First things first: Trello’s free plan is amazing. For a whopping $0, you get all these features:
- Unlimited users, including freelancers and clients
- A Kanban-esque, drag-and-drop dashboard
- Unlimited boards
- Unlimited tasks
For no cost, you can still get unlimited collaboration. And depending on the size and needs of your team, you could manage projects for free for years!
Even if you have to upgrade and pay for Trello, the price is still pretty good. With the Business plan, you’ll get additional support, security, privacy, integrations, and up to 250MB for file attachments, which is much more than the 10MB allowed in the free plan. To put it in perspective, 10MB is about enough for a magazine, while 250MB is enough for a book series.
When debating between Trello and Asana, remember that Trello is like your goofy, Hawaiian shirt–wearing uncle with its customizable backgrounds and laid-back usability. Even people who don’t have a lot of project management experience find it easy to work with Trello. That’s a big reason why it’s the most popular project management software on our list.
The intuitive drag-and-drop dashboard looks and functions like a Kanban board, but you can get Gantt charts and other resources through power-ups or integrations. You can even update your Trello cards with extra tasks through email.
Trello is ideal for small and just-starting businesses, such as small marketing agencies. Even some big businesses can get a lot of value out of it—after all, it’s good enough for Google.
The thing with being the most popular project management tool is that you also tend to draw quite a bit of criticism. But I guess we couldn’t expect to be handed our dream project management system for such a cheap price.
Trello requires a lot of power-ups or integrations to get the best project management features. Anyone who wants time tracking, report generation, and project tracking on the free plan of Trello might find it frustrating.
Even when you get unlimited power-ups (added features) in the paid plans, the reporting doesn’t go into all the useful details you would get through Asana and some other software. And there are some collaboration tools, like team chat, that we wish were there.
Trello also doesn’t have great customer support. “Priority support” for Trello means email support. There’s no helpline and no customer support chat. C’mon, Trello—your job is to make this easier for us, not easier for you!