Trello Review 2025: In Defense of Doing Less

Hot Take: Simplicity Is the Most Underrated Feature in Software

Here is something that will get me yelled at on LinkedIn: most project management tools are too complicated, and the people who buy them are confusing activity with progress. I have watched three different companies migrate from Trello to Monday.com or ClickUp because someone in management decided they needed "more powerful project management." Every single time, the same thing happened. The new tool got configured. Dashboards got built. Custom fields got created. Training sessions were scheduled. And six months later, half the team was still tracking their actual work on sticky notes because the project management tool had become a project unto itself.

Trello does not let this happen. Not because it is magic, but because it does not give you enough rope to hang yourself with. There are boards. There are lists. There are cards. You drag cards from left to right as work progresses. That is it. That is the product. A five-year-old could understand it. And that constraint -- that refusal to be everything for everyone -- is what makes Trello genuinely useful for a surprising number of teams.

I am not going to pretend Trello is the right tool for every team. It is not. If you are managing a fifty-person engineering organization with cross-team dependencies and quarter-long sprints, you need Jira or Linear. If you are doing portfolio-level program management, you need Asana or Monday. But for the majority of teams -- small teams, non-technical teams, teams that just need to see what everyone is working on -- Trello is not just adequate. It is better than the complex alternatives, specifically because it is simpler.

What Trello Gets Right That Others Miss

The drag-and-drop is the product. This sounds trivial. It is not. Moving a card from "In Progress" to "Done" triggers a small hit of satisfaction that I cannot fully explain but that I experience every time. It is the digital equivalent of crossing something off a list. ClickUp, Monday, and Asana have drag-and-drop too, but it gets buried under navigation trees, sidebar panels, and view selectors. In Trello, the board is the first thing you see and the only thing you need to interact with. The visual clarity is the value.

Zero training required. I have onboarded new team members onto Trello in less than five minutes. Here is the board. Here are the lists. Here is where your tasks are. Drag them when you are done. Any questions? There never are. Compare this with Asana (which requires explaining sections, projects, portfolios, goals, workload views, and rules) or ClickUp (which requires a full orientation just to understand the hierarchy of Spaces, Folders, Lists, and Views). The best tool is the one people actually use, and people use tools they understand.

The board layout works for almost anything. I have seen Trello boards for software sprints, editorial calendars, wedding planning, apartment hunting, sales pipelines, customer support tickets, recipe collections, and one memorable board that tracked every episode of a podcast. The Kanban structure is flexible enough to represent any workflow that moves through stages, and that covers more use cases than you might expect.

Butler Automation: The Secret Weapon

If there is one feature that has kept Trello competitive against tools with ten times the functionality, it is Butler. Butler is Trello's built-in automation engine, and it is good enough that it eliminates entire categories of complaints about Trello's simplicity.

Here are automations I set up in under an hour that my team uses every day. When a card is moved to "Review," it automatically gets assigned to our QA lead and a due date gets set for two days out. When all checklist items on a card are checked, the card moves itself to "Done" and gets a green label. Every Monday morning, a "Weekly Planning" card auto-creates in the "To Do" list. When a new card is created in any list, a comment is automatically posted to our Slack channel.

Butler uses a natural language interface that non-technical people can actually understand. You are not writing code. You are assembling trigger-action rules from dropdown menus that read like sentences: "When a card is moved into list Done by anyone, set the card cover to green and remove all members." My marketing colleague built her own automation in fifteen minutes after I showed her where the button was. That would not happen in Jira or ClickUp without someone writing an actual workflow configuration.

The free tier gives you limited Butler runs per month. Paid plans make them unlimited. If you are using Trello seriously, the automation alone justifies the upgrade. It turns a simple board tool into something that handles a surprising amount of workflow logic.

The Teams Where Trello Shines

Marketing and Content Teams

If I could only recommend one project management tool for marketing teams, it would be Trello without hesitation. Content calendars work naturally as boards: "Ideas," "Writing," "Editing," "Scheduled," "Published." Each card is a piece of content with a description, a due date, a label for content type, and a checklist of production steps. You can attach the Google Doc draft, tag the editor, and track the whole thing without leaving Trello. Marketing teams tend to have straightforward workflows and value visual clarity. Trello was built for them.

