Coming from a place of extreme prejudice against and resentment towards Trello, I actually was pleasantly surprised. Not perfect but it still works well enough and has enough features to feel powerful. It seems like they’re adding lots to it, which is maybe a mixed bag.
I tried Microsoft Lists - it is broken in Safari (when I press the add card button, it doesn’t pop up until I interact with the user feedback widget). I tried GitHub projects but it was being weird and insists on all issues having the same columns. I tried Todoist but the story for sharing projects isn’t great for anonymous users (I need to share in a public meeting for people without accounts or desire to set them up). Microsoft Planner is offensively bad, and this is coming from a heavily biased office fanboy who secretly dreams of someday working on Outlook because I’m actually that uncool.
So, what do the cool kids use for semi-structured cards these days?
Edit: yes maybe Notion is the answer, trying it is on my to do list.
- an iOS widget that makes capturing things super fast and easy
- an INBOX board where cards land, with lists that are auto-populated by card label
- a button to move a card to a THIS WEEK board that has lists for each day of the week
- a button to send a card back if it ain't happening this week
- a timeline view that is the reason we pay the insane price, but which is indeed very useful
I think it's worth the single-person license. I don't think it's worth that for every user, and may downgrade at the end of my annual license.
I hope they don't muck it up with feature creep, but the polish they have put on Trello is quite nice.
I don't use Trello often, but this strikes me as the JIRA-ification of Trello being underway.
Others don't seem to agree though.
I think there will always be a group praising the addition of features. That's how all Enterprise software gets to be the way it is. Every "I won't buy it because I need $checkbox_feature" begets a meeting between sales and engineering to see how fast it could be implemented.
(Noun, cf. JIRA) A process of systematically degrading a software system, e.g. in an attempt to monetize it.
It doesn't add swimlanes to Trello the way you'd expect. It opens up a new view which looks like Trello, but seems to be totally custom. So you can only see the swimlanes in this view, but not using Trello normally.
Not sure if I'm missing something but this is a non-starter for me.
The previous Microsoft try at kanban added status on the card surface so that you had to set todo, in progress, done etc on the cards. This then created some sort of meta progress tracking. I found this to be too much when I just wanted columns tracking state.
In order of work assignment, traditional kanban is that when a person completes a task they then take the top card and work on that.
glad to see a step in the right direction, hopefully 90's cloths comeback will go in the same path.
So I used Trello at home, and Jira at work. I loved how fast Trello was (despite being Electron); it’s still probably the fastest Electron/web app.
But the lack of swimlanes pushed me to Favro, which was too slow to enjoy using. When Atlassian bought Trello I figured that swimlanes would never arrive, since they wouldn’t want to eat into Jira features and market share (which i disagree with, but I digress).
As a result I use Trello casually and for simple projects with my wife, but didn’t go all-in on it. I’ll give this Power Up a try though!
They have been talking about changing that, but I understand it is complex and never really becomes a priority
I'd be curious to know how many people work at companies that allow 3rd party plug-ins for these kinds of tools.
Trello allows for great collaboration and informal planning, even for daily life and for a single person. It allows capturing great deal of information under a card and showing a great deal of information without overloading your senses.
So, in short, "It works (TM)", and works well.
Trello is much better for lists and Kanban boards. The UI just works a lot better than Notion which is just a mess and ugly for such uses.
But, possibly we will discover some need for features we could add to a paid version of this in future.
