For Personal and Small Team Kanban (w/out Swimlanes)
August 12, 2019

For Personal and Small Team Kanban (w/out Swimlanes)

Sarah Meerschaert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Trello

Trello is used on a person by person bases at my organization. I use Trello as a bit of a to-do list/Kanban board. I know some teams use Trello across their group but it's more common for this to be used for personal organization at Billtrust. For group tasks, we are more likely to rely on JIRA or Clarizen.
  • UI - Trello is intuitive and easy to set up.
  • Customization - You can change your background color, create as many lists as you want, as many boards as you want, color code, add details, etc.
  • Collaboration - It is super easy to invite others to share a board or assign them tasks. In my volunteer work, we share a board and assign one another tasks. In my last company, I created a list per team member for them to move work into when they picked up the assignment.
  • Ease of Access - I prefer the web app but the phone is easy to use too
  • Swim Lanes - they are nonexistent. There is a third-party tool to add them but it's buggy as all get out
  • View - I am not sure how to do it but I really wish I didn't have to pick between viewing all cards with no detail or one with all detail. Maybe the ability to collapse and expand?
  • Integrations - It would be amazing if I could easily pop action items from Gmail over to Trello, but right now I can only copy text or upload screenshot attachments.
  • Positive - I'm able to pop things into my Trello list for follow up later.
  • Positive - It's free, which is fantastic.
  • Negative - It is time-consuming bouncing between Gmail, Trello, JIRA, Confluence, Salesforce, etc.
This is a really intuitive product for anyone. And if you have any background in Kanban boards, all the better. It's free, there isn't a lot of set up, and they make it very clear what you can edit and customize and what you can't. There are a lot of example boards you can look at online to get ideas for how to structure your own.
I haven't had much need to contact their support because the product is easy to use and pretty bug-free. I did reach out to them about swimlanes and I was able to find the information I needed very quickly and it was thorough and accurate information about current functionality.

I love that they use their own product. That's always a good sign.
Todoist - There's good functionality here but you really need the paid version to get the most out of it. This isn't set up for kanban.
Remember the Milk is really for personal lists.
Evernote - This is incredibly free form. I loved it at first but honestly, you can just use a Google doc or a notepad doc for the same functionality. Trello is much richer.
JIRA - This is good for large projects, large teams, and overall scrum efforts. Trello is for small kanban projects.
Outlook Tasks - Honestly, Outlook tasks is amazing but it isn't very mobile friendly, and it isn't really great for collaboration.
Google Tasks - This product is my least favorite Google product. I'd honestly rather use GoogleWave or GoogleGlasses than this thing.
Trello is great for personal and professional Kanban boards. It's great for small to mid-sized projects. It's hard to use for large long term projects or large teams. It also doesn't feature reporting, so for projects tied to specific deliverables and metrics, it's better to use other tools. Overall it's a great idea when you have more data than works well for physical post-it based Kanban boards but a JIRA project or Clarizen project seems like overkill.

Trello Feature Ratings

Task Management
10
Resource Management
6
Scheduling
8
Team Collaboration
8
Support for Agile Methodology
3
Support for Waterfall Methodology
6
Document Management
2
Mobile Access
8