Trello Review

What Trello Is

Trello is a Kanban-based project management tool originally launched in 2011 by Fog Creek Software and acquired by Atlassian in 2017 for $425 million. It is one of the most widely adopted PM tools in the world, with more than 50 million users, largely because its core interface is immediately understandable: cards represent tasks, columns represent stages, and cards move left to right as work progresses. A new Trello board is usable within five minutes with no training.

Atlassian’s acquisition has brought Trello closer integration with Jira, Confluence, and the broader Atlassian ecosystem while maintaining its independent brand and simple interface. Teams using Atlassian products can connect Trello boards to Jira issues and Confluence spaces, which extends Trello’s utility for engineering-adjacent workflows.

Key Features

Kanban Boards and Cards

A Trello board is a collection of lists (columns) containing cards (tasks). Each card can have a description, attachments, due dates, checklists, labels, members, and comments. Cards are dragged between lists as work progresses. The interface is entirely visual: the state of a project is readable at a glance without clicking into any individual card.

Labels, colors, and cover images make boards highly scannable. A content team can color-code cards by content type (green for blog, blue for social, red for email) and see the work mix across a sprint at a glance. A project manager can use labels for priority (urgent, normal, low) and see the priority distribution across all active tasks simultaneously.

Custom fields, available on Standard and above, add typed properties to cards: text, numbers, dates, dropdowns, and checkboxes. A card representing a client project can have a custom field for the client name, the contract value, and the delivery date, making the card a richer data record rather than just a task placeholder.

Butler Automation

Butler is Trello’s built-in automation system, triggered by card movements, due dates, checklist completions, or manual button presses. Common automations: when a card moves to the Done list, archive it and notify the card’s assigned member; when a card’s due date is 24 hours away, add a red label and notify the assignee; when a new card is created in the Requests list, add a checklist and assign it to the intake coordinator.

Free accounts get 250 automation runs per month. Standard accounts get 1,000 workspace automation runs per month. Premium accounts get unlimited runs. For small teams with simple automation needs, the free tier is sufficient. For teams that want automation to do significant workflow work, Standard or Premium is required.

Power-Ups

Power-Ups are Trello’s extension system: integrations and feature additions that connect Trello to other tools or add capabilities that are not built in. Free accounts get one Power-Up per board. Standard, Premium, and Enterprise accounts get unlimited Power-Ups. Common Power-Ups: Slack notifications, GitHub issue cards, Google Drive attachment previews, calendar sync, voting on cards, and the Jira integration.

The most important implication of the one-Power-Up limit on free accounts is that teams must choose between capabilities. A team that wants both a Google Drive integration and a Slack notification connector must upgrade to Standard to have both on the same board.

Views (Premium Feature)

Beyond the standard Kanban board, Trello Premium adds five additional views: Timeline (Gantt-style), Calendar, Table (spreadsheet-like), Dashboard (charts and summaries), and Map (for location-based work). These views display the same card data in different formats, which is valuable for teams that need to see deadlines on a calendar or communicate a project timeline to a client. The views being Premium-only at $10 per user per month is one of the most common reasons teams report upgrading or switching away from Trello.

Who Should Use Trello

Small teams with simple, linear workflows are Trello’s clearest fit. A content team tracking editorial status (Idea, Writing, Review, Published), an onboarding team managing new hire tasks (To Do, In Progress, Done), or a product team triaging support requests (New, Triaged, In Progress, Resolved) all benefit from Trello’s visual simplicity without bumping into its feature ceiling.

Teams that prioritize zero onboarding friction should seriously consider Trello. In environments where getting the entire team to adopt a PM tool is the primary challenge, Trello’s immediate readability and minimal setup reduce adoption resistance more effectively than any feature-rich alternative. A PM tool the whole team uses is better than a PM tool only the PM uses.

Teams already in the Atlassian ecosystem benefit from Trello’s native Jira integration, which lets engineering teams keep their Jira workflow intact while cross-functional partners track work in Trello with linked issue cards that reflect Jira status automatically.

Who Should NOT Use Trello

Teams managing complex projects with multiple workstreams, dependencies, and resource constraints will hit Trello’s ceiling quickly. There is no native dependency management, no resource or workload view, no portfolio view across multiple boards, and no reporting beyond the Premium Dashboard (which provides basic charts but no cross-board analytics). A project manager who needs to report on team velocity, capacity, or budget variance cannot produce that information from Trello without exporting data to a spreadsheet.

Engineering teams doing Scrum will find Trello an approximation at best. Sprint planning can be done on a Trello board (one board per sprint, move cards between backlog and active lists), but there is no native story point estimation, no velocity chart, no burndown, and no backlog refinement workflow. Jira, ClickUp, or Linear are significantly more appropriate for engineering sprint management.

Growing teams whose board card count exceeds 100 to 150 active cards will find Trello increasingly difficult to navigate. Filtering and search work, but the board interface becomes cluttered at scale in a way that purpose-built tools with more robust filtering and hierarchy manage more gracefully. Trello is most effective as a team size and workflow complexity are modest enough that the full board state is readable at a single glance.

Trello Pricing

Trello offers four plans. The Free plan and Standard plan represent genuine value; Premium is appropriate for teams that need timeline views or unlimited automation; Enterprise is for large organizations requiring centralized governance.

The Free plan covers unlimited cards and list creation, up to 10 boards per workspace, one Power-Up per board, and 250 Butler automation runs per month. The 10-board limit is the most significant free-tier constraint: teams managing more than 10 concurrent projects will need to archive older boards or upgrade.

The Standard plan at $5 per user per month (billed annually) removes the 10-board limit, adds unlimited Power-Ups, custom fields, and 1,000 workspace automation runs per month. This is the appropriate plan for most professional teams using Trello as their primary PM tool.

The Premium plan at $10 per user per month (billed annually) adds the Timeline, Calendar, Table, Dashboard, and Map views, unlimited automation, and observer roles. Teams that need any view beyond the Kanban board require Premium.

The Enterprise plan at $17.50 per user per month (billed annually, minimum 25 users) adds organization-level permissions, public board management, and power admin features for large Atlassian deployments.

Verdict

Trello is the right tool for teams that value simplicity above all else and whose project complexity does not exceed what a well-organized Kanban board can represent. Its free and Standard plans are among the best value options in the category for basic task tracking. Its ceiling is lower than any other tool on this list, but that ceiling is also the point: teams that want project management to be immediately usable without training or configuration will not find a better starting point.

Teams that know they will need Gantt charts, resource management, sprint tracking, or complex reporting within six months should factor the eventual tool switch into their evaluation. Trello’s simplicity is a feature for teams at the right stage of growth and complexity; it becomes a limitation when projects grow beyond what the board can represent clearly.

Affiliation disclosure: This review was produced by ClickUp’s editorial team. ClickUp is a direct competitor to Trello. We evaluated Trello based on three weeks of hands-on testing and have disclosed where ClickUp offers comparable features. Readers should weigh this context when interpreting our assessment.