Kanban workflows made personal and fun
August 12, 2019

Kanban workflows made personal and fun

Elissa Bernstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Trello

Our company uses Trello within specific teams, rather than across the entire organization. My team (product content strategy) used Trello for task management up until a few months ago, when we switched to JIRA Software along with the rest of the product, UX design, and development teams. There are still a few teams who use Trello (like the localization team), so I use their Trello board whenever I need to request translations for dashboard copy.
  • Trello is extremely easy to use. You can create a board and get up and running in minutes. It's very easy to add new users, share permissions, create and edit cards, etc.
  • Trello has a fun brand personality and UI. It sounds silly, but I loved being able to set different photographs as backgrounds -- always made me smile. Their documentation and emails are cute and easy to read.
  • Trello is a great value price-wise and offers a very good free membership.
  • Trello doesn't have all of the functionality of some other competitors. For example, you can't create "swim lanes" that highlight specific issues at the top of each column, or create multiple statuses within a single column.
  • Trello is fantastic for simple views but can appear overwhelming once you add many cards with many fields. I could get around this by filtering to only see cards assigned to myself, but it was hard to otherwise pick out my cards at a glance.
  • Trello only offers one kanban view. You can filter this view, but it would be great if there were multiple views that let you reorganize and view your cards in different ways.
  • 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.
I found Trello extremely easy to use. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to open the sidebar and edit cards, but once I got the hang of it, navigating Trello is very easy. My one complaint is that it can be hard to parse many cards at a glance. Cards can sometimes feel cluttered with all their tags and fields (although I admittedly don't know a better way around this).
I have never needed to contact Trello's customer support team. For the most part, the app is pretty self-explanatory. I have used their help center and find it really useful, particularly their Getting Started guides, which cover everything from general information to feature deep dives and best practices. The help center is available in six different languages and the Trello Community is there to answer questions along with Trello Support.
Ultimately, Trello feels like a simpler version of JIRA. In our team's earlier days, we used and loved Trello. Now, our team has moved to JIRA -- not necessarily because we needed more functionality, but the larger product, design, and development teams use JIRA, and it was preferable for our boards to be linked. Trello is still used by other small teams at the company. It's simpler to use than JIRA and feels more "fun." JIRA does offer more technical capabilities, however, like scrum workflows and swim lanes. JIRA feels like a work tool while Trello is just as appropriate for personal use.
Trello is fantastic and a wonderful solution for smaller teams. Ultimately, my team needed more nuanced capabilities, and we switched to JIRA so that the content strategy, product, UX design, and development projects were all located in one place. But I continue to use the Trello boards that belong to smaller teams, and I also use Trello personally.

Trello is great for individual projects, allowing you to compartmentalize all of your tasks and literally watch your cards cross the finish line into the last column. Issues only start to arise when you're using Trello along with multiple other teams as a collaboration tool.

Trello Feature Ratings

Task Management
8
Resource Management
Not Rated
Gantt Charts
Not Rated
Scheduling
Not Rated
Workflow Automation
Not Rated
Team Collaboration
7
Support for Agile Methodology
8
Support for Waterfall Methodology
Not Rated
Document Management
Not Rated
Email integration
Not Rated
Mobile Access
9
Timesheet Tracking
Not Rated
Change request and Case Management
Not Rated
Budget and Expense Management
Not Rated
Quotes/estimates
Not Rated
Invoicing
Not Rated
Project & financial reporting
Not Rated
Integration with accounting software
Not Rated