Every manager needs a digital partner when it comes to handling business tasks — no matter how big or small. The good thing is that there is a wide range of management tools available for you. The downside? It’s a headache to pick the best one.
In this Trello vs. monday.com comparison, we will make things easier for you by battling the top two contenders that offer project management tools. While every software exists to provide a case-to-case solution, let’s see once and for all the best and only management tool you’ll ever need.
Table of Contents
monday.com
monday.com started back in 2010, but it only began gaining attention in 2018. The immediate rise to fame as a project management tool can be attributed to monday.com’s sleek user-interface with features that cover all your managing needs.
The basics of monday.com are easy to utilize. By adopting this tool, your projects will be categorized into boards that are composed of “pulses” or grouped tasks. monday.com allows you to include deadlines, assigned people, tags, and other things to the pulses.
One of the coolest features of this software is the ability to color-code where you can add/edit the labels for each task.
Style is definitely one of monday.com’s strong suits, which are perfect for the wide variety of features that the tool offers. Flexibility is taken into a whole another level where you can choose your own visual type of project management. In this way, monday.com allows you to display data in many ways that you can easily understand and follow.
Clear communication is critical to successful project completion and delivery, which monday.com understands. This tool provides a centralized communication to make sure that you are updated real-time.
monday.com also offers integrations where you can automatically bring your data from multiple apps. Some of the most popular integrations in this tool are Zoom, Microsoft applications, Dropbox, and Google applications.
All of monday.com’s features come with a price. The Basic plan costs $8 per user per month complete with the essentials but with limited remote work and advanced features. Their most popular plan is the Standard plan, which costs $10 per user per month, which is considerably more than enough to support simple and complex management tasks.
If you have a large number of employees, consider getting the Pro plan, which costs $16 per user per month, but for full-grown companies, you can customize your own Enterprise plan.
While monday.com doesn’t have a free plan, you can experience the Pro plan in a 14-day free trial.
Pros
- It offers many views and customizable items
- Can handle simple to complex project management
- Availability of centralized communication
-
Availability of integrations and plug-ins
Cons
- No free version
- It can be a bit complicated to use
Trello
Trello started as a prototype developed back in 2011 before it became the giant global productivity platform we see today.
This cloud-based project management tool lets you organize and prioritize your projects in a flexible way with Trello’s usage of boards, lists, and cards.
Image Source: https://blog.trello.com/butler-power-up-trello-automation
Using Trello is like having an online whiteboard. In its essence, you create columns and add cards under it. The cards represent the tasks that are categorized under the column of your project. You can then assign these cards to your team members with given deadlines—a pretty neat Kanban setup.
Right off the bat, what’s interesting about Trello is that it’s incredibly simple without sacrificing productivity. A typical setup is having columns named “to-do,” “doing,” and “done.” It’s incredibly user-friendly that you can use this tool to organize just about anything regardless if it’s for work or personal. But simple doesn’t mean basic.
This tool takes Kanban project management to a whole different level with its Built-In Workflow Automation with Butler. With Butler, you can set up the option to automatically remove tedious tasks from your to-do lists with its interactive triggers and commands. It’s like having an assistant’s assistant, all to boost your productivity and efficiency.
True to its flexibility, Trello features the new use of Power-Ups. Power-Ups are plug-ins, scripts, and integrations that you can add to your boards. Trello offers a wide variety of power-ups such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Agile Guy.
Another thing that Trello has an edge with its pricing. Trello offers its standard features for free. This includes unlimited personal boards, cards, and lists with an allocation of 10MB per file attachment. It also comes with 10 Team Boards, 1 Power-Up per Board, and limited use of Automation by Butler.
If you want more from Trello, its Business Class plan costs $9.99 per user per month while the Enterprise plan starts at $20.83 per month suitable for 20 users, and the more users you have, the lesser you need to pay.
