2 years later and trello is still awful

[Stephanie Lodie]

Two years ago Atlassian changed the functionality of Trello forever, for the worse. 

Workspaces- horrible for individual users and $150 a year. 

Have to pay for each workspace AND each user.

Still can't archive a workspace

The Standard plan doesn't really have a reason to exist.

They placed different views in the Premium plan and called it best value because all the functions that a user would expect to be standard are part of a premium plan for other reason than they can get a plurality of people to pay for a plan with way more feature than they need or will ever use.

Trello has become the cable of Kanban.

The reason I’m writing this today is because 2 years later I still struggle with if I want to pay for the features. I want the features but it seems like the second I pay for a little, Atlassian will be nickel and diming me for a lot.

I plan on keeping my boards that I’ve invested in but with Atlassian’s known behavior of shaking out individual users, I can’t say that I trust the platform.

How many people here moved to other project management tools but still use Trello?

[Brittany Joiner]

@Stephanie Lodie sorry to hear you're frustrated! You don't necessarily have to pay for each workspace and each user. For instance, I'm an extremely active Trello user and I only pay for one premium workspace and just have a majority of my boards in there (particularly ones that i want to use paid features on), and have managed thus far to only have my partner and sister on one board at a time, so I'm the only paid user. My renewal is coming up and I'm paying $119 for premium features, and that feels worth it to me since I'm using Trello for literally everything in my life, and I really like using timeline and calendar views, and i do a TON of automation (I'm honestly shocked that I don't have to pay more for all the automation i do in Trello). 

I do see the confusion with Standard vs Premium plan - i think the biggest difference is if you want more views and are doing a lot of automation. Standard gives you unlimited boards and custom fields, but Premium unlocks the multiple board views. (Funnily enough, if you only want Calendar View, you actually don't need to pay for Trello at all - you can use the Calendar Power-Up on Trello's free plan and get the same functionality).

So I see premium as being most useful for doing high volumes of automation, and if you're not doing that, you'll probably be fine with Standard (i think that's like $50/year) or even the free plan (if you don't want custom fields, although i just realized that i think Amazing Fields Power-Up is actually free and has a lot of functionality). 

Can I ask which premium features you're interested in that think should be included in the free plan? I consult with a lot of users and find the free plan usually has more features than most people need, and the ones that are paid tend to save them so much time in their business, they're not worried about the price on it and just optimize the workspace and number of users to minimize costs. Sometimes, if you need a very specific feature, you can use the free version of Trello and find a power-up that does exactly what you're looking for, and even if it charges a fee, it might still be less than the cost of Standard or Premium, so if you have a specific feature in mind you're looking for, let me know and I'm happy to try to help think of the lowest cost solution!

[Stephanie Lodie]

Thanks for the response! The only feature that I think should have been free or added to the standard plan are the different views. A lot of other project management tools have different views as part of their free tiers and it seems like Atlassian purposefully created a lack luster product (compared to what they already had) to force people into a higher paying tier.

The standard plan would be great for small scale users with this addition and it seems like Atlassian has a specific money target in mind then figured out how they could get there instead of creating an offer that people naturally wanted to buy. 

I'll try adding power-ups. I'd never considered that before but I've just recently started with Asana. Even if I pay more with them in the end, I can (hopefully) trust that Asana isn't selling a purposefully underpowered product or will degrade the useability of a product I'd come to rely on. 

[Brittany Joiner]

@Stephanie Lodie got it! If you're most interested in the views, I'd recommend the calendar power-up, and Blue Cat Reports for dashboards/reports. There's a bunch of other dashboard power-ups with reporting if you're interested in that piece - just look in the "Analytics and Reporting" section in the power-up marketplace. Planyway power-up has timeline views i believe. So if you do like Trello and prefer it, it's the views you're interested in, I'd recommend checking those out and seeing if they help!

I know it's just my opinion, but I don't think Atlassian tried to price things like that to nickel and dime users, but admittedly my only experience is with Trello so i can't speak to other tools of theirs. I think like any SaaS they've got costs to cover and needed to separate features in different ways and found those sets of features were usually more useful for business users that would be able to justify the expense for the benefit. Personally, I feel like they give more away for free than they should as I know many people who are perfectly happy with the free Trello plan and never upgrade. For a while I just paid for "Trello gold" back in the day because I wanted to support a product I liked, not because I actually needed the paid features.

I've generally found Trello's pricing and features in line with its competitors, but everyone has a different style of tool so there is tragically no perfect one for everyone (not even Trello 😭).

[Mr. C]

Stephanie Lodie im really trying to contact you about an urgent matter my email is chawams@yahoo.com thanks