What is Trello? A guide to Atlassian’s collaboration and work management tool

Trello is a collaborative work administration app designed to trace staff initiatives, spotlight duties underway, shoe who they’re assigned to, and element progress in direction of completion.
At its core, Trello depends on the rules of Kanban venture boards to visualise workflows, offering managers and staff members with a easy overview of a venture from begin to end.
Trello’s key elements are boards, lists, and playing cards.
Boards are the start line, and usually deal with an over-arching venture akin to launching a brand new web site, or process-based duties, akin to on-boarding an worker. Within every board, a number of lists might be created to point the progress of a venture; “to do,” “in progress,” and “done” lists are widespread examples. Individual playing cards inside the lists maintain data on a selected job and might be moved from listing to listing as wanted (akin to when a job is accomplished).
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Trello’s timeline view.
Each card can comprise a broad vary of job data, together with a textual content description, file attachments, automations, feedback, and extra.
Users navigate Trello from a “home view” that acts as a hub and central newsfeed. This permits them to simply bounce to boards or floor the entire playing cards a person might need missed since final logging in.
Trello – which was acquired by software program vendor Atlassian in 2017 – integrates effectively with different functions, too, utilizing what the corporate calls “power-ups.” These API integrations permit customers to entry options in Slack, Salesforce, Gmail, or different apps (as effectively with Atlassian’s personal merchandise) instantly from Trello.
An enormous a part of Trello’s enchantment is its ease of use and flexibility: the app is commonly additionally used for private itineraries, together with something from planning holidays to weddings. In that sense, it differs from full-featured venture administration software program, prioritizing light-weight performance and accessibility over a broad characteristic set.
“Unlike project management applications like Microsoft Project that target traditional project managers, Trello can be used across the organization by anyone that needs to manage projects but does not need or want a specialized – and complex – project management tool,” stated Raúl Castañón, senior analyst at 451 Research, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Atlassian sought to make Trello much more highly effective with the introduction of workflow automations after it acquired Butler and built-in its options into the app. This lets customers arrange easy guidelines to automate repetitive duties akin to shifting a playing cards to the “done” listing when a guidelines is full, as an example.
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Trello playing cards present venture data in easy-to-digest methods to simplify job administration.
Trello pricing
Trello, which revamped its pricing construction on Aug. 24, now presents 4 tiers: Free, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise.
The free tier requires customers to enroll, and gives entry to limitless power-up integrations, limitless storage (as much as 10MB per file), 250 Butler automations, and different options. But the variety of accessible boards is proscribed to 10.
The lately launched Standard tier provides superior checklists and customized fields, further Butler automations, and better file dimension storage (as much as 250MB per file. It prices $5 per person every month, when paid yearly.
The Premium possibility – $10 per thirty days – has limitless Butler automations, added dashboard, timeline and calendar views, and admin and safety instruments.  
The top-tier Enterprise plan contains additional safety measures designed for deployments at massive companies. These measures embody organization-wide permissions, cell machine administration integration, and different admin-focused capabilities. The Enterprise model presents a spread of pricing plans, relying on the variety of customers. It begins at $17.50 per person a month.
How Trello compares to options
Demand for work administration instruments was on the rise even earlier than the Covid-19 pandemic. The rising reputation of distant work and hybrid workplaces has solely elevated the necessity for instruments to coordinate duties amongst disparate groups.
In truth, Gartner expects spending on social and collaboration platforms to rise 17% this 12 months to $4.5 billion, with spending on work administration platforms being the most important driver.
It’s a aggressive subject. Alongside Trello, a wide range of work administration software program distributors have emerged to capitalize on enterprise demand. Among these are Asana and Monday, each which accomplished IPOs up to now 12 months, at valuations of $4 billion and $7.5 billion, respectively. In current months, different opponents within the area have been acquired, together with Workfront (purchased by Adobe for $1.5 billion) and Wrike (purchased by Citrix for $2.25 billion).
Microsoft additionally has a job administration instrument, Planner, which is a part of its Microsoft 365 suite.
Many of those instruments are constructed across the identical Kanban-style to-do listing strategy popularized by Trello; they provide related boards, lists, and card layouts, in addition to different “views.” Most additionally embody automations and collaborative options.
Other rivals take a extra spreadsheet-centric view of venture administration; these embody well-funded standalone apps akin to Smartsheet and Airtable, in addition to merchandise akin to Microsoft Lists and Google Tables.
Trello has lengthy held a major market share, thanks primarily to its ease of use. There had been no less than 50 million registered customers in 2018, in response to the newest stats publicly accessible, although Atlassian stated the determine is now considerably larger. It has additionally benefited from integration into Atlassian’s portfolio of apps such, as Jira.
“It combines ease of use and flexibility with powerful capabilities, making it an effective tool across a wide range of use cases,” stated Castañón.
Furthermore, momentum gained through the COVID-19 lockdown reveals that Trello is a “natural fit” for supporting staff collaboration in a distributed workforce, he stated.
“All in all, Trello stands out against other similar tools; however, it is facing growing competition from adjacent categories. This will be perhaps its main challenge moving forward,” he stated.
How Trello plans to evolve
Trello earlier this 12 months introduced an overhaul of its app, to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of its launch.
Among different modifications, Trello has gotten a number of new board views: desk, timeline, dashboard, and calendar. These present totally different views permitting customers to view and work together with the knowledge held in boards. 
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Trello’s Dashboard view visualizes key metrics akin to due dates, assigned playing cards, and playing cards per listing.
Going ahead, Trello stated customers will be capable of transfer playing cards throughout totally different boards in every of the totally different views, simply as is feasible with the desk view presently. Third-party builders will even be capable of create their very own apps and providers to attach with the assorted board views in future.
Trello now presents three new card varieties: hyperlink playing cards, board playing cards, and mirror playing cards. Link playing cards, as an example, can join with apps akin to Dropbox or Google Drive by pasting a URL within the card’s title, and may show a preview of the content material.
“Trello has been ahead of the curve in several ways,” stated Castañón.
That stated, the app now faces stronger competitors than it’s seen up to now, significantly as some parts of labor administration apps grow to be embedded in current productiveness instruments. For instance, Fluid Components are a part of Microsoft 365, and Smart Canvas is included into Google Workspace. Those integrations make light-weight job administration options accessible in a spread of doc varieties.
“Updates by Microsoft and Google also reflect that Trello faces an intensely competitive space, with the roadmap for productivity tools increasingly incorporating work management capabilities,” Castañón stated.