Pros
- Easy to use
- Smart planning with Butler
- Availability of Power-Ups
- The free plan is adequate for personal use
Cons
- Limited to general project management only
- Lacks features for a PM tool
Trello vs Monday.com – Features Face-to-Face
1. Ease of Use
Before digging deeper into the features and functionality of Trello and monday.com, you should need to know how easy and efficient you can use them. In this part, we are testing both management tools for ease of use and accessibility. We’ll also see whether there is a struggle between design and usability from the two.
Trello
Trello prides itself on being user-friendly. Its onboarding is really simple to use with a minimal learning curve. So you can use this tool regardless of your experience. The type of industry you belong to doesn’t really matter because Trello is an all-around project management tool.
All you need to do to use Trello is to open a board, add a list, then add your cards. What you have now is a fuss-free list that keeps track of your task.
The reason why Trello is so simple is because of its Kanban methodology that it uses. Having separate columns for to-do, doing, and done lets you visualize your management process and achievements. Seeing all the items in the context of each other can be very informative which lessens the hassle of having to look through your determined tasks.
Since Trello focuses more on the events (a.k.a. the tasks that needed to be done) instead of how long it takes, this helps limit the amount of work in progress. With this, you can balance your task approach, so your team won’t start and commit too much work at once.
Another thing that Trello uses that helps you navigate the tool with ease is the drag and drop functionality. You can drag any tasks to their specific columns and drop it there. By doing this, you can personally keep track of your progress. It doesn’t really need to take a tech genius to figure this project management tool out.
monday.com
The first thing that you’ll notice in monday.com is its design — its attractive interface is truly the epitome of the modern way of organizing and managing. monday.com is a tool that is incredibly easy to use if you’re sticking to the basics of creating and organizing your tasks. But when it comes to using their wide varieties of features, you may want to take some time to study it.
To use monday.com, you can start off with their wide selection of templates. If you want to create your own, it’s somewhat similar to Trello where your projects are based on boards. Then you can add your pulses which you can organize into groups.
One thing that this tool has an edge on is its design is anchored on giving you all the information that you need in an instant. monday.com has a layout that uses space and color incredibly well while still getting a lot onto the screen.
While monday.com is more complicated than Trello, this management tool makes the best of their interface to make it less complicated and easy to use. In this way, they are actually inviting you to try and explore monday.com. Plus, it adds subtle things that you probably won’t realize that you need until you experienced it.
VERDICT: Trello
When it comes to ease of use, Trello has this on the bag. It doesn’t take long for you to figure this out especially with a simple drag and drop system that works well in project management.
monday.com is more complicated to use but its interface makes it easier. Since this is not an interface round, Trello wins with its effective simplicity. But understand that monday.com is sophisticated because it has a lot to offer, so don’t let the usability concerns put you off from using it.
2. Project Organization
In this round, we’ll analyze how Trello and monday.com perform as a project management tool in terms of project organization and having features to help you keep things smoothly. Trello and monday.com share common sets of features, and we’ll see how both tools differentiate themselves.
Trello
You’re already familiar with Trello’s Kanban setup, which is the tool’s main feature in the project organization. This setup is great because you’ll have better visibility of your tasks. With this, you can actually keep a close eye on your backlogs and instantly see how you are moving through with your progress. But Trello seems to hit a wall when it comes to complex organizations. When using this tool, you might find a scenario where a mixture of boards, lists, and cards may be limiting. Since Trello promotes work-in-progress limits, a project with a significant number of tasks will be hard to visualize on this tool.When it comes to collaboration and management, Trello offers a simple procedure. Team Boards are shareable to your members, which helps you plan your project in collaboration. Then, you can assign cards to your team members and have them categorized with deadlines. There’s also an activity log and a progress meter to keep a simple track over your boards. On the downside, sophisticated tracking is not an available feature. A disadvantage of Trello is that it really can’t show task dependencies. This is crucial, especially if you’re a professional project manager that uses the critical path in determining a clear picture of your project’s schedule. As an addition, Trello allows you to attach files to boards with size limits of 10MB to 250MB depending on your plan. This feature is beneficial if you have a more extended set of general instructions or related documents to your projects that you can attach to the board for everyone to see. This tool allows you to customize your board and notification preferences. You can also add categories, fixed labels, and tags to your tasks for easy organization. Trello also allows room for flexibility with the use of Power-Ups.
monday.com
If there’s one thing you can learn from the first round is that monday.com is not the most straightforward project management tool you can have but is definitely packed with features. Like Trello, monday.com offers a Kanban view but much more interactive.The typical drag and drop system is the same as Trello’s, but on monday.com, your Kanban board will be automatically set up. Plus, you’ll have different options to organize your Kanban board without having to manually do it yourself, a feature that is lacking in Trello.
