Trello Review 2019

Original Audio Version

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Review Transcript

Hey guys. It’s Sam here from Reviews Boss back with another review and today it’s going to be a really short one. I just want to talk quickly about a product that I’ve used quite extensively now for a while for task management and project tracking. It’s called Trello.

So, what is Trello? As I briefly mentioned, it’s a task tracking project manaegement-y kinda platform. I’m trying to think what they actually call themselves. Let me just check quickly. I’m doing this review live so bear with. What do they say? Trello lets you work more collaboratively and get more done. Trello’s boards list and card enable you to organize and prioritize your projects in a fun, flexible and rewarding day. So, yeah, it’s like a sort of project management system, task management system. It’s built around these things called cards and basically, cards are pretty flexible. You can do whatever you want with them to try and create a flow that works for you for tracking projects and I got onto Trello at an old job of mine and basically, we were in a marketing tea. There was about seven or eight of us and to be honest, we were pretty bad at keeping track of all the work we did and so the boss actually got Trello going and we started using that to track projects and to be honest, it was really effective and it did help us get a lot of stuff done so I’ve always had it in the back of my mind to review Trello.

So, let’s talk through some additional details of the product. So, some other cool things you can do with Trello are that you can integrate it with other apps that you might be using. So, things like Slack or MailChimp or all sorts of stuff, Box, Confluence, draw.io, DropBox, it’s all in there. There’s tons of stuff. If you click this link to look at the Trello Power Ups, they’re called, you’ll be able to see what you can link your Trello cards in with. The pricing is pretty sharp as well so there’s a free forever plan that gives you unlimited boards, cards, members checklist and attachments and we used it for seven or eight staff and it was free and I use it for myself now and I’ve used it in smaller teams as well and it works for free. As you move up to Business Class, it’s called, for $9.99 per user per month when paid annually. You get everything from the free version plus you get Power Up integrations with other … For the Power Ups list I mentioned before, things like Jira, Bitbucket, MailChimp, Salesforce, Google Drive. So, it just lets you manage more stuff in one place for your projects, which is pretty cool. You can attach files up to 250mb. Free versions only up to 10mb.

You can control team member access much easier. You can create private boards, membership invitations and then as you go up to Enterprise level, well it just becomes more corporatey and it’s all about authentication etc. You get an account executive to help you on boarding assistance, priority support, all that kinda stuff. But, basically, where am I going with this? Trello’s got pricing and plans to suit everyone but you’re probably going to be fine with just the free version.

So, I don’t want to linger too much on how exactly it works. I’m probably not the best person to explain cause I’m not that good at explaining the card system apart from saying it works and you get into the flow of it yourself. What I’ve done, is added a couple of videos below of beds from YouTube that I’ve found that do a better job of explaining how Trello actually works. What I just want to talk about is what I like about it and what I don’t like about it and whether you should use it.

So, what do I like? Very affordable. The free platform’s great, really good. You can get most stuff done that you need and if you do have to pay, it’s very reasonably priced, especially if you’re just an independent person working by yourself or in a small team. The premium integrations, the Power Ups, they’re really good. They’re going to save you a lot of time and help you to recharge your projects as do the larger file attachments and things like that. That was one issue we used to encounter. In my job where we first started using Trello, was when we had the free platform, our graphic designer could not load his graphic designs properly for the different projects we had and that was a bit frustrating.

What else do I like about it? There’s lots of features. It’s fairly straightforward to use and once you get into a flow of things, you will find that Trello is just nice to work with and it really does help you get stuff done. I’ve got a card, for example, set up in Trello. I should say, what’s the correct term that you get this right? I’ve got a board, which … No, is it a board or a card? Let me have a look. Yeah, it’s a board. Okay. So, you’ve got a few things. You got a team, which is a group of boards and people so that could be your marketing department or your sales department or your HR department. Then you got boards. So, boards are things, they’re defined on Trello as, a board is made up of cards ordered on lists.

So, I’ve got a board for this website and under it, I have two cards, and one is the reviews that I want to do and that I am doing, that I’ve done, and the other is just general tasks like, make sure you back up the website every so often or make sure you pay for your hosting and things like that. And if I look at my card view for the reviews board, or the reviews project I guess I’d call it, I’ve got two cards there. I’ve got pending reviews and I’ve got reviews that need editing. So, pending reviews, I just chuck down a list of products I want to review and I can actually click into each card individually. I can open up one for, what is a review I’m going to be doing? I’m going to be reviewing SaleHoo and I can add comments, I can add a checklist so I can say these are things that have to be covered in the review. I can do all sort of stuff like that and then when I’ve actually started that review, I can just drag it, or if I’ve finished it, I guess the draft and published it, I can drag it across to my ‘reviews need editing’ column and that really helps organize the flow and I can add more lists as well with those cards.

The structure is … you’ll work it out as you go along but it’s pretty flexible and powerful to use Trello and what I want to do now is move onto the stuff I don’t like about it because I did want to keep this review short and as you probably saw or heard then, my explanation of the boards and the lists and the cards and all this stuff, it’s all a bit jumbled because while you can learn it and you can pick it up pretty quickly, it is actually kind of confusing in some respects, just the whole concept of cards and everything unless you really spend some time learning how they’re supposed to work. You just want to dive in and have an easy checklist system and if you want to do that, Trello potentially isn’t the best. You might be better looking at something like Todoist, which is another thing I want to review so I’ll add a card under my pending reviews list to review Todoist.

It’s not necessarily the easiest thing to use. There are some limitations with Trello. One of the ones I find is, it’s not fantastic for doing a weekly list. So, what do I need to achieve this week? You could do it. I’ve jerry rigged up a system that works but it really is more focused around projects and we had the same issue when we used it in my old work is that it worked fantastically well for larger business development or marketing projects but it didn’t work so well for weekly task planning. So, that’s something to bear in mind and the other things I don’t like about it is, there’s not a huge amount else apart from the fact that you really have to understand how the product wants you to work to get the most out of it. You can just run wild and free and just make lists and boards and come up with your own system and that’s cool but Trello does encourage you to work the way they want you to work to get the best result and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s just something to bear in mind and I suppose it is a negative for some people.

Other things, there’s some stuff that is a little bit strange to me. For example, if I look at my main list of all my teams, which represent the different businesses or different things I do in my life. I got one for personal tasks, just stuff I have to do, pay insurance or go get the car fixed, stuff like that. For some weird reason, I can’t drag the boards. Why I can’t drag the boards around, I have to star the ones I want to go to the top. That is just dumb. I should be able to just drag them around. I should be able to reorder everything the way I want to reorder it. That’s not very good, in my mind. So, that’s an example of something Trello does where it’s really trying to lock you into a particular system and probably not much development that they could create a lot more flexibility for you.

But, look, overall, I want to cap this review off and keep it short. Trello is very good as a project management task management system, for documenting what you need to do and then working to get it done, it really does work effectively. Just bear in mind that it’s really geared to make you work a way that obviously the product creators want you to work and people might debate that, “Oh, you can do anything you want with Trello.” And to an extent, you can, but you will find, “Okay, it’s trying to really encourage me to think about things in a certain way and use the system of boards and cards and lists to do things in that way.”

But, overall, there’s great training available. Heaps of people use it so there’s lots of independent training as well. The pricing’s fantastic. The supports good. It’s go a nice efficient interface. It’s not the most attractive app to use but it works pretty well. If you want to manage projects and keep yourself on track, it’s powerful, it’s effective, it’s affordable and I recommend you give it a try.