Trello Review
Trello is an easy to use task management solution with a free plan, good customer support, and many feature add-ons to help small businesses efficiently manage projects, tasks, and teams.
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Expert Analyst & Reviewer
UPDATED
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Trello
| Total Rating | 4.5 |
|---|---|
| Pricing | Excellent |
| Features | Good |
| Customer Service | Good |
| Integrations | Good |
| Reviews | Excellent |
Number Of Projects Available
10-UnlimitedPricing
$0-$17.50/User Per MonthBusiness Size
Small-Medium BusinessesTrello At A Glance
- Web-based project management app
- Scheduling, time management, and budget tracking features
- Best for small and midsize business owners
Pros
- Easy to use
- Free plan available
- Intuitive interface
- Unlimited amount of integrations for all users
Cons
- Limited features
- Not all integrations are free to use
- Unsuited to large businesses
Table of Contents
What is Trello?
Trello is a web-based team and project management app. The customizable tool includes “boards”, which represent dedicated projects, and “cards”, which represent a project’s tasks. Cards can be assigned to team members and moved around according to stages of completion.
Trello Pricing
| Plan | Price | When To Use |
|---|---|---|
| Trello Free | $0/month | If you need a personal project management system |
| Trello Standard | $6/user/month | If you are managing a small team |
| Trello Premium | $10/user/month | If you need up to 100 internal users and need to work with people outside your team |
| Trello Enterprise | $17.50/user/month | If you have over 100 team members or 300+ team members to get a bulk discount |
Trello has one free and three paid subscription plans, with monthly or (discounted) yearly payment options. The higher the subscription plan, the more boards, workspaces, and users you can add on.
Trello offers nonprofit and educational discounts to its users. One nice addition is that nonprofits may qualify for a 75% discount on paid plans, while educational institutions can expect 50% off.
Paid plans may be canceled at any time, although Trello only offers full refunds to users who cancel their accounts within 30 days of signing up. And if you’re not sure which plan is right for you, Trello does offer a 14-day free trial of their Premium plan (no credit card required).
Note: Add-on integrations, also known as Power-Ups, are free to add to your Trello Workspaces. However, you may need to pay a monthly subscription price depending on the Power-Up you choose.
Trello Free
Trello Free costs $0/month and includes:
- Unlimited personal lists and cards (only used for personal projects)
- Pre-designed templates for single boards
- Assignees and due dates
- Unlimited activity logs
- Up to 10 boards per collaborative Workspace
- iOS and Android mobile apps
- Unlimited Power-Ups (feature integrations) per board
- Unlimited storage (10MB per file)
- 250 Workspace automation command runs per month
- Two-factor authentication
- Custom backgrounds and stickers
Trello Standard
Trello Standard costs $5 per user per month and includes everything in the Trello free plan, plus:
- Unlimited boards (which are projects)
- Advanced checklists
- Custom fields
- File attachments of up to 250MB
- 1,000 Workspace automation commands per month
- Saved searches
- Single board guests, which are users that do not belong to your Workspace but have been invited to only one of your Workspace boards
Trello Premium
Trello’s Business Class plan costs $10 per user per month (up to 100 users) and includes everything in the Trello Standard plan, plus:
- Dashboard view
- Timeline view
- Workspace table view
- Calendar view
- Map view
- Unlimited Workspace automation command runs
- Admin and security features
- Workspace level templates
- Board collections to group different boards together
- Observer features to limit users’ actions within a board
- Priority email support (responses within one business day)
- Google Workspace connection
- Simple data export
- Unlimited command runs
Trello Enterprise
Trello Enterprise costs $17.50 per user per month (billed annually; volume discounts are available for companies with 300+ users) and includes everything in the Trello Premium plan, plus:
- Unlimited Workspaces
- Organization-wide permissions
- Organization visible boards
- Public board management
- Multi-board guests
- Increased SAML SSO security available via Atlassian Access (starts at $3 per user per month)
- Power-Up (integration) administration
- Attachment restrictions
- Public board management
Extra Trello Costs & Fees
| Extra Costs | Price |
|---|---|
| Paid Integrations | $4 to $13 per month |
| Atlassian Advanced Security | Starting at $3/user/month |
Advanced security features offered by Atlassian, the company that owns Trello, come at an additional cost of $3 per user per month. Unless you need a high level of security for a large team, this feature might not be worth the cost.
