Trello is a popular cloud-based collaboration tool catered for teams of all sizes, including freelancers and creators. This is mainly used by companies with a large employee workforce to keep track of ongoing projects and important deadlines. With Trello, you don’t have to rely on conducting meetings just to have updates on what has been accomplished. Instead, you can view your progress online using a few powerful features provided by the solution.
Trello Features
Trello boards
A Trello board refers to a list of lists, usually viewed as a card, where you and your team can organize projects. This helps users view details regarding a project such as any working ideas, the tasks to be finished, what’s already been done, and the team members involved. This keeps you updated and makes progress easier to track.
Collaboration
Trello maximizes collaboration by allowing you to invite as many people to your board as needed. Just drag and drop people to your existing cards and they can see the details of the projects they’ve been added into. You can also assign tasks, define workflows and prioritize certain actions. This increases productivity for your team and accelerates projects.
Comments and attachments
Another feature in Trello that increases teamwork is the ability to post comments and add attachments to your cards. With this feature, Trello becomes a platform where you can discuss relevant matters online. This works by mentioning certain members and uploading files from several options. This includes your computer, DropBox, One Drive and Google Drive.
Checklists and due dates
Ensure deadlines are met with the help of checklists and due dates. This feature allows you to keep track of important tasks and upcoming dates or items. If you have the Calendar Power-Up tool, you can view all your remaining activities through a calendar powered by Trello.
Filtering and tagging
Before, when you had to look for relevant information online, you needed to scour through long email threads and several spreadsheets. It’s the same thing with Trello—except with boards, cards and lists. However, the platform reduces the amount of effort you put through just to find a specific category or card. This is done through the filtering and tagging features. All you must do is search up the keyword and you’ll never lose a card again.
Trello Benefits
An organized database
With its simple interface and powerful features, Trello provides users with an organized database where everything can be understood at a single glance. You can arrange and sort through multiple cards according to your preferences, making it easier to work through projects of any size.
Secured and well-protected data
Trello doesn’t take security for granted and understands the need for privacy and security. Depending on the pricing plan you chose, you are given varying levels of protection. However, it should be noted that your data is sent over a secure, SSL/HHTPS connection and is kept encrypted in off-site backups.
Reasonable timeframes
When you have several projects happening all at once, it becomes difficult to manage all of them. However, with Trello’s intuitive tools, you can decide which tasks and cards should be prioritized by the team. It also keeps you on track of expected deadlines and upcoming due dates. Additionally, these tools come with the ability to know which team member has been assigned a specific task and if said task has already been completed.
Trello Pricing
Three pricing packages are made available by Trello to its users: Free, Business Class and Enterprise. Each plan has different sets of standard features and varying levels of functionalities. They are also catered to different types of industries and businesses. If you want to check out its most basic features, you can try its Free version without any charges at all.
Free
This plan is free of charge for your lifetime subscription. Its standard features include unlimited personal boards, unlimited cards, unlimited lists and 10 MB of space per file attachment. When it comes to the team features, you are only given a maximum of ten boards overall.
On the other hand, you are also limited to one power-up per board. Power-ups enable you to use calendars, custom fields, third party reporting and automation for your business requirements. You can also have automated features by Butler. This includes the ability to add rudimentary automation to daily tasks and run 50 commands per month.
You don’t have to worry about security as well since the Free plan has a 2-factor authentication feature.
Business Class
This second pricing plan has all the features found in Free but with a few notable differences and advanced options. You can benefit from an increased 250 MB increase per file attachment, priority support, observers and custom backgrounds and stickers.
Other additional tools include board collections and team board templates. This means you can compile the boards of your teams under collections based on departments, team or major projects. You also have more power-ups, which are further explained in the following:
- Custom fields – help structure cards with custom fields such as texts, dates, numbers, checkboxes and dropdown lists
- List limits – with limits, users can identify bottlenecks in their team’s workflow
- Card repeater – reduces the need for manual card creation by automatically duplicating Trello cards at set intervals
- Calendar view – allows your deadlines to be represented through a visual calendar
- Map view – adds locations and places to your cards
- Voting – allows for voting when it comes to important team decisions
- More than 100 application integrations – includes Slack, Google Drive and Salesforce
When it comes to the automated features offered by Butler, the Business Class plan has 1,000 command runs per team, scheduled commands, command administration, email notifications and HTTP requests.
With security, you don’t have just a 2-factor authentication. You have additional security features to keep your data safe and protected. This includes advanced admin permissions, domain-capped invites, the ability to exclude colleagues, Google Apps sign-on and simple data export.
This plan is priced at $9.99 per user and per month.
Enterprise
The last pricing plan varies to the number of registered users you have in this solution. For example, if you only have 20 users per month, then each user is priced at $20.83. But if you have 5,000 users, then each user is priced at $5.92. It has all the standard and team features offered in the previous plan. What makes it different are the additional functionalities found in the security and administrative category:
- Single sign-on for all SAML IdPs – allows easy access to Trello for employees who are using top identity providers such as Microsoft Azure, G Suite, Okta and OneLogin
- Power-up administration – lets users decide which power-ups and attachment types can be used on a board
- Attachment restrictions – allows you to restrict certain attachments on some boards
- Company-wide permissions – this allows you to set permission at company-level, granting access to all teams
- Organization visible boards
- Personalized onboarding
- Public board management – this administrative feature lets you view public boards in private spaces of users and change the visibility of select boards
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a proper project management platform to incorporate teamwork and efficiency, then Trello is one of the best alternatives in the current market. With its uncomplicated and easy-to-navigate interface, new startups and small businesses won’t have any problems getting used to how it works. Trello users have also stated that the activity history and third-party application integrations are its most recommended features.
