Trello
Visual project management with boards, lists, and cards
What it does
Trello is the original Kanban board tool: lists of cards you drag between columns. Owned by Atlassian since 2017 and slowly absorbed into the Atlassian universe. Every card can hold a checklist, due date, attachments, comments, custom fields, and Butler automations. The Power-Ups system extends cards with calendars, dashboards, Gantt views, integrations. Trello wins when the workflow IS "move this card from To Do to Doing to Done" and nothing more complicated. It loses fast when you need dependencies, resource planning, custom statuses per project, or reporting across boards.
Free tier
Yes
Starts at
$5/mo
Setup
easy
Key features
Integrates with
Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, Jira, Confluence
Who this fits
- Solo founders and 2-10 person teams that want visual task tracking without a learning curve
- Trades, cleaners, medspa front-desk, and field teams tracking simple recurring workflows
- Real estate agents tracking listings or transactions through a fixed set of stages
- Content teams running an editorial calendar with an "Idea > Drafting > Review > Published" flow
- Anyone whose main need is "everyone can see where things stand" — the board IS the status meeting
Who it does NOT fit
- Teams needing cross-project reporting, resource load views, or portfolio-level Gantt (Asana, Wrike, Monday)
- Dev teams tracking sprints, bugs, and dependencies (Jira, Linear)
- Ops teams running SLA-driven workflows with branching logic (ClickUp, Monday)
- Anyone with more than ~5 concurrent boards — Trello has no strong home view for many boards at once
Pricing
Real gotchas
- Enterprise requires a 50-user minimum with roughly $10,000/yr floor — you cannot buy Enterprise for a 20-person team even if you want the SSO (Source: CostBench: https://costbench.com/software/project-management/trello/)
- Free tier now caps at 10 boards per Workspace (Atlassian pulled the "unlimited boards on Free" carpet in 2022). Below 10 is fine, over that is a forced upgrade
- Butler automation runs are metered per plan. Heavy automation on Standard hits the 1,000-run cap fast; check the Workspace command usage screen before assuming it is "free"
- Power-Ups from third parties often carry their OWN subscription fees on top of Trello (Planyway, Placker, Elegantt) — the visible Trello bill is not the real bill
- No native reporting or portfolio view without the Premium Dashboard view or a third-party Power-Up
- Guest access (external clients) is limited on Free and Standard; multi-board guest access needs Premium or Enterprise
Integrations that matter
Otto’s take on this tool
Recommend Trello when: business_size is 1-15, pain point is "we need to see who is doing what without a meeting," and the workflow is visual/kanban rather than structured project management. Highest fit for trades, medspa, real estate, and solo consultants. Do NOT recommend for teams needing dependencies, resource planning, cross-project rollup, or dev-team sprint tracking. If the user is comparing to ClickUp: Trello wins on simplicity and adoption speed; ClickUp wins the moment you need custom statuses or reporting. If the user is comparing to Notion: Trello is faster for pure task boards; Notion wins if docs + tasks live together.
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