Pivotal Tracker vs. Planview AdaptiveWork vs. Trello

The UI of the Pivotal tracker is really beautiful and amazing, which looks trivial, but we have it open all the time, so it's nice for us. In Pivotal tracker for me its very Easy to create tasks or stories anytime without facing any problems. Pivotal tracker provides us a ton of features to track the tasks and manage a team and the projects. Pivotal tracker allows for a entire team to be on the same page of the tool in regards to where is the project right now, right status of every task, what is being worked on and by whom.

Incentivized

I've been an AdaptiveWork (Clarizen) admin for the past 14 years, so I've seen much improvement since I started working with the product. I'm very happy we can utilize the hybrid mode by using the cards, I think this was long overdue but it works very well.

Incentivized

For teams or individuals with lots of individual tasks/details to track, Trello is perfect! It basically removes the need for a paper checklist. For those that need an overall project management tool that requires less tasks and more overarching goals, collaboration amongst various teams, and gantt charts I would suggest monday.com

Incentivized

• It's great for tracking milestones and reporting team velocity per sprint.
• Maintaining a prioritized backlog that is sharable with different members of your team is relatively simple.
• There's a free version of the product for up to 3 collaborators working on 2 projects and the starting price for larger packages is relatively low.

Incentivized

• Many ways to acclimate to the system; documentation, videos, community, and contacts.
• Planview provides scalable customization options tailored to the unique needs of each business unit or department. Easily add or remove fields in the system. As the admin, it was easy to learn how to configure.
• Offers flexibility to adapt to existing systems and align with organizational workflows and processes. There are multiple ways to customize each part of the system to meet our needs.

Incentivized

• Helps track employees "to do before hire", "to do after hired," and "to do when employee leaves"
• Provides important information on each employee like personal information along with data collected during the time of hire and during employment time
• Allows more than one person to be assigned to a task per employee and will remain open until everyone involved has completed their task

• In-story task management is still a weak point. The ability to @mention users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress' would go a long way.
• Epics do not span projects. This becomes troublesome when scaling Pivotal Tracker's agile methodology to multiple teams.
• Splitting stories is often confusing for team members as there is no concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off of it. There are only two levels: Epic & Story.

Incentivized

• When it comes to reports, it would be great if there was an easy way to roll-up the results instead of having to create configurations to summarize data.
• The consultant experience has not been great when it comes to more advanced needs for configurations. The consultants are in a different timezone which limits hours to work together and it seems hours are spent trying to determine what the requirement is and when the initial thought is that the configuration is possible, it may result in not being able to assist.
• Charts in the reports section are not able to be exported
• When pulling a report together, you need to make sure you pull from the right "item" or level. If you decide you need data that resides in another "item" or level, you need to re-do the report from the beginning.
• Because the system is so configurable and I imagine different clients use the system differently, when you need something automated in your account, where you need to pull a consultant or SME in, the person doesn't necessarily understand your configurations and how things work so they are unable to give recommendations on how to solve problems that don't impact other configurations you already have set up in the system.
• Templates cannot be updated unless they are pulled into a project and then re-saved. In the templates module, you are not able to open a template and edit to re-save. Therefore, making updates to a template can be very time consuming having to find a project to use to pull it in, make updates, re-save and then pull out. It would be great if the templates module allowed you to edit the templates and re-save.

Incentivized

• I use colour coding a lot so I would like a wider range of colour options.
• Also as a visual thinker I would like to be able to easily add images to cards.
• I would like to be able to attach a wider range of file formats to cards.

Incentivized

I love the simplicity, non-configurability, and price/performance of this tool. Hands down my favorite project management tool for agile.

Incentivized

I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.

I am very likely to renew Trello, because it doesn't cost anything to do so. I am also very likely to use Trello's upgraded features in the future because a lot of my team's data is stored on there and they have already gotten used to the platform. Trello is very easy for new team members to pick up, making the onboarding and usability very streamlined.

Incentivized

It was generally easy to use once you got the hang of it. The searching and tagging of tickets was fine, commenting worked well, and release planning was good. However, it wasn't the most intuitive tool in the beginning. The UI is pretty outdated and could have used upgrades over time.

