What is Trello?
Trello is a web-based project management tool that helps teams to organize and prioritize tasks, collaborate on projects, and track progress. Founded in 2011 and acquired by Atlassian in 2017, Trello has become one of the most popular project management tools on the market, used by teams of all sizes across a wide range of industries. Trello's visual interface makes it easy to create and manage projects using a system of boards, lists, and cards. Users can add cards to their boards to represent tasks, projects, or ideas, and then add comments, checklists, attachments, and due dates to each card. Users can also assign cards to team members, set priorities, and track progress using Trello's intuitive drag-and-drop interface. In addition to its core project management features, Trello offers a range of power-ups and integrations that enable users to extend the functionality of the platform. Power-ups include features like custom fields, voting, and automation, while integrations with third-party tools like Slack, Google Drive, and GitHub enable users to connect Trello with their favorite apps and services. Overall, Trello's intuitive interface and powerful features make it an ideal tool for teams looking to streamline their project management workflows and collaborate more effectively.
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Trello Reviews (32)
- ★★★★★17
- ★★★★★11
- ★★★★★3
- ★★★★★1
- ★★★★★0
Review Summary
Generated using AI from real user reviews
Trello is a straightforward, intuitive task manager that works well for small teams and solo operators, though it has clear limitations as you scale. Users consistently praise the drag-and-drop board view, which requires almost no onboarding and helps teams spot bottlenecks at a glance. The integrations with Slack, Google Drive, and GitHub are genuinely valued, pulling in files and notifications without forcing tool-switching. Checklists inside cards and automation through Butler (Trello's built-in rule engine) are frequently highlighted as understated features that save real time on repetitive work.
The main criticisms emerge around growth and depth. Users bumping into larger teams or complex workflows report hitting walls: no cross-board workload view, missing dependencies, shallow task hierarchy, and reporting gaps that require piping data elsewhere. The free tier has tightened, with power-up limits and timeline views now paywalled. A handful of users reported occasional reliability issues—sluggish boards, cards refusing to save, checklist items flickering back—though most describe uptime as solid. Customer support is described as slow or templated when it's needed at all.
For nonprofits and agencies, the platform scales reasonably well and onboards new members fast. Solo operators and small remote teams find it near-frictionless. But if you need granular reporting, task dependencies, or workload balancing across people, you'll likely feel constrained.
★★★★★
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
“Five years in and I still open Trello on Monday…”
Five years in and I still open Trello on Monday mornings the same way I open my coffee app. It's just there, ready, with no friction between me and whatever I need to do. That is rarer than it sounds. Most project tools feel like they were designed by someone who wanted you to notice the software. Trello gets out of the way. Cards are cards. Drag one from 'In Progress' to 'Done' and everything updates. The visual board layout clicked for me within the first hour, and honestly it has never stopped clicking.
For a small team like ours (seven people, fully remote), the UI does a lot of the management work for you. Checklists inside cards are my favorite underappreciated feature. Instead of a separate task tracker or a buried spreadsheet, I can pop open a card, see exactly what's done and what isn't, and close it in ten seconds. The Slack integration handles notifications without spamming anyone. Automations through Butler have saved me probably an hour a week of manual card-moving and due-date nudging. None of these features feel bolted on.
If I'm being honest about the friction points, the free tier is more limited now than it used to be, and a couple of the power-ups I rely on require the paid plan. That stings a little for a tiny operation. Customer support has also been more of a documentation-first, human-second experience, which is fine when the product works but mildly annoying when you have a specific edge-case question. Even with those caveats, I would not switch. The UI consistency alone, across five years and multiple Atlassian ownership cycles, is genuinely impressive.
★★★★★
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
“Six months managing client work through Trello, and the integrations…”
Six months managing client work through Trello, and the integrations are genuinely what made me stay. When you're running projects on behalf of clients rather than for your own team, the number of tools in play multiplies fast. Slack notifications that actually fire at the right moment. Google Drive attachments living directly on the card so clients aren't hunting through email threads. GitHub links that let my dev contacts see ticket context without leaving their own workflow. All of it clicked into place within the first couple of weeks, and onboarding new clients to a board where their preferred tools already plug in has made a noticeably smoother handoff process.
The Power-Ups system is where Trello earns its keep for agency work specifically. Custom fields let me surface the information each client actually cares about, and the automation rules (Butler, if you're not familiar) have quietly saved me hours of manual card-moving and status-updating across multiple boards. I set a rule once per project type and it just runs. That kind of low-friction customisation matters when you're context-switching between five different client accounts in a single afternoon.
My one genuine frustration: the free-tier Power-Up limit will catch you off guard if you're spinning up boards for budget-conscious clients who want to stay on the free plan. You hit the wall sooner than you'd expect, and the conversation about upgrading can feel awkward when it wasn't flagged clearly at the start. It's not a dealbreaker, but I wish the pricing page were more upfront about which integrations actually require a paid tier. Overall though, Trello fits agency life better than anything else I've tried in this space.
★★★★★
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
“Checklists inside cards sound like a small thing. They are…”
Checklists inside cards sound like a small thing. They are not. About a year ago I started using Trello to manage a mixed workload of ongoing client deliverables and one-off tasks, and the checklist feature is what I keep coming back to when someone asks why I haven't switched to anything fancier. You can nest multiple checklists inside a single card, name each one differently, assign individual checklist items to specific people, and set due dates on each item independently. For a small team handling projects with a lot of moving parts, that granularity matters enormously.
