As an enterprise leader, chances are you see an ad for a different work management tool every day—each one promising to be bigger and better than all the rest. You’ve perused the options, understand the benefits of having a work management system in place, and have probably even dabbled in a few trials.

But pulling the trigger on a solution is easier said than done. With so many platforms offering the same features, how can you tell which work management tool is the best fit for your teams?

A 40-row spreadsheet can tell you what a solution is capable of, but every team works differently. What a platform will help your team accomplish matters more than what it can do in a vacuum.

As a work management system tailor-made to address enterprise challenges, Trello outperforms the competition where it counts. It’s also a cost-efficient solution — one with the robust features, integrations, and automations enterprise teams need in order to thrive, all without blowing out the budget.

When you stack Trello up against the competition, it’s easy to see why Trello is simply the right work management solution for enterprises just like yours.

Trello vs Asana: Flexible Ways To Work 

If you’re researching options that can scale to your teams’ needs, chances are that you’ve spent time studying the similarities and differences between Trello and Asana. The latter offers a strong product solution to manage multiple projects. However, there are a plethora of factors to consider that contribute to user experience, employee satisfaction, and ultimately business success. 

Here are some features you should be screening for when evaluating which platform works best for your teams—features that will impact your employees’ ability to manage their workflows, collaborate more efficiently, and improve their productivity. And that’s where Trello shines.

Workflow Automation That Meet Each Team’s Unique Needs

If you want your teams to reach their fullest potential, you need to set them up with systems that enable productivity. That means giving them access to tools that make it easy to automate workflows and eliminate manual tasks, without getting in their way. Trello simplifies the process, with no-code automations every team can take advantage of—no technical skills required.

While the ability to automate may not feel like a make-or-break feature, it’s a critical feature to consider when picking a work management solution. Workflow automations provide huge time savings for your employees—which means bottom-line savings for the entire organization without sacrificing any productivity.

According to a 2020 study by Automation Anywhere, the average employee spends 3 hours a day on repetitive, manual tasks that could easily be automated. That’s a significant percentage of time being wasted on items that aren’t necessarily skill-related—or a particularly high lift for the company. When you do that math, a business with 500 employees could save up to 7,500 hours per week simply by automating these tasks through Trello.

giphy - 2022-02-17T165837.150

While Asana offers custom Rules that allow users to automate routine tasks, the system is dependent upon you knowing which tasks make the most sense to automate (easier said than done) and how to configure those automations up with the rule builder. Trello’s no-code automation tool, Butler, can provide suggestions based on the tasks your employees complete most frequently. 

Butler options overview

Enterprise teams can create unlimited commands and custom buttons, tackling tedious, repetitive tasks so they can use their time and energy more wisely. Recurring cards? Done. Automatic email to a client when a project is ready for review? Piece of cake. Approve the automation with one click of a button, then sit back and watch your team’s productivity soar!

Flexible Boards That Go Beyond Work Management

One of the biggest benefits of Trello is your teams’ ability to transform a board into whatever they need it to be. Being able to do more with one tool can help your company cut down on redundant tools and also centralize where your employees connect and collaborate.

Solutions like Asana aim to help teams take work beyond project management, but their fixed structures don’t lend themselves to other uses as easily. With Trello, your company and teams can shape boards to handle a wide variety of different cases:

  • Knowledge base. Nearly half of employees say they spend up to two hours each day trying to track down the information necessary to do their jobs. And 57% say their productivity suffers because they spend too much time finding the right information. Centralizing important resources means no more scouring inboxes, multiple collaboration tools, and the company network for last quarter’s product roadmap. With a dedicated internal knowledge base, employees can access the files and resources they need—regardless of where they work.
  • People and team directory. As work becomes more hybrid, it’s all too easy for teams and employees to feel disconnected. Tapping into Trello’s card covers, employees can share their favorite headshot and include important details on their card, like their role, responsibilities, preferred contact method(s), and any fun facts.
  • Communication hub. Teams can use Trello hubs to centralize important communications, like letters from the CEO and company-wide announcements. That way, employees will always know where to go for the latest updates. A robust communications hub includes documentation employees from every department need access to—like open enrollment information, company policies, and holiday schedules.
  • Public Roadmap. Transparency in a scaling business is key, and public roadmaps or release notes definitely lend a helping hand. With Trello’s visual collaboration features, you can swap out boring bullet lists for a more engaging experience. Trello cards can display screenshots and GIFs that show customers new enhancements or detailed bug fixes. As an example, check out Buffer’s public roadmap board here.
  • Customer feedback. Engage your customers with a public-facing enhancement requests board. Enabling the Voting Power-Up gives them an opportunity to weigh in on potential features or enhancements and allows your product and development teams to better organize upcoming sprints.

