Trello

Trello is the tool that made Kanban boards a household word. Cards on lists, lists on a board, drag a card from To Do to Done - the idea takes about thirty seconds to learn, which explains a lot of its success. Fifteen years on, it is still the fastest way to get a messy project out of a chat thread and into something everyone can see.

A board is a project, lists are stages, cards are tasks. Cards hold the details: descriptions, checklists, due dates, attachments, comments and @mentions, colored labels and assigned members. Everything updates in real time for everyone watching the board, and an activity feed records who changed what. It is simple on purpose, and that simplicity is the point: nobody needs training, and nobody can claim they did not see the deadline.

The free plan is honest about its limits. You get unlimited cards and up to 10 boards per Workspace, which covers a small team or a busy personal life. Attachments uploaded from your computer are capped at 10MB per file (linking files from Drive or Dropbox dodges that), and you get the classic board view only. Paying for Standard or Premium lifts the board cap, raises attachments to 250MB, and opens extra views like Timeline, Table, Calendar and Map, plus unlimited automation runs.

That automation, called Butler, hides real depth under the friendly surface. Rules like "when a card moves to Done, archive it and post to Slack" take a minute to build and quietly save hours. Power-Ups bolt on integrations - Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Salesforce and a couple of hundred more - so the board can sit at the center of a workflow instead of beside it.

Trello runs in the browser, as a desktop app for Windows and macOS (the Mac version shown here, 2.16.10 from October 2026, is a 157.2MB download; Windows and mobile clients update on their own schedules and the web app updates continuously), and as mobile apps for iOS and Android. There is no official Linux app; Linux users live in the browser tab like everyone else. Sync across devices is fast and reliable.

Where does it fall short? Big projects. A board with a thousand cards becomes a wall of noise, and Trello has no native Gantt charts, time tracking, workload views or real reporting - Power-Ups patch some of that, at extra cost. Offline support is thin: the apps need a connection to do anything useful. And Atlassian has been steering the product toward personal productivity lately, which sometimes shows in its priorities.

For small teams, freelancers, students and anyone whose project fits on a whiteboard, Trello remains the easiest recommendation in its category. If you outgrow it, you will know exactly why - and Atlassian will happily sell you Jira.