The main difference between monday.com to Trello is that this tool doesn’t have the same limitations as Trello’s Kanban management. By adding significant features, monday.com became more than your standard project management tool.Remember task dependencies that Trello didn’t hit? monday.com lets you arrange your data in many different ways thanks to its view feature. Aside from Kanban, this tool shows your data in Timeline view, Calendar view, File view, charts, and a dashboard to summarize every progress that you make.One particular useful view on monday.com is its Gantt charts, which are perfect for showing task dependencies. This is essential when it comes to project scheduling, enabling you to plan realistically, coordinate with others, and track specific tasks.When it comes to collaborations, this tool lets you share your boards with other members like Trello. You can also assign individual tasks to your members and set a deadline for it. Plus, you can invite your clients to view information about their projects. That way, you won’t have to update them every day or week manually.
File sharing in this tool is available with a 5GB storage limit. Files are attached to specific tasks, but the File view, you can see them all in one place. monday.com also gives you many customization options. You have the same customization with Trello’s but with much more freedom like customizable labels to keep your projects well-organized.If the full range of offers that monday.com still doesn’t satisfy you, integration is also available in this tool. VERDICT: monday.comCompromising the simplicity of the tool for its functions seems to work well for monday.com, which is why they claim the spot for its overall features for project organization. It has many views, which alone makes this tool superior against Trello when it comes to feature availability. Both Trello and monday.com offer plenty of applications and programs for integrations. We can even say that Trello has more extensions with its Power-Ups, but its lack of comprehensive built-in features put Trello behind.
3. Affordability
In this last section, we’ll compare the price of Trello and monday.com. We’re looking at value for money and if the price is justified.
Trello
First off, Trello has a free plan that lets you use their basic features of the Kanban board. If you’re only using a management tool for personal use, then the free tier of Trello is your best option. In the free plan, you’ll get the following features:
-
Unlimited personal boards
-
Unlimited cards
-
Unlimited lists
-
10MB per file attachment
-
10 team boards
-
1 Power-Up per board
The next tier in Trello is the Business Class which costs $9.99 a month for each user. Aside from unlimited features (except for file attachment) that are in the free tier, you’ll get these additional or upgraded features:
-
250MB per file attachment
-
Advanced checklist
-
Observers
-
Calendar view
-
Map view
-
Voting
The last tier is the Enterprise which costs $20.83 per month for each user with a minimum of 100 users. Enterprise is suitable for companies as the cost of each user goes down if you have more than 100 users signed in. This tier unlocks all the features of Trello.
monday.com
Unlike Trello, monday.com doesn’t have a free plan but it lets you sign in into a 14-day free trial. Their Basic plan costs $39 per month for 5 users (around $8 each) which includes:
-
Unlimited free viewers
-
Over 20 column types
-
Kanban view
-
Embedded forms
-
iOS and Android apps
-
1 dashboard
-
Basic activity log
-
Two-factor authentication
-
24/7 support
-
5 GB of storage
The Standard plan costs $49 per month for 5 users which have upgraded features of the Basic plan and additional features:
-
Timeline, Calendar, Map view
-
5 integrations
-
15 Automations
-
5 dashboards
-
Shared boards with guests
-
Create templates
-
Email integration
-
Full API
-
50 GB of storage
The Pro plan costs $79 per month for 5 users which unlocks all features of monday.com such as formula column, time tracking, and chart view.