Trello’s flexible setup lets teams choose their own work journey and gives them the ability to utilize boards in whatever way works best for them. Not sure where to start? Find inspiring examples and templates of how other enterprise teams are using Trello.

All-Inclusive Pricing That Won’t Break The Bank

If you’re investing in a work management tool, you deserve to know what you’re paying for—and to feel confident that you’re getting your money’s worth. Trello prioritizes price transparency, with a clearly defined pricing structure that shows exactly what features your teams will have at their fingertips (and spoiler alert: there are a lot).

Trello’s affordable, tiered pricing is all-inclusive—making it easy for enterprises to find the perfect work management solution without breaking the bank. Our base per-user pricing for Enterprise plans starts lower than the competition and decreases the more people you have, so teams can continue to scale as the company grows.

Trello vs Microsoft Planner: Integrations & Collaboration For All

Microsoft Planner has emerged as a competitive work management option for companies. Some may find it restrictive, though—both in the features available and the tools that it works with. Trello offers robust integrations (200+ and counting) that reduce context switching and enable collaboration company-wide.

Integrations That Play Nice With Other Apps

Trello’s software plays nice with other apps—connecting the tools your teams use most in one single platform for a seamless experience. Need to pull in leads from Salesforce? Done. Keep tabs on a sprint in Jira? There’s a Power-Up for that. These integrations are a game-changer for enterprises since employees are regularly called upon to use a variety of apps throughout the workday.

In fact, most workers are estimated to switch between 10 apps 25 times per day—and that context switching comes with huge productivity costs. Over one-quarter of workers say that “actions and messages are missed when switching apps,” and that can lead to missed deadlines and frustrated clients.

While Microsoft Planner integrates well with other Microsoft apps, it’s confined to the Office 365 ecosystem. That means teams who regularly rely on non-Office apps for their daily jobs will be SOL—or lose valuable time jumping from platform to platform.

Trello has 200+ integrations (including Microsoft Teams) that are immediately available for teams to use—no installation required.

By picking a work management solution that integrates with the rest of your tech stack, you can reduce context switching and save your team valuable time.

Limitless Collaboration Capabilities

Every team needs effective collaboration tools—ones that help employees communicate, track progress, and share feedback with each other, regardless of where they’re working. Trello was built with collaboration in mind—providing features that enable employees to tackle projects alongside their closest team members and across departments. No jumping through hoops required!

A recent Gartner survey revealed that 82% of company leaders intend to permit remote working some of the time post-COVID. As companies prepare to shift toward permanent hybrid models, it’s critical they address collaboration challenges and enable employees to work together on projects, no matter where they’re working.

That’s not such an easy feat to accomplish if you’re relying on Microsoft Planner for your team’s collaboration. The platform has a 1,000-character limit for comments, making it difficult for employees to provide the context required in hybrid work on projects or leave comprehensive feedback for team members.

Trello, on the other hand, was built to enable cross-team communication. Users have unlimited characters, no communication restrictions, and the ability to keep team members in the loop by @ mentioning them anywhere within the product. Add multiple team members to the same card, share projects between boards to collaborate with coworkers from other departments, and even loop external clients in for approvals.

giphy - 2022-02-17T171406.901

With Trello, teams get to decide what collaboration looks like, how they can support one another, and how, together, they can improve their internal processes for a more efficient, collaborative team.

Trello vs Monday: A Simple User Experience For Your Team

Your teams are busy juggling tight deadlines, training new hires, onboarding clients, and working to grow the company. They want to focus on their work, not configuring a complicated tool (no matter how beneficial the tool may be).

It’s easy for teams to ramp up quickly on Trello, whileMonday comes with a steeper learning curve. Further, the mobile experience makes it more difficult to adopt across teams with varying technical backgrounds or skill levels. When evaluating Trello vs Monday, consider how factors like these impact the product’s overall value—for your teams and your enterprise.

Intuitive Design That Guarantees Ease Of Use

Trello is the most visual collaboration tool on the market and enables teams of all skill levels to ramp up quickly with little assistance. The platform is intuitive with an easy-to-use design—a marked advantage since design directly impacts how quickly employees are able to learn (and embrace) a new tool.

