add a new card, more keyboard shortcuts, and notifications.
As with any kanban board app, Trello lets you create custom boards. We mentioned the example of To Do, Doing, and Done, but you can make boards with as many columns and whatever names you want. Trello also has templates to help guide you toward better workflow management. A few examples are Better Work Habits Challenge, Design Sprint, New Hire Onboarding, Office Party Planning, Publishing Process, and Support Ticket Management. With a higher-end plan, you can make custom templates at the Workspace level.
Building Cards
After you set up a board with columns, you need to make cards. Trello's cards can have a lot of detail: an assignee, attachments, a description, a due date, hyperlinks, labels (similar to tags), a task name, subtasks, and more. Asana's AI tools can help you generate content for these fields. Trello lets you upload content from not only your desktop, but also Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and URLs. If you upload a picture to a card, Trello can turn it into a cover image to help you identify its purpose at a glance.
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(Credit: Trello/PCMag)Although you can assign someone to a card and set a due date, you won't find more advanced project management features for estimating best- and worst-case scenarios for how long a task could take to complete. We also find it strange that you can't check cards off as done (you can only archive them). This is still true even for cards with a due date. Maybe the problem is that we think of cards as tasks when, in fact, they don't have to be. Thankfully, it’s easy to fix this issue by simply creating an automation that moves any cards to the top of the “Done” pile when you check them off.
If you want to see a progress status, you can add checklists within a card and mark those off are you go. For example, if you complete 7 of 10 checkboxes, you see 7/10 on the card and a progress bar with the corresponding percentage when you open it.
(Credit: Trello/PCMag)Color-coded labels are another tool for organizing cards, though we find them to be a bit of a letdown. Each label requires a color, which means you quickly run out of easily identifiable choices. An option to enable patterns for color-blind users is a nice touch. However, we'd like the option to use keyword tags as labels. That would make it easier to search for, sort, and filter cards.
Trello gives you several ways to view the cards on your board. As mentioned, you can change from the default kanban option to Dashboard, Gantt chart-like Timeline, and Map views, among others. You can find out more about each type here.
If you work with multiple boards, Trello now allows you to mirror cards so that they show up exactly the same in other boards you control. This feature is a time-saver since you no longer have to go back and forth between boards and repeatedly create the same tasks.
Inbox and Planner: Helpful for Organization
Trello's Inbox is just what it sounds like—a way to send yourself things you want to add to your Trello board straight from your email. Did you receive an email with a booking reservation, concert tickets, or doctor appointment details? If you forward the messages to inbox@app.trello.com, you see related cards in your Trello Inbox in seconds. With the help of AI, the app will summarize the emails, create a description for your cards, set a due date, and even add the original email as an attachment.
(Credit: Trello/PCMag)When we forwarded an email with an Airbnb reservation confirmation in testing, Trello correctly summarized its contents and wrote a quick description about the address and contact information, check-in and check-out times, dates, house rules, and location. All we had to do then was move the card to our Vacation list.
The Planner lets you seamlessly connect to your Google Calendar and import everything. You can create extra tasks and place them in the planner, or move some from your Trello Inbox. A similar integration with Microsoft Outlook's Calendar is in the works.
(Credit: Trello/PCMag)Power-Ups and Integrations: Some Tools Are Basic
Trello doesn't come with time-tracking capabilities, but you can add them as a Power-Up. The same is true for work-in-progress (WIP) limits, which you might want if you want to make sure you don't overwhelm any one team member. However, all you get is a warning when you exceed the limit. Trello won't block you from exceeding the limit or require you to input a reason for doing so.
We've tinkered with some of these extras for time tracking, reports, and scrum features (scrum is a style of working popular among software developers that focuses on iteration). They aren't bad, but they also aren't nearly as powerful as the native reporting and time estimation features in traditional project management apps, such as LiquidPlanner, which can, for instance, reconfigure an entire timeline of interdependent tasks if even one person misses a deadline.
If your account level supports integrations, you can connect Trello to many other business apps, including Harvest and Toggl. As long as you don't mind cobbling together a unique suite of tools for your team, you can customize Trello to your heart's content. It just might take a while to connect everything you want and need.
Automations: Easy to Create, With Relevant Suggestions
With Trello, you can create automations (or command runs) with a code-free tool called Butler. These automations, which aim to reduce repetitive actions, involve a trigger action and a response. The list of triggers and actions isn't exhaustive, but it covers many common scenarios. For example, you might create an automation that says, "When a card moves to the Done column, automatically check off any remaining subtasks on that card." Or, "If someone places a card in the Delayed column, automatically add ten days to the due date." As mentioned, an automation is how you can ensure that checking off a card moves it to the "Done" column.
(Credit: Trello/PCMag)Besides creating these rules, you can schedule calendar-based automations so that something specific happens based on a card’s due date and time. One of the best things about Trello’s automation menu, however, is that it gives you suggestions based on how you use the app. Since we created a bunch of tasks with checklists for each day in testing (we like seeing the progress bar), the system suggested creating a button that automatically adds us as the card’s assignees and throws in a checklist, too.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Trello)
Trello
Trello's intuitive features, inviting visual design, and smart automations allow it to adeptly handle both personal tasks and collaborative work.