VERDICT: Trello
Trello wins the price category simply because of its free version. If you’re looking for a Kanban-style setup which is offered on the Basic plan of monday.com for $8 per user per month, then you’re better off using the unlimited free trial of Trello.
But if you’re willing to pay for the paid plans of Trello, then consider switching to monday.com. The Business Class of Trello costs $9.99 each but offers fewer features than monday.com’s Standard Plan with $9.8 each. In monday.com, you’ll get all the features of paid Trello plus the additional data views.
In short, if you’re looking for a free project management tool, then go for Trello. If you’re willing to pay, then monday.com has the better value for your money.
Trello vs. Monday.com – Standout Features
Now that the side-by-side comparisons are done, we’ll check their standout features that make Trello or monday.com superior to each other.
Trello
Trello is really a simple management tool so it’s not surprising that it doesn’t have a lot of glitz and glam that other tools offer. Here is a feature that Trello uses to up their Kanban board:
-
Automated Butler Tool. Trello gets most of its power as a management tool with the Butler to eliminate manual processes. Essentially, Butler will not only help you with the things that you need, but it will also show you the things that you might’ve overlooked during the process.
monday.com
monday.com truly has a lot of things to offer that Trello doesn’t have. Here are standout features that monday.com has:
-
Automations. monday.com set itself from Trello’s Butler with its own Automations. Basically, with Automations, you can make your own codes to your boards to set a trigger which will then cause an action. For example, when a task is complete, you can automatically notify a member of your team.
-
Views. This is what monday.com does best. With views, you can be versatile with your tasks and how you do it. You can see your data as charts, time-tracks, Kanban, or calendar.
Final Verdict
monday.com wins the competition for its sophisticated and incredible features that it offers for a justifiable price. But it doesn’t mean that you have to disregard Trello. Like we said, each project management tool in the market tackles your needs differently. So, you have to fit your program to you and your project’s priority. Is it simplicity? Features? Or price?
Use Trello as your management tool if:
-
You’re an individual looking for a tool to organize just about anything.
-
You’re a project manager and the project you have is small.
-
Your priority is to have a simple list of things to do.
-
You don’t need excessive features for you to know what you’re doing and what you need to do.
-
You want a free management tool.
Trello keeps things basic and simple which is why you might want to choose this tool for your day-to-day activities. It’s also free but its features are enough so you can get by without any hassle or fuss.
Use monday.com as your management tool if:
-
You’re handling a big project with complicated tasks.
-
You’re looking for maximum efficiency.
-
You’re a part of a big company that needs more features to keep things running smoothly.
-
You can afford to pay for the features.
monday.com is a powerful tool for powerful tasks and if your work entails the features that they offer to keep your day much simpler, then this tool is your best bet.
[tcb-script type=”application/ld+json”]{ “@context”: “https://schema.org/”, “mainEntityOfPage”: “https://astrogprod.wpengine.com/blog/trello-vs-monday/”, “@type”: “Article”, “headline”: “Trello vs monday.com- What Is The Best Management Tool for Your Needs?”, “datePublished”: “2020-04-30”, “dateModified”: “2020-04-30”, “description”: “Read our Trello vs. monday.com comparison. Discover today what is the best project management tool for you needs.”, “keywords”: [“trello vs monday.com”,”monday.com vs trello”,”trello”,”monday.com”], “image”: { “@type”: “ImageObject”, “height”: “560”, “width”: “315”, “url”: “https://astrogprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/mondayvstrello-788×443.png” }, “author”: “Angelo Sorbello”, “publisher”: { “@type”: “Organization”, “name”: “Astrogrowth”, “sameAs”:[ “https://www.facebook.com/astrogrowth”, “https://twitter.com/astrogrowth”, “https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4nXTjQAcHtdfoYEn_hHeQ”, “https://linkedin.com/company/astrogrowth”, “https://g.page/astrogrowth” ], “logo”: { “@type”: “ImageObject”, “url”: “https://astrogprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/astrogrowthwithe-1.webp” } }}[/tcb-script]