Most people are visual learners, and while that may seem trivial, intuitive design can be the difference between a work management solution that’s quickly embraced by your entire enterprise and one that never gets used.

While Monday provides a robust work management experience, it comes with that steeper learning curve. There are an overwhelming number of templates, views, and project layouts for employees to learn can hinder adoption. Its complex design can also make the platform difficult to navigate, frustrating users and delaying their adoption of the tool. Ultimately, this jeopardizes how quickly a company might see value in its implementation.

Since the beginning, Trello has prioritized the user experience. That means designing a tool that feels natural and easy to use, with the smallest learning curve possible. Users learn the ropes of boards, lists, and cards as they go about their work. In as little as a day, they experience firsthand the value Trello provides in terms of visualizing, managing, and collaborating on work.

Our drag-and-drop fields make the interface digestible for teams of all technical levels, and Trello has a huge library of training materials and resources available for anyone who needs help nailing down the system.

Bells and whistles are exciting, but at the end of the day, a steep learning curve can negatively impact project deliveries, finances, and employee morale by getting in the way.

“What we love the most about Trello is the simplicity. There are many great project management solutions on the market, but we’ve found that many are so full of options and features that they can encourage unnecessary complexity. Trello does the opposite; it helps us reduce the complexity of our systems and processes, keeping our workflow visual and streamlined while still providing enough features to get the job done.” – R.J. Weiss, founder of The Ways to Wealth

A Mobile Experience Teams Love

Mobile UX has become increasingly important in a world where employees find themselves working from their phones on a daily basis. Teams need to be able to upload files, access information, and communicate with coworkers at the drop of a hat—even if they’re not in front of a computer.

According to Igloo’s State Of The Digital Workplace, one in five employees regularly access work apps from their mobile phones. That number has exploded in recent years and just goes to show how important mobile compatibility is in a work management tool.

Monday’s mobile experience can be condensed or crowded—many of their project views are difficult to view on a phone, resulting in more time spent swiping sideways to get an idea of each project’s timeline. Trello, on the other hand, provides perspective regardless of screen size. Our real-time updates allow teams to weave seamlessly between platforms — whether that’s a computer, phone, or something in between.

Trello vs Shadow IT: Enterprise-Level Permissions & Security

According to Forbes, one in five enterprises faces a cybersecurity issue because of a “non-sanctioned IT resource.” And those security breaches aren’t cheap—with an average cost of $9.05 million in the U.S. alone. Companies that want to avoid messy data breaches should evaluate incoming tools for their security features and take steps to keep the employee work experience secure.

Security Measures That Combat Shadow IT & Ensure Data Protection

Trello goes beyond basic user management and SAML single sign-on to offer robust security features that even your IT department will love. Workspace admins can update user permissions, restrict file sharing access, and even control which apps employees integrate with.

That last one is an important feature, since 57% of employees admit to using at least one non-approved app on a daily basis to do their job. This non-approved app usage—otherwise known as shadow IT—has become a huge pain point for enterprises and introduces organizational risk.

With Trello, workspace admins can combat shadow IT by defining which apps employees are able to integrate with—making sure no unapproved apps slip through, while preserving access to productivity.

Through the Enterprise Admin Dashboard, your security professionals can:

  • Set cascading security permissions that flow through to Workspaces and boards
  • Choose default Workspace and board visibility settings
  • Manage Workspace members (and their access) individually or in bulk
  • Define who has permission to create and delete boards
  • Approve Workspace requests to join the Enterprise
  • Assign and remove Enterprise licenses
  • Specify approved file-sharing options
  • Approve Power-Ups (i.e., app integrations) that meet your company’s security protocols

Trello Enterprise maintains a strict security and compliance program that includes SOC2 and SOC3, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27018, PCI DSS and FedRAMP certifications, as well as GDPR compliance. Your trust in Trello Enterprise matters, and it’s why Trello has centralized all trust- and security-related reports and certifications in one place.

Teams Power Through Work, Not Just Tasks, With Trello Enterprise 

There are lots of work management solutions out there, but when it comes to picking the one that’s best for your organization, the answer doesn’t have to be complicated. Trello Enterprise’s robust features, coupled with intuitive simplicity, enable enterprise teams to work more efficiently. This means teams have tools necessary to streamline internal processes, improve cross-team collaboration, and take control of their work journey.

Schedule a demo today and see how Trello Enterprise can help take your teams to the next level.

Trello vs. Asana vs. Monday: which work management tool works best for your teams?