Also, all integrations are free to enable in your Trello Workspaces, but some are not free to put to use. Some third-party integration creators may charge a monthly subscription fee which ranges from $4 to $13 on average. This is not uncommon among third-party integrations, but if you’re not choosy about which integrations you use, you could end up paying more for Trello than it’s worth.
Is Trello Easy To Use?
Trello’s simple, visually-appealing UI makes it incredibly easy to use. Workspaces and cards are easy to edit and move around. There are also free templates available to you, so you don’t have to start building boards and cards from scratch.
You can create color-coded labeling conventions, design automation rules, assign users to tasks, create subtasks within lists, and bring on new users to your workspaces. Trello also integrates with several other team and project management tools such as Slack and Google Drive with the push of a button.
Trello is available on desktop and as a mobile app (iOS/Android).
Trello Features
| Feature | Availability |
|---|---|
| Project Management | |
| Track Project Progress | |
| Gantt Charts | |
| Task Management | |
| Invoicing | |
| Job Costing | |
| Team Management | |
| Project Scheduling | |
| Time Tracking | |
| Resource Management | |
| Budgeting | |
| Reporting | Premium & Enterprise plans only |
Thanks to a recent price revamping, Trello now offers a wide array of project management tools in all plans. All users can now add an unlimited number of Power-Ups, which add core project management functionalities like budget and time tracking. All users can invite an unlimited amount of Trello users to collaborate on a board. And all users have an unlimited amount of storage.
Now that hundreds of project management integrations are available to everyone, Trello is a strong competitor among project management apps like Asana and ClickUp.
Learn more about Trello’s specific features offerings below.
Project & Task Management
With Trello’s straightforward feature set, you can quickly get projects up and running. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy for you to move specific tasks across various stages of completion.
With Trello, you can:
- Generate project templates
- Create color-coded labels for priority levels, different departments, subject matter type, etc. (colorblind-friendly mode available)
- Save cards as templates for future use
- Create subtasks and due dates
- Check off completed tasks and view card tasks as a percentage of completion
- View tasks in Workspace, calendar, timeline, table, and Gantt chart format by adding a free Power-Up or using built-in features of the Trello Premium plan
- Combine cards from different Workspaces for a more holistic view of your various projects
- Connect to Google Calendar
- Use automation tools to streamline actions such as assigning a card to a new person after a task within that card is completed
Team Management
Many of the team management features you need for larger teams (such as setting a variety of user roles) only become available at the Premium plan. Overall, though, there are a decent number of team management features, such as the ability to:
- Add an unlimited number of collaborators to a Workspace
- Integrate with Slack and Google Workspace
- Assign team members to specific tasks
- Make Workspaces public or private
- Invite guest users from outside your team to your Workspace (starting at Standard plan)
- Change user permissions (starting at Premium plan)
- Sync different projects and Workspaces from your end to better manage collaborators
- Send reminders about meetings and due dates to team members
- Create different user roles and permissions (starting at Premium plan)
- Add read-only users (aka “observers”)
Time Tracking
Time tracking is not built into your Trello account. Instead, you can use a free Power-Up like Planyway, which doubles as a calendar/timeline project view tool, to:
- Track working hours with a live timer within cards
- Specify which task is being worked on
- Decide who, if anyone, can backlog their time
- Show actual working time against estimated working time
- Filter working hours by user, task, label, card, board, and organization
- Export working hours to a CSV or Excel file for invoicing purposes
There are several free Power-Ups available for expense tracking, including Costello and Smart Fields. There is also a board template designed specifically for budgeting, which uses Smart Fields.
With Trello’s built-in features and a Power-Up, you can:
- Add documents to cards and boards (individual max file size dependent on pricing plan)
- Track billable hours within specific cards
- Estimate how much you’re spending on a certain task or project
- Update your expenses as you go along, either for a whole project or a certain card
- View a history of expense updates
- Export expense information as a CSV file for invoicing and tax purposes
Reporting
Starting at the Premium plan, you can export your boards’ data to a CSV file. That CSV lists everything about each of your cards, so try to deactivate any unnecessary Power-Ups, or your spreadsheet will look cluttered and confusing.
