Monday vs Trello Compared: Which Is Best & What's the Difference?

Both Monday and Trello rank among the best project management tools out there, but they aren’t quite equal in all respects. In this Monday vs Trello comparison, we dig into the details to help you choose the best of the two for you.

We look at determining factors including pricing, quality of free versions, and customer support. We also compare their ease of use, look and feel, and tools and features. 

Read on to see how the apps stack up against each other.

What is the difference between Monday and Trello?

The difference between Trello and Monday is slight at first glance. However they do have an appreciable divergence in features and functionality that should inform your choice. 

If you’re looking for more background on either, we’ve already written an in-depth Monday review elsewhere. You can also go ahead and give our Trello review a once-over if you like. 

Before we dive right in, let’s just say a thing or two about project management, especially, what is known as agile working. This is a concept underpinning basically all project management software today.

Agile task and project management refers to breaking down big projects into tasks, subtasks and iterations. 

It means completing short bursts of work, testing and getting feedback, and then moving on. It’s the opposite of big-picture long-term planning, which can be inflexible and prone to huge setbacks if things do not go 100% as planned. 

With agile tasks and projects, teams can be flexible and adaptable to new challenges and obstacles as they arise. This is particularly useful for software development and bug fixing, but is otherwise also good for more creative content work like marketing campaigns and sales pipeline lifecycle planning.

The major difference between Trello and Monday.com is that Trello is a more lightweight platform at first glance. It’s easiest to learn, to use, and there is less time-wasting on an abundance of features. Meanwhile, Monday offers a more robust task and project management experience. 

Another difference that stands out is that Trello is almost all centered around Kanban boards and cards, though it offers a variety of views. Monday.com does have Kanban boards, but a Monday user is more likely to toggle between many views and dashboards. 

Finally, Trello is probably best for creative teams doing content planning, whether for blogs, marketing campaigns, graphics, web design and more. Monday can be used for these things too, but it’s also more useful for a wider variety of purposes including CRM and sales tasks, technical developments, and even IRL and virtual things like event planning.

So, enough preamble. Time to push up those reading glasses and see a side-by-side comparison of Monday.com vs Trello.

Monday vs Trello comparison chart

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Monday vs Trello pricing

Monday.com pricing and Trello’s pricing plans are not that dissimilar. Both have free plans. Both have several paid plans which go up to enterprise plans.

Monday.com’s enterprise prices are not advertised on their site, so some digging is required. Also, Monday.com has 5 pricing tiers while Trello has only 4.

Which is best for you?

Trello has the most affordable basic plan when compared to Monday.com. Also, Trello clearly shows the price for its enterprise plan package. Figuring out the cost of Monday.com for your business will take a little more effort.

Trello vs Monday free versions

Free plans are a great way to test out project management tools. Both Trello and Monday.com have free plans, which is great. So, which one is better?

Which is best for you?

Trello’s free plan lets you include unlimited team members. Monday.com’s free plan is capped at 2 users. 

Monday’s free plan still gets you unlimited boards and unlimited docs as file attachments. Trello’s free plan is good for unlimited cards, unlimited Power-Ups, unlimited storage, but only 10 Trello boards per workspace.

Customer support

Customer support entails many things. First and foremost is a helpdesk which can either be reached via email, phone support, text or social media. 

Which is best for you?

Monday offers its users 24/7 support, even with the Monday.com free plan. Enterprise plans can even get a dedicated customer success manager. Trello’s customer support is less clear, but there is priority email support with the premium plans.

Knowledgebase & learning

Getting help with your project and collaboration tools shouldn’t always entail reaching a human agent. There are other resources like FAQs, knowledge bases, video tutorials and webinars.

Which is best for you?

Monday.com offers daily live webinars on a range of topics. Monday also has a comprehensive self-serve knowledge base for users to peruse. Trello also has guides, webinars and even a Trello blog with useful tips.

Market share

Market share is not so easily measured when it comes to task management, project management and team collaboration platforms. This is because they are often added up across a range of sectors like productivity, internal communications, or rate of adoption.