Incentivized

It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented.

The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.

Trello is incredibly intuitive, both on desktop and mobile right away. It is also full of helpful features that make it even easier to use, and is flexible enough to suit almost any organizational need. Onboarding for the software is thorough, but concise, and the service is frequently updated with even more QOL improvements.

Incentivized

Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.

yes always support available when I need it!

Reports: Quick to Reasonable

Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable
(By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.)

Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow

Never experienced issues with the above!

We've never had to request support in the 5 years I have been using it. A solid solution! Everything I have had questions about is on the website. New features are in their newsletter with more details on their website. Often I am using the new features within a few minutes of reading the article.

Incentivized

It's a good experience overall. Clarizen was useful when needed. It's mostly needed for advice on how to do more sophisticated actions or how to change something that was set up administratively. It's seldom used otherwise. The product consistently works, the documentation is acceptable, and the generally intuitive product is easy enough for most staff to pick up without much issue.

Incentivized

I haven't reached out to their support very often and their support is very limited anyway for the free users. They do have tons of great articles and videos in their Help Center and constantly send emails with updates and add-ons to the product. The fact that I've barely ever had to contact their support team means that they've developed a great product.

Incentivized

• We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period.
• Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here

It was helpful and informative! It was back before the pandemic in 2019 so I'm not sure if they still do it but I really enjoyed the experience

Our trainer, Alex, is exceptional and knows the product really well. I swear he must have wrote the product himself! His manner with training is very easy going, gives you homework that is applicable to what you need to learn and stages it correctly for you. It was a pleasure to be trained by him.

We have been able to implement AdaptiveWork pretty easily but it requires updating of resource availability and continuous training as roles change and new people join the company. Other documentation is used such as spreadsheets for longer range planning and project approval

Incentivized

For our small business, getting a few of us started well on Trello was the key, I think. As long as a couple of us were really comfortable with the interface, we could lead others and help them with any questions. From now on, anyone who works with us just naturally uses Trello for information sharing - it's just part of what we do.

Incentivized

We have had employees in the past look at Drupal, and other open source project management tools to assist in our needs. Unfortunately each solution took too much time to implement, design and configure that we could not stop the work we were doing for clients to complete a full set up of a project tracker. Thankfully Pivotal is a predefined solution with no configuration needed. Simply input your projects, design your Stories with Tasks and begin your tracking.

Incentivized

Planview AdaptiveWork was the right size, at the right price point that fit our customization and integration flexibility. It is intuitive to use but allowed us to add complexity as our needs grew

Incentivized

Trello is more simple and not as "robust" as the other tools, but it's easier to use and manage and understand and ACTUALLY get stuff done with. It's simplicity is part of the beauty of using it. You don't need a million options that nobody uses, you just need to get stuff done.

Incentivized

Feels like anyone across the org (no matter their location) can use the tool easily!

Not sure if we use those

• Time is money with development and a lot of things can fall through the cracks. Having a good system for making sure you're building the most relevant product for customers is really important so it was well worth it for us.
• The process we used worked for us and it helped us streamline our development which reduced a lot of things falling through the cracks and headaches. I'm sure there are other products that can do the same job just as effectively but Pivotal Tracker worked well for us.

Incentivized

• By implementing Planview AdaptiveWork on a company-wide level, we have been able to remove the other project management tools we have been using and consolidate our costs for technology down to a single tool
• The ability to incorporate cross-departmental work and communication has streamlined our project management processes to a point where we can work seamlessly together without interruption trying to consider the gaps between tools
• Reporting capabilities from the unified tool has given our leadership insight and the ability to make strategic business decisions more effectively than ever

Incentivized

• Trello keeps me organized, focused, and on track. I could filter the Trello board to only see my issues and understand what I needed to work on and when.
• Trello helped our team implement an agile structure. It's a very simple kanban method of viewing all of your team's tasks and statuses. You can completely customize the columns to your team's specific workflow and create tags relevant to your work.
• Trello helps reduce unnecessary communications between teams. When I want to request translations, I simply create a card on the localization Trello board -- no need to directly message anyone on the team, and I can watch the status of the card change from "in progress" to "in review" to "translated," all without having to directly ask for updates.

Incentivized