Trello pricing: Which plan should you choose?
Trello is a cracking project management tool for kanban-lovers – but which package is right for your budget and needs?
Trello makes it onto our list of the best project management software out there today, largely thanks to its wonderful kanban board and the amazing flexibility it offers. However, making sense of its numerous pricing plans can be tricky. Below, we clear the confusion so you can decide which Trello plan is best for you.
As we discuss in our Trello review, the software distinguishes itself mainly thanks to its kanban board, which is simply excellent. The user experience is flawless: you can add as much or as little information as you want to tasks, and there are some solid automation options as well.
However, Trello is a bit of a one-trick pony, regardless of how good that trick is. If your project management needs extend beyond the board, Trello may not be the right choice for you. This is because its other functions – such as its list, dashboard and map, among others – just aren’t that great.
Assuming that your needs are straightforward, though, Trello is the best Kanban tool going. But how does its pricing work, and which plan should you choose?
Trello pricing: Everything you need to know
To see how we’ve arrived at that conclusion, it’s best if we provide a breakdown of each Trello plan. There are four, including the free tier.
Trello free plan
The free plan is what makes Trello great. This is because Trello’s biggest strength by far is its board, and you get near-unlimited use of it without paying a penny. The limit is that you can only have up to ten boards; however, this should be fine for almost anybody. If you factor in one board per team or project, you’d need a pretty big company to go over that limit.
That aside, Trello offers more for free than most other project management services in their paid plans. This includes unlimited storage (although it limits file size to 10MB), plus you can add as many cards as you like to each board. Note, however, that there’s a practical limit of about 1,000 – it’s around that number that you may notice some slowdown.
The only real reason to upgrade appears to be automations. Known as workspace command runs, the free plan lets you execute a maximum of 250 of these per month, which isn’t many, even for a small company.
Trello Standard: £4 per user per month
To remove the few restrictions of the free plan, but without paying for the full Trello Premium package, there’s an in-between plan called Trello Standard. We really appreciate this plan, since it’s one of a very few of its kind. Many of Trello’s competitors let you either use their program for free, or make you shell out serious money – there usually isn’t a lot of space between these two options.
The Standard plan lets you use unlimited boards, 1,000 automations per month and provides access to specialised checklists and custom fields on cards – although, again, you can get Power-ups to do this for you. Standard also raises the file size limit to 250MB.
At £4 per user per month (assuming you sign on for a year at a time), Trello Standard is a decent option for anybody who likes Trello’s free plan, but chafes at its restrictions.
READ NEXT: The best free project management tools
Trello Premium: £8 per user per month
Trello Premium seems to be the company’s flagship plan. At £8 per user per month – again, assuming you pay annually – it’s reasonably priced when compared to the rest of the market, although whether it offers the same value is debatable.
Premium removes any remaining restrictions on automations while adding a number of features to the board, including new views of your tasks, such as timelines, calendar and a few more. However, none is particularly impressive, with most generally done better by Trello’s competitors (check out our Trello vs Asana article).
Other benefits include the ability to invite observers to your projects, so people can look but not touch, as well as some data-manipulation tools, which could prove handy for the right teams. Finally, there are some added security measures to restrict access to certain sections of each project.
Trello Enterprise: £15 per user per month
The final tier of Trello is called Enterprise and, as you’ll likely guess, is designed for large companies. The features here focus mainly on adding new usability and creating tiers of access to different functions.
Having had some time to have a play with these options, they seem well implemented; however, we’re not sure that Trello adds anything that isn’t done better by any of its competitors. No matter which way you look at it, you’re still just using a kanban board. Trello’s other functions just aren’t up to snuff.
Does Trello offer a free trial?
If you’re interested in putting Trello through its paces, you’ll be happy to know that all paid plans come with a 14-day trial. Unless you decide to take up a plan, you’ll revert back to the free plan once the 14 days expires.
