We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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Throughout our article below, we'll use the words overwhelming and overly complex a lot.
Many of the most popular project management tools are designed for large teams and organizations, and they can be overwhelming and complex to set up and use for smaller teams. Here's what to keep in mind:
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Trello brings all your tasks, teammates, and tools together.
Trello is probably a project management tool that most people have heard of. It was one of the first project managers to hit mainstream popularity because it was the first project manager to allow for kanban board view from a web app, bringing with it a super user friendly interface.
This was an incredible feat back in 2011 and what resulted in its rise to popularity, especially in the B2C space (general consumers, not majorly breaking into the B2B space). For example, you'd use Trello to manage your personal tasks, maybe more as a prosumer, and less as a business owner.
We used Trello here at Efficient App for years, before ultimately switching to Asana, when they too added kanban functionality, as we felt that Trello sort of got a bit stuck, while their competitors were evolving and working to further innovate in the project management space.
Rating: D
The main differentiation that Trello had was kanban board functionality, and that's about where it started and ends. Thing is, kanban view is now a staple of any modern project manager on the market in this day and age.
Feature set wise, since Atlassian now owns Trello, they've prioritized integrations within the Atlassian suite.
Rating: C-
Let's just say, here's a screenshot of Trello from 2011:
And here's Trello today:
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If this is how much Trello has evolved over the span of 12 years, do you genuinely think that Trello is a leader in the space? To us, it feels more like a relic from the past. There's been huge strides in web development technologies, design esthetics, and more over the past decade, just seems like Trello has failed to get the memo.
Rating: C
Trello does board view well, but that's about the bulk of it. As they haven't really seemed to update Trello much in the past 6+ years, the bulk of the credit that we can give Trello comes from it having incredibly deep integration with the Atlassian suite of tools (e.g. Jira,Confluence, and Bitbucket).
With Atlassian's acquisition of Trello, came with it more of an integration with Atlassian's tooling.
Rating: B+
Trello actually has a pretty solid mobile app on both iOS and Android. This is in part to how much time they've had to perfect it. Early on, being more in the B2C space, and coming out more when the iPhone was gaining major traction, a solid mobile app is something that the general consumer wanted. So this is something they've spent a lot of time perfecting.
Rating: B+
We also have to give Trello credit in this area. They have a super robust API and powerful Zapier connector. If their Zapier connector doesn't have quite what you're looking for, you should be able to do chat you'd like to do using their developer API.
If your team is heavily relying on the Atlassian software stack, then Trello is likely to bring with it some native integrations to help your team out as well.
When looking at the best project management tools on the market, we just can't put Trello that high up on the list. They feel like a very safe solution that hasn't seen any innovation since it was first created.
If you're looking for a modern tool, you'd probably be better off looking at something like Motion vs Trello. If you're looking for something that is solid and stable and has all the project management basics, we'd just be hard-pressed to not recommend Asana over Trello in about every category.
Trello is nowhere the best project management solution on the market, but it is one that most have likely used in the past, or have at least heard of.
We feel like Atlassian acquired Trello to have some type of solution in the project management space, so that they can try to get teams to use and rely on the entire Atlassian suite. Essentially, turning the parent company more into an all-in-one solution, by leveraging many different software solutions, along with native integrations.
We're hard-pressed to recommend Trello for that reason, unless your team is heavily reliant on the Atlassian software stack. If you're not, then pretty much any project manager on our top project management list will serve you better.
Jira is a suite of agile work management solutions developed by Atlassian. It is designed to facilitate collaboration across teams, from concept to customer, and is used by software, IT, business, and operations teams among others.
Jira Software started off focusing on helping software teams to manage project development—think sprints, agile and scrum methodologies. But in 2021, Jira launched what they call "Work Management" to help greater business teams like marketing, HR, finance, and design.
This meant that they introduced other features that tools like Asana and Monday have, like different views (task list view, timeline view, kanban board view) and forms.
What does this all mean? Well first and foremost, Jira is designed for highly technical teams and the other "work management" features were created in an effort to compete with Monday and Asana and gain more market share.
With that, don't expect Jira to be a project management tool with a friendly user experience. It has a steep learning curve with a ton of features, with many of them that will never be used an average business.