Which is best for you?

Depending on which resource you investigate, you often come across very similar specs. The percentage of the market dominated by these two task management solutions is about equal.

Monday.com or Trello for ease of use?

A software that puts being user friendly high on its list of priorities will always get good grades from reviewers and users alike. Both Trello and Monday.com are user friendly solutions, so which one is easier to use?

Which is best for you?

Perhaps this category comes down to a measure of personal taste. Generally speaking, Trello is great for ease of use, but Monday.com has a relatively slight learning curve. 

Both offer basic onboarding services too, with Monday having tailored onboarding for their enterprise clients.

Look and feel

Aesthetics count when it comes to dashboards and interfaces. It’s not only about how pleasing things are to the eye, although that is indeed important when you are staring at a platform for many hours per day. 

Look and feel speaks to how intuitive the dashboard is, which in turn makes for the work experience to be smoother and more pleasant.

Which is best for you?

Ever since its launch, Trello has always been lauded as being a great looking piece of software, easy on the eyes, and clear in its purposes. Trello has some of the most recognizable boards and cards in the SaaS world. 

Monday.com’s interfaces are hardly to be derided either. It’s a great-looking app too, but it’s just not as clean and concise as Trello. 

Trello vs Monday features & functionality

Now that we’ve gone over some of the basics to approaching Trello and Monday.com, let's look at some of the tools, features and functionalities of both of these project management solutions. While it may seem they are incredibly similar, we feel once you've read up on the ins and outs of their tools, you’ll have a better idea which one is more suitable for your needs.

Email tracking

Email tracking is a key feature particularly for marketing campaigns, though neither Trello nor Monday.com specialize in this field. Email tracking is also useful among team members, which means you get notifications when a team member opens your email.

Which is best for you?

Monday has many tools for emailing and activities and this includes email tracking. Once you connect your regular email to Monday’s platform, you can use email templates, send and receive emails and track emails from inside Monday. 

For Trello, you’ll need the email for Trello Power-Up by SendBoard to have more email functionality. 

Workflow automations

No SaaS is complete without automated workflow tools. These allow you to set up business processes which function with conditional logic. They take over easy repetitive tasks, like sending notifications or changing statuses, which free up time for your team members.

Which is best for you?

Trello gives you the power of built-in automations. They are standard with every Trello board. You don’t need to know any code to use these. 

Setting up your own trigger-action rules is also a snap. And automations are included in the free version. Monday.com also has automations but not in their free plan.

Views and dashboards

When it comes to task management and project management, your various views are your bread and butter of streamlined productivity. Key among those are Kanban boards, Gantt charts, calendar views, and list views.

Which is best for you?

Trello is a pioneer of bringing Kanban views to the mainstream. Aside from Kanban boards, Trello has a dashboard view with instant insights, a timeline view which is like a Gantt chart, workspace view, calendar view and even a map view. 

Monday has an activity log view, Kanban board view, timeline, calendar, map, chart and workload. In both cases, not all views are in the free versions.

Task management

Every project is a series of tasks, which in turn can be a series of subtasks. Some are done individually, and others as a team. Many tasks are built around dependencies, meaning the platform ensures certain tasks are complete as necessary to begin new tasks, for example: you can’t do an invoice before you plan your budget.

Which is best for you?

Both Trello and Monday.com make it very easy to set up tasks and subtasks. You can affix data to tasks like assignees with custom fields, permissions, due dates and checklists. 

At the same time, it needs to be said that Monday has more robust task dependency tools, if you need them.

Time tracking

No task and project management solution is worth it these days without serious time tracking functionality. This lets managers understand their team’s productivity levels on both the team and individual level. It also helps plan roadmaps and going forward. 

Which is best for you?

Monday’s time tracking abilities come with their Pro plan. Time spent can be broken down by task or project or individual or department. Likewise, Trello’s activity dashboard has real-time and up-to-date data in their timeline view which can serve some time tracking purposes.

