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The "Project Management" category is one that has been quite underwhelming for a while. Project management software was first created for engineering teams or large enterprise companies. If you've worked for an enterprise company, you'd be familiar with the software Smartsheet and/or Jira. Project management tools were reserved for highly complex technical projects and there weren't any tools available for the average small–medium sized teams.
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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.
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There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
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The digital daily planner that helps you feel calm and stay focused.
Sunsama fits into the day planner app category, acting as a digital planner helping with task management and time blocking.
It can help with planning your daily work, time blocking and scheduling your important tasks each day. It takes a zen-like approach to helping you intentionally plan your day, allowing you participate in the planning process of your day all while giving you a calendar view of your tasks. Many people that struggle with focusing claim that it helps them better schedule their day, allowing them to get more work done.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
If your organization uses a full project management tool like Asana, ClickUp, or Trello and you want another tool to help you schedule tasks onto your calendar view and plan when you'll do each specific task, then Sunsama can be a great addition to your productivity tools.
If you don't have a need for a full project management tool and are more so looking for a task management app to get your daily work done, then Sunsama is a great choice. Just keep in mind that Sunsama only allows you to plan your schedule a few weeks in advance so if you have larger projects at hand, it might be a bit frustrating since you'll need to backlog most of your tasks until the time to actually work on them gets closer.
If you like to take an intentional, zen-like approach to planning your day, and can see yourself carving out 15-20 minutes a day for planning, then Sunsama could be the best day planner app for you.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Sunsama is not a project management tool, it's very much a task management software. It allows you to only plan only up to two weeks in advance. So if you are looking for a way to manage larger projects or collaborate with team members then you might find yourself looking for 2 tools to accomplish what one tool should be able to do (e.g. Motion vs Sunsama). So re-iternating again, if you are in the market for a new project management tool, and are considering Sunsama, you will be disappointed as this is not what it was made to do.
You should also not use Sunsama if you don't think you'd be good at keeping up with the planning process of your tasks. Sunsama doesn't automatically schedule or prioritize your tasks for you, YOU need to do that each day, so if you forget or it falls to the wayside, you might end up paying for a tool that is sitting dormant. There are other productivity tools (Motion) that use AI to schedule your day that might be better for you in this case.
Let's dive in deeper ⤵
Rating: B
Sunsama has invested a lot of time into their ke features such as their daily review, weekly review, and weekly objective functionality. All features that try to get you to plan daily, what tasks need to get done, and how they tie to the actual goals and objectives of the week.
That said, people have complained that they wish there was more of a monthly and quarterly objectives, since weekly is often too short of a time to plan for larger goals.
Sunsama is also a calendar app that integrates deeply with tools like Asana, allowing you to pull tasks from Asana and put them onto your calendar for daily planning. It's a clever idea, especially if you're already using and loving Asana, but just frustrated by the lack of integration with a calendar. Something that Motion actually does out of the box as it's an all-in-one task and time management tool.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Rating: A-
This is one of the areas that Sunsama totally excels. They have a super minimal and beautiful interface. They also have calming features like focus mode and daily shutdown, which allow you to take a deep breath, removing all other distractions, allowing you to focus your attention.
Rating: B-
With such a stellar UI, you'd expect the UX to be fantastic. And it is, in many areas. For example, things function the way you'd expect them to, and they have keyboard shortcuts for most things.
That said, it does feel like there's many missed opportunities to automate some of the things you need to do during your daily review (and yes, you need to review your Sunsama daily so that it doesn't fall behind). Why not have an option to automatically reschedule your day for you, why is it such a manual process? The same frustration that we have with a tool like Asana.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Rating: C-
Sunsama has an iOS and Android app that is relatively basic, and they refer to it as a "companion to the web app". So this means you can add basic tasks to Sunsama while on-the-go, and see what's on your calendar/schedule for the day, but you're not going to actually be planning any work while on-the-go.
You're also not going to have any actual calendar scheduling functionality while on-the-go. The truth of the matter is that it feels a bit rushed. We also experienced a pretty buggy mobile app experience with the app randomly crashing. There's only day view for the calendar for example, and the back gestures on Android don't even seem to work when backing out of tasks.
Let's just say that it's fair in that they are referring to it as a companion (for expectation setting), and you're not going to be replacing your calendar of choice or your primary project management app on mobile anytime soon.
With all of that said, you're going to want to use their desktop app or web app for planning your day and getting actual work done.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Rating: C-
Sunsama does not currently have an API. As it's more focused on native integrations with tools like that of with Asana, ClickUp, or Trello. So with that, you can see that their focus isn't actually on extending Sunsama into a flexible tool outside of what they've decided to integrate deeply with.
If you're using one of the main tools they integrate with, this might be a good thing, but for now, with no API, you cannot integrate it with your team's CRM for example, which leads us to feel they are more focused on being an individual daily planner application instead of a team project manager.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Is Sunsama worth it? If you need a daily planner application or task management software and are willing to intentionally take the 15-20 minutes to plan your daily work, then we think it's worth giving a shot. Their daily review and weekly review features are meant to help you reflect and better help you with managing your time overall.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
If you're not already using and loving another project manager like Asana, we'd recommend simply using Motion, as when you compare Motion vs Sunsama, you really need Sunsama and Asana together (2 separate tools) to get what Motion gives you out of the box.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
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