Other than that, Trello has very limited free analytics solutions. You can pay a monthly subscription (ranging from $4 to $13 per month) to get more advanced analytics. Jira Align is a free, simple report generator, and this integration allows you to:
- Create burnup charts
- Generate cumulative flow diagrams
- Decide which cards are being analyzed
Other Power-Ups allow you to flag which cards are getting little interaction. This could mean the card itself is unnecessary or that your team is missing an important step in a project.
Trello Customer Service
| Support Option | Availability |
|---|---|
| Phone Support | |
| Support Tickets | |
| Live Chat | |
| Dedicated Support Rep | |
| Knowledgebase | |
| Videos & Tutorials | |
| Company Blog | |
| Social Media |
Trello’s customer service is available by email (Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM EST) and support ticket only. Fortunately, Trello is pretty quick at responding to messages during business hours.
Trello users on the Premium and Enterprise plans get priority email support. These users get their responses by the next possible business day, guaranteed.
Trello Integrations
Trello can integrate with more than 190 third-party apps, including Zapier, Slack, and Google applications. There are also feature add-ons, such as Card Dependencies by Screenful, Expiration Reminder, and TeamGantt. You can also use Trello’s Power-Ups to connect with reporting tools, such as Agile Metrics by Screenful, or with sales and support tools, such as Zendesk and Salesforce.
Trello also provides a simple RESTful web API, which you can use to build additional apps.
Trello Reviews
In general, online feedback for Trello is positive, earning 4.4/5 stars on G2 Crowd, based on over 12,400 reviews. Trello has a 4.3/5 star rating on Trustpilot, based on 121 reviews.
Negative Trello Reviews & Complaints
- Needs more functionalities
- User interface can become overwhelming
- Not many task automation capabilities
Positive Trello Reviews & Testimonials
- Free and low price plans are available
- Simple, accessible software
- Easy to collaborate
- Versatile uses for individuals and businesses
Is Trello Secure?
Trello is secure and the company protects users in the following ways:
- Use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) to create a secure connection using 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption for all data sent between the web, desktop, iOS, and Android apps and the Trello servers
- GDPR compliant
- Data stored in Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 platform and Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
- Regular testing for vulnerabilities
- Regular data backups and data stored in multiple offsite locations
For more detailed information about Trello’s security protocols, you can take a look at Trello’s security guide on its website.
The Final Verdict: Is Trello Worth It?
| Trello Review | |
|---|---|
| Business Size | Ideal for teams with 1-100 users |
| Pricing | $0/month-$17.50/user/month |
| Choose If You Need | Low-cost software, easy project setup, customization options |
Trello used to be nothing more than a task management tool for individuals and very small teams. However, the company has quickly realized that businesses need more than a simple card-based management system to reach their goals.
With the ability to add any integration to your Trello Workspaces, invite anyone to collaborate with you, easily build task management templates, and create simple automation rules, a small to midsize business can quickly organize their team members’ jobs and measurable project goals. Plus, the price is hard to beat.
However, if you run a large business, Trello might not be the most expansive, cost-effective application for your project management needs. If your large business could benefit from more scalable project management software, read our LiquidPlanner and Workfront reviews before dedicating yourself to a specific tool.
Nicolette Kier
Expert Analyst & Reviewer
As a small business owner, contributing writer Nicolette Kier has been sharing her knowledge on all things related to freelancing and eCommerce since 2019. She earned a BS in Physics and a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh.
View Nicolette Kier's professional experience on LinkedIn.
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It seems there was no mention of the Chrome extensions you can get now for Trello, which address precisely some of the shortcomings mentioned in this article.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Thank you! The review was very thorough and of great assistance to me as a security manager to quickly gather an overall view of the application. Can features, such as file sharing or Dropbox integration, be disabled / restricted in any of the levels (such as Enterprise or Business Class) ?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I do not believe so, as Trello is a fairly simple application. However, for a more certain answer, I would recommend contacting their support staff. They might be able to work something out for you.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Very nice review! however Trello is avaible in more languages then only English. Its avaible in English, Spanish, German and Portuguese.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Thanks for pointing that out! I’ll adjust the review accordingly 🙂
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Excellent review.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Thorough review. Thanks for putting all of this information together!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.