Template library

Templates are absolutely key for project management. They offer out-of-the-box visual breakdowns for how you want to organize your team, tasks and long-term goals.

Which is best for you?

Trello is renowned for its template library. Among some top business template options are ones for team alignment, business modeling, decision tracking, change-management workflows, and order-management pipeline workflows. 

Trello also has template categories for things like design, marketing projects, HR and operations, team management, product management and even remote work.

Monday.com’s templates also break it down by similar categories. Some top Monday templates include CRM, campaign planning, portfolio management, sprints management, event management, and A/B testing and planning templates.

Mobile and desktop versions

Some project management software uses a responsive interface, meaning that the screen size adapts to any device. Others create dedicated mobile apps, as is the case for Monday.com and Trello. Both platforms are available on iOS and Android.

Which is best for you?

Trello has mobile apps for iPhones and Android devices, but they also offer a desktop version from the App Store and Microsoft store. 

The Trello mobile app is good for to-do lists, team communication and staying updated with project progress. Monday.com’s mobile app does similar things, but their desktop version is slightly less intuitive than Trello’s until you get the hang of it.

Integrations

Few software are fully comprehensive all on their own, so it’s great to have an app that integrates with others, whether to add CRM, marketing, sales or other functionalities to project management. 

Which is best for you?

Trello calls their native integrations Power-Ups. They have Power-Ups for apps like BitBucket Cloud, Google Drive and Gmail, Jira (also made by Atlassian like Trello), MailChimp, GitHub, Slack and more. 

Monday.com’s integrations are limited based on the plan you buy. Basic integrations include Salesforce, Zoom, Slack, Google Drive, Microsoft Excel and OneDrive and Dropbox. 

With connectors like Zapier, both Trello and Monday have even more integration possibilities. 

Security

Since both of these systems deal with your data, it’s important to have solid data security and safety. You wouldn’t want your project planning to leak into the wrong hands, especially as your information is most likely going to be stored on their clouds.

Which is best for you?

Trello begins with two-factor authentication, meaning someone needs both their login and password as well as a connected second device to confirm their access. Trello also uses 256-bit AES encryption with GNU Privacy Guard. 

Monday’s platform was built with security protocols such as ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27018. It also offers two-factor authentication with AES-256 data encryption to boot.

All things considered, these are both very secure apps.

Product limitations

Sadly, no product is perfect. Limitations are something everyone needs to take into account when shopping for a new project and tasks management app. The important thing is to be aware of your priorities: how will you use the software, what features are most important, how many people will collaborate, etc.

Which is best for you?

Trello is known as a very lightweight app, meaning it's fast and easy to use, but lacks some of the more robust power you might expect if your projects and teams get really big. Likewise, the app needs a constant good connection to the internet. 

You also have a lot of limitations with Trello in the lower pricing packages, like storage limits, limited numbers of workspaces and boards per workspace. 

Monday.com’s limitations are similar, in that the best tools require the more expensive plans. Monday is also limited in terms of the number of new and custom fields one can add to tasks and projects. 

Monday’s template library is also not so extensive, and could be considered one of its product limitations.

Which is better, Trello or Monday.com? Our conclusion

It’s never easy for us to choose one amazing software solution over another, especially when the comparison is so head-to-head as it is with Atlassian’s Trello vs Monday. 

And of course, you can have a look at our list of the best project management software for more ideas. For example, there’s Wrike and Asana for general solid SaaS, or apps like Jira if your tasks are more on the DevOps side.

But as far as our head-to-head comparison goes, here’s the unvarnished reality.

Trello is more affordable, easier to use, and has a more thorough free version. But once you get up into the more advanced features, it’s possible many users will see the benefits of Monday over Trello. 

It all depends on your business class or business needs, really, as everything does. How you plan to use either of these project management solutions is key. We’re sorry for being anticlimactic, but it’s true.

We thank you for getting to the end of this Trello vs Monday.com comparison piece. We've sought to explain what task and project management is all about, and which of these apps is better from task to task. 

Monday vs Trello, which one is right for you? Now you should know!