Freelancers and Solopreneurs

When you are a team of one, the overhead of a powerful project management tool is all cost and no benefit. You do not need role-based permissions. You do not need portfolio dashboards. You need a place to track what you are working on, what is up next, and what is done. Trello's free tier -- ten boards per workspace, unlimited cards -- is more than enough for most solo workers. I know freelancers who have been on Trello's free plan for five years and never needed to upgrade.

Non-Technical Teams That Hate "Software"

I have introduced Trello to HR departments, school administrators, and a group of restaurant managers. In every case, the adoption was immediate. These are people who visibly flinch when you say the word "onboarding." Trello does not feel like enterprise software. It feels like a whiteboard with sticky notes, which is exactly what many of these teams were using before. The transition from physical to digital should be invisible, and Trello makes it invisible.

When You Will Outgrow Trello (And That Is Okay)

I want to be honest about Trello's ceiling because pretending it does not exist would make this review useless.

You will outgrow Trello when your board has more than about fifty active cards. At that point, the visual advantage of the Kanban board inverts -- instead of clarity, you get visual noise. Scrolling through long lists looking for specific cards becomes frustrating, and search becomes your primary navigation method, which defeats the purpose of a visual tool.

You will outgrow Trello when you need task dependencies. There is no built-in way to say "Task B cannot start until Task A is complete." You can fake it with labels or checklists, but it is a workaround, not a feature. For projects with complex dependency chains, Trello will cause missed deadlines because the tool cannot enforce sequencing.

You will outgrow Trello when you need reporting. Trello has no native burndown charts, velocity tracking, time-to-completion metrics, or workload views. The Dashboard view on Premium plans shows basic activity stats, but nothing approaching what Asana, Monday, or Jira provide. If someone in leadership asks "how productive is our team this quarter," Trello cannot answer that question.

You will outgrow Trello when cross-team coordination matters. One board per team works fine. When three teams need to coordinate on a project with shared milestones and handoffs, you need a portfolio-level view that Trello does not offer. You can link boards, but it is clunky.

A Word About Feature Creep Culture

I want to push back on something I see in every Trello review, including the ones written by people I respect. The common critique goes: "Trello is fine, but it lacks X, Y, and Z features that competitors offer." The implication is that more features equals better tool. I disagree.

ClickUp has more features than any other project management tool. It also has the steepest learning curve, the most cluttered interface, and some of the most frustrated users I have talked to. Monday.com has been adding features at a pace that is impressive and also slightly exhausting -- their product now includes CRM, forms, docs, whiteboards, and probably a toaster by the time you read this. These tools suffer from the same problem: they optimize for the demo, not the daily use.

Trello has resisted this temptation more than most, and I think that resistance is a feature, not a bug. Yes, Atlassian has added views, automation, and integrations. But the core product is still recognizably the same board-and-card experience it was in 2011. That consistency has value. It means the blog post you read three years ago about how to set up a Trello board still works. It means the workflow your team built last year does not break because of a product redesign. It means your mental model of the tool stays stable. In a world where every SaaS product is trying to be a platform, there is something refreshing about a tool that is trying to be a very good tool.

Pricing: Fair, With One Annoying Tier

Free gives you unlimited cards, up to ten boards, one Power-Up per board, and limited Butler automation. Genuinely useful for small teams and personal projects. Standard at five per user per month unlocks unlimited boards, unlimited Power-Ups, custom fields, and advanced checklists. This is the sweet spot for most teams. Premium at ten per user per month adds Timeline, Calendar, Dashboard, and Map views, plus workspace admin features and priority support. Enterprise at $17.50 per user per month adds organizational controls and SSO.

My complaint is with the Premium tier. Gating the Timeline and Calendar views -- which are table-stakes features in competing tools -- behind a ten-dollar-per-user plan is Trello's worst pricing decision. Asana offers calendar and timeline views on cheaper plans. Monday includes them at comparable price points. These views are not premium features in 2025. They are expected features. Trello should either include them at the Standard tier or lower the Premium price. This is the one area where Atlassian's ownership has clearly pushed Trello toward revenue extraction at the expense of user goodwill.

Trello vs. the Rest

Pros and Cons

The Anti-Feature-Creep Verdict