| Functionality | 3 <p>Caters to key functionalities for small businesses, allowing users to create and manage projects and tasks through to-do lists, a kanban adjacent board, timelines, project specific-shared docs and a unified, transparent team message thread.</p><p>However, in the essence of being simple and intuitive, it lacks components that other tools provide like OKR/goal setting, workflow automation or simply adding custom fields to your tasks.</p> | 4 <p>As opposed to a project management tool, Trello is more of a "shared to-do list" which only offers basic task management features to manage simple projects. Trello doesn't have any built-in functionality to manage task dependencies, and inbuilt documentation section or any meaningful analytics.</p><p>However, you can layer on richer functionality via its rich marketplace of "power ups" plugins - usually at a premium.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 5 <p>Learning Curve = 3</p><p>User-Friendliness = 8</p><p>Basecamp has quite an intuitive UI and it's easy to locate where all the important features are after you've done their basic tour. They have a lot of resources to help a user get to grasps with the tool. However, there are some features you may have to search for a bit but it's a small set.</p> | 9 <p>Trello has an extremely approachable and intuitive UX. It should be easy and straightforward to implement for teams with any level of technical competency. The only more complex features Trello has are its power-ups and automations module. Besides that, it should take any SMB employee less than 30 minutes to feel comfortable with platform.</p> |
| Look and feel | 6 <p>Going back to Basecamp's implicit motto of 'no-fluff, gets the job done', it has a minimalistic UI which is acceptable and is fast to load. Other tools have a more attractive look and feel and could provide a more appealing layout/colour combination.</p> | 8 <p>Trello offers a clean, visually appealing interface that is both functional and engaging. If you dislike Trello's default interface, you're able to personalise boards and cards with custom colours, images and stickers. Its page loads are also lightning fast (<1 second), which is refreshing compared to most project manage tools.</p> |
| Customisability | 2 <p>Basecamp allows you to have custom project views but that's pretty much it. Unfortunately you won't be able to access some of the key features that the other tools provide like custom workflows, reports, tags, fields.</p> | 4 <p>While Trello allows for some customisation e.g. switching between project views, adding custom fields - its inherent simplicity limits advanced customisability. There are simple things you can't customise e.g. which columns are shown on a table, filters are limited to a few default fields, which can be frustrating if you're trying to adapt Trello to your workflow.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 6 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, but it lacks a rich library of templates. Full setup should take less than a day.</p> | 9 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, because it has a very rich library of templates, including hundreds from the Trello community. Full setup should take less than a day.</p> |
| Customer Support | 9 <p>Amazing responsive customer support via an in-app live chat bot. You should be able to get a detailed response from a person quite quickly. To complement this, they have curated a wealth of resources, youtube videos and FAQs to get you going.</p> | 4 <p>Trello's support leaves much to be desired. Trello seems to push users towards self-service, such as to their documentation and community forums, which can be frustrating when you need immediate assistance. Even direct support from Atlassian can be hit-or-miss, especially for smaller customers not on premium support plans.</p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p>An API is available and it natively integrates with Zapier and a host of cloud resources but it missed out on quite a few useful tools like Github, Zendesk and Freedesk which other tools would be able to accommodate. However, you could use Zapier to connect to a variety of third party tools and Basecamp does link up with a few useful mobile-apps which is a bonus, but this is just something which doesn't happen natively. Someone would need to add those further integrations on your end.</p> | 7 <p>Trello has a extremely vibrant marketplace with most relevant third-party integrations (Gmail, Slack, Mailchimp) and "Power-ups" - plugins that extend Trello's functionality e.g. creating forms, invoicing, managing task hierarchies.</p><p>It also has an API for custom integrations. However, note that on lower tier plans, there's a limit to the number of Power-Ups you can use per board, which limits the usefulness.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 9 <p>Can export data easily via adminland if you have the permissions for it in the organisation.</p> | 8 <p>Exporting key data out of Trello is relatively straightforward. You can simply export entire projects, with all your tasks, in JSON or CSV formats. However, note that not all data - such as comments, activity logs and attachments will transfer seamlessly. However, you can export other data via its API.</p> |