With that, while Jira has been previously known as one of the best agile project management tools, there are newer tools on the market that are much more modern and simple to use. Keep reading to find out what they are ⤵
Jira is for enterprise engineering teams (1000 employees +) who work with traditional project management methodologies like scrum and agile. Jira calls itself a customizable workflow engine that allows users to track issues, bugs, tasks and other work items through pre-defined workflows.
If your team is already using the likes of behemoth software solutions like Salesforce and NetSuite, then Jira is probably a solution that will fit into your software stack as an enterprise team. When configured correctly, Jira can be useful in the software development space.
A Scrum Master is a professional who leads a team using Agile project management through the course of a project. Teams who have the most success with Jira have a full-time salaried employee (aka Scrum Master) whose job is to mange the project and spend most of their day in Jira.
When speaking with employees of enterprise companies using Jira, they've mentioned that when they first implemented Jira, they also hired multiple Scrum Master's to manage a handful of projects each. But with budget cuts overtime, Scrum Masters were let go, and the job of "Scrum Master" fell on the shoulders of the Business Analysts on the team. This resulted in employees needing to do numerous jobs, burn out and team members leaving the company altogether.
That said, if you're thinking of implementing Jira, make sure you also have the budget to hire employees (often numerous) to work exclusively within Jira to keep things on track. If you don't, skip implementing Jira altogether and opt for something more simple like Linear for software development.
If you have less than 1000 employees on your team and you are considering using Jira Work Management, we're here to say that it's not a good idea. There are MUCH better tools on the market — Asana if you're a larger team, or Motion if you have 100 employees or under. These project management tools are friendly, have beautiful interfaces and your team will actually want to use the tools.
If you're looking for a project management tool that works "out of the box", Jira is not for you.
There are newer, better tools for managing software development sprints.
We're seeing modern software development teams prefer the likes of Linear for issue tracking, as Linear is much more beautifully designed (while teams typically find Jira cluttered and complex). Linear is also much easier to set up than Jira.
Another newer solution for project management is Motion. Motion is ready to use out of the box and teams love that tasks appear right on their calendar in time blocks. Read our full Motion review.
If you are looking for a project management tool for anything other than software development, we don't recommend Jira. Look—sure they offer features built for marketing and design, but we can guarantee your marketing and design team will hate using Jira (they likey won't adopt it either). Why? Because they are marketing and design teams 😄 They want to use user friendly software with an intuitive interface that is easy to use—not a tool initially built for engineers. Same goes for construction teams, financial planners, HR teams, and onwards.
Jira is highly customizable, making it too complicated for the average person. Expect a steep learning curve for every the most simple of features, as many folks who use Jira end up overwhelmed. If you're looking for an intuitive, easy to set up tool, Jira is not for you.
Jira Roadmaps enables cross collaboration among different departments, making projects visible company wide. This helps teams stay on track with the bigger picture and track progress and dependencies based on team availability.
Once Jira is configured correctly, assigning tasks and stories to team members is easy so you can easily see who is working on what task.
To implement Jira, you must have deep IT and technical experience due to it's steep learning curve and customization requirements. Expect to work with a Jira Solutions Partner which can cost over six-figures for a larger organization. Your team will need to be onboarded slowly and keep in mind that regular trainings will be required.
For instance, simple things like writing Jira descriptions require you to use markdown for bolding, italics, and bullet points. Busy team members have expressed being deeply frustrated with the time it takes formatting text to write updates to the team. Our take? This isn't a good use to of time for anyone 😅
Employees who have used Jira have reported it being slow at times. For instance, they said that while the search functionality was useful, it could sometimes be very slow.
A project management tool is only useful if it's being regularly updated by team members. Because of Jira's overly complicated nature, employees often don't share updates in Jira during each sprint, waiting to only update Jira at the very end. When we asked why, they mentioned it's because "they dislike Jira, try to avoid it, and they are too busy doing actual work than spending time updating the project management tool."
Jira has over 3000+ integrations with other tools. That said, for enterprise tools like Salesforce or Zendesk you're very likely looking at a custom integration that will need to be managed by a third party.
Unless you're a super large enterprise with thousands of employees doing agile project management, Jira is not worth considering as a project management tool. It will be highly complex to set up and user adoption will require a lot of training due to the overwhelming features.
Instead, we recommend that engineering teams consider Linear for issue tracking and all other teams (marketing, design, HR, and onwards), or consider Motion that is much more user friendly for the average person (and your team will actually enjoy using it).
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