Trello Review: Helpful Workflow App

11 Mar Trello Review: Helpful Workflow App

One of the most intuitive kanban workflow apps you’ll find, Trello lets you fully customize the boards you create. It’s a solid tool for managing work and workflows; however, it’s not a project management tool, as many think. 

Kim and I are The Biz Wizards and we use this as an easy and (Free) collaboration tool for our business.  You’d think that our two-person “team” would be easy to administer. But we both have different focus points throughout the day and Trello helps us stay focused on our daily and weekly tasks.

Pros

    Flexible and customizable kanban app

    Offers desktop apps and mobile apps

    Intuitive interface

Cons

    No Gantt charts

    No time-tracking

    No progress reports

    No billing functions

Trello is an eye-catching, fun, and intuitive app that helps people collaborate around work. The biggest challenge to using it is deciding whether it is the right kind of collaboration app to manage your work. Trello is best described as a kanban board app.  It’s a software category that’s best for organizing, coordinating, and tracking a teams’ work as it moves through a workflow. It isn’t a great app for traditional project management. Still, Trello’s selling points are its ease of use and ability to share Trello boards with outside collaborators.

Comparing Trello to other kanban apps, it comes up short on some features, such as swimlanes (project task diagramming) and work-in-progress limits. What it does have is a selection of additional features you can add à la carte, making the app only as complex and feature-rich as you want it to be. Figuring out if it’s right for your team and the work you want to manage may take some trial and error, however.

Is Trello a Project Management App?

A common question I hear about Trello is this: “Isn’t Trello a project management app?”  It is and it isn’t. It depends on how strict you are with your definition of the word “project.” A project is a group of tasks that have 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 is an easy and convenient Kanban workflow app – it shouldn’t be mistaken for a traditional project management app.

What Is Kanban?

Kanban is a method for organizing, tracking, and managing work. Imagine that you want to manage a family to-do list using a poster board and sticky notes. You might start by making three columns (Trello calls them lists) labeled To Do, Doing, and Done. You can then write on the sticky notes chores that must be done and put them into that first column.

There are two large benefits of the kanban process. One is that it’s a great system for limiting how much work any one person can have on their plate at a time. The second is that everyone has visibility into the state of the work that the team (Kim & I) needs to do. This allows for both accountability and the possibility of helping each other if one is falling behind on their task completion.  Kanban board apps are ideal for managing work and the movement of work through different stages, or workflow.

Price and Plans

Trello has trimmed down the number of plan types it offers to three, getting rid of its former Gold option. You can now sign up for a Free, Business Class, or Enterprise account. 

Trello Free Features

Trello Free is as the name suggests: free. With this type of account, you can make as many personal boards, cards, and lists as you want, although you are limited to making no more than 10 team (that is, collaborative) boards. File attachments can be no more than 10MB in size, and you can’t integrate your account with other apps. Most importantly, you get only one power-up option per board.

Trello Power-Up Options (Upgrades)

The power-up concept is important in understanding what makes the Free account so much different from the paid accounts. Power-ups are à la carte features that you add to your Trello boards. Trello is different. With Trello, you customize which features (or power-ups) you want for each board. And the number of features you can add varies based on the account type you choose. A few examples of power-ups are a calendar view, time-tracking, and custom fields.

Trello Business Class Features

The Business Class ($12.50 per person per month or $119.88 per person per year) and Enterprise (prices vary) accounts come with unlimited power-ups. They also both have a 250MB size limit for uploads and let you create an unlimited number of team boards. The difference between these two types of accounts has less to do with end-user features and more with backend management options. Trello Enterprise includes tools for administering single sign-on and managing permissions and restrictions.

Features and Power-Ups

Color-coded labels are another tool for organizing cards, though I find them to be a bit of a letdown. Each label requires a color, which means you quickly run out of easily identifiable colors after maybe 10 or so. There is an option to enable patterns for color-blind users. I would like the option to use keyword tags as labels if that would fit the needs of my board better. That would add more ways to search for, sort, and filter cards. You can add more features through third-party Google Chrome extensions, too. There’s even a Trello app for Slack.  

If you have a paid account that allows for integration, you can connect Trello to other business apps beyond just what’s in the Chrome Extension store. Time-tracking tools Toggl and Harvest both offer integration with Trello, for example.  You can customize Trello to your heart’s content, it just might take a while to connect everything you want and need.

Trello Prices vs the Competition

Trello’s prices are on par with other collaboration software packages. In the first few years after its initial launch, Trello charged much less, which, alongside its friendly user interface, helped it earn a reputation for being a great tool for small businesses and startups. The rates are still fair, but they are not a steal.

Asana charges starts at $13.49 per person per month; Leankit starts at $19 per person per month; Zenkit starts at $9 per person per month option, Wrike starts at $9.80 per person per month.

Trello Scheduling

As with any kanban board app, Trello lets you create custom boards. You can make boards with as many columns as you like, and you can name those columns whatever you want.

Next, you make cards to put into the columns. Trello’s cards can have a lot of detail on them. You can put the name of a task, assignee, sub-tasks, due date, and many more options.  and more.  Another step to getting started is to invite people to join your board if you want to make team boards. Somewhat new to Trello are templates. You can now choose a board that’s already designed to help guide you toward better workflow management, depending on what type of work you are doing.

Mobile & Desktop Usage

You can use Trello as a web app or as a downloaded desktop app (mac OS, Windows) or mobile app (Android, iPhone, and iPad). The web app works smoothly, with great drag-and-drop capabilities. You do get some advantages from installing a desktop app. For starters, you get desktop notifications as well as quick-add options.  Trello lets you upload content from not only your desktop, but also Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and URLs. One of Trello’s strengths is that it’s uniquely flexible and you can get rather creative with it.

Creating rules & Automation in Trello

One of the newer features in Trello is the ability to create automations, also known as command, runs or Butler.  Sometimes in Trello, the rules of your board will be to follow one action (called a trigger) with another action, and it’s the same action every time.

When that’s the case, you can create an automation. For example, whenever you someone moves a card to the Done column, the action can be to automatically check off any remaining sub-tasks on that card.

Flexible, Visual, and Light

Trello is a great and flexible app for collaboratively managing work and workflows. Because it’s flexible, Trello may require some experimentation to figure out how to best use it for your team and the workload you manage. New templates help ease that burden, giving you suggestions on how to get started in different contexts. Trello is a great collaboration tool when you don’t need a heavy-duty project management app.

The Bottom Line

Kim and I find Trello to be an intuitive, customizable, easy-to-use, kanban workflow app. 

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