What really clicked for me was realising I could build a sort of micro-workflow inside one card without cluttering the board with a dozen sub-cards. A single "Website Relaunch" card can contain a "Copy" checklist assigned to one person, a "Design Assets" checklist assigned to another, and a "QA" checklist sitting ready for when both are done. Progress shows as a little completion bar on the card face. Visible at a glance. No digging required. My four-person project team stopped missing hand-offs almost immediately after we set this up properly.
The rest of Trello holds up well too. Automation through Butler has saved me from a handful of tedious recurring tasks, and the Google Drive power-up means attachments are actually findable later. Customer support is pretty much self-serve documentation, which is fine most of the time but can feel thin when you hit something unusual. Value is hard to argue with at this size and price point. If checklists with per-item ownership and due dates is something you need daily, Trello does it better than anything I tried before landing here.
★★★★★
Thursday, April 16, 2026
“Moved here from a tool that had every feature imaginable…”
Moved here from a tool that had every feature imaginable and zero clarity. Trello's boards are genuinely refreshing after that mess. Cards are quick to create, drag-and-drop actually works, and for simple client workflows it covers the basics well.
That said, a year in and I keep bumping into the same walls. No timeline view without upgrading, automation limits on the free tier are real, and the features I relied on before (dependencies, workload tracking) just aren't here. It's lighter, yes. Sometimes too light for what I need.
★★★★★
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
“Solid reliability, honestly. In about a year of daily use…”
Solid reliability, honestly. In about a year of daily use across a small six-person team, I can count the outages on one hand. That matters more than any feature list when your whole workflow lives inside one tool. Cards load fast, boards sync without drama, and I've hit maybe two minor bugs the whole time.
The one gripe: their status page sometimes lags behind what's actually happening. I've noticed slowdowns before Atlassian officially acknowledges them. Small thing, but frustrating in the moment. Still, for a team our size, the uptime track record is genuinely hard to fault.
★★★★★
Friday, April 3, 2026
“Doubling the size of a nonprofit team is the kind…”
Doubling the size of a nonprofit team is the kind of chaos that exposes every weak point in your systems. Six months ago I was managing boards for maybe eight people. Now I'm onboarding new volunteers and part-time educators almost every month, and Trello has handled every bit of that growth without making me feel like I'm constantly rebuilding from scratch. The drag-and-drop card system is intuitive enough that new people are contributing meaningfully within their first week, no training sessions required. That alone is worth a lot when you're running lean.
What surprised me most is how well the permission structure scales. I can keep sensitive grant-tracking boards visible only to core staff while volunteers access their own project spaces without getting lost or stumbling into the wrong place. Automation through Butler has cut down repetitive setup work noticeably. Customer support responded faster than I expected for a free-tier user, though their answers sometimes felt a little templated. For a nonprofit operating on a tight budget, the value here is genuinely hard to argue with.
★★★★★
Thursday, April 2, 2026
“Three years of running projects for a small education charity,…”
Three years of running projects for a small education charity, and the thing that keeps tripping us up isn't the learning curve or the feature gaps. It's reliability. I've lost count of the afternoons where Trello has gone sluggish mid-session, cards refusing to save, boards throwing errors with no explanation. One particularly bad stretch last spring meant my team couldn't access a board for the better part of a day during a grant deadline. That's not a minor inconvenience when you're working with volunteers and tight timelines.
To be fair, the kanban interface is genuinely intuitive, and new volunteers pick it up quickly with minimal hand-holding. The checklists and due dates cover most of what a small nonprofit actually needs. But the bug history bothers me more than I expected it to when I first signed up. Support responses tend to be slow and fairly generic. For an organisation without a dedicated IT person to escalate things, that combination is wearing. I'd keep looking if uptime matters to you.
★★★★★
Monday, March 23, 2026
“Switching away from my old board-based tool felt risky after…”
Switching away from my old board-based tool felt risky after years of habit. Trello just made the transition obvious. The drag-and-drop is snappier, the card detail view is cleaner, and automations I used to cobble together with third-party scripts are now built right in. A few power-ups I relied on early on got paywalled over time, which stung a little. Still, for a solo operator running five or six client projects at once, nothing else I've tested comes close to this level of clarity.
★★★★★
Monday, March 9, 2026
“Not once in six months has Trello gone down on…”
Not once in six months has Trello gone down on me mid-sprint. That sounds like a low bar, but if you've been burned by flaky tools before, you know how much it matters. Our department runs daily standups off the board, and reliability is non-negotiable.
I came in half-expecting the usual baggage: mysterious syncing bugs, cards disappearing, the odd outage at the worst possible time. None of it. The platform just works. Customer support was a little slow on one question I had, but honestly, I rarely needed them.
★★★★★
Thursday, February 26, 2026
“Five-plus years solo, and Trello is still the backbone of…”
Five-plus years solo, and Trello is still the backbone of how I run every client engagement. That said, I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't flag the edges I've bumped into repeatedly. Card aging is a nice visual nudge, but it breaks down when you have genuinely long-horizon tasks that are actively worked. They go visually stale even when they're not. The free tier's power-up limit used to be brutal (one at a time, remember that?), and while they've loosened it considerably, some automations still hit ceilings that feel arbitrary for a solo operator. Subtask depth is shallow. You get checklists, which are fine, but if you want nested sub-items or dependencies, you're patching it with workarounds.
None of that is enough to make me leave. The drag-and-drop board view is still the clearest way I know to see where a project actually stands, and the Butler automation has saved me embarrassing amounts of repetitive clicking. If you work alone and your projects don't require deep hierarchical structures, this thing is hard to beat. Just go in knowing the limits.
