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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:
We see more often than not that teams actually jump into implementing a project management tool too early believe it or not.
The main question we'd ask is, does your team currently use a CRM? If so, is your project management/task needs actually simple enough to not require an entire standalone tool for it?
Believe it or not, pipelines within a CRM can actually be a great alternative to a project management tool for smaller teams. With the introduction of a standalone project manager comes with a lot of added work as mentioned above.
Now this is totally fine and possible, just trying to flag that many smaller teams and startups might be trying to create too much complexity and structure, when they really just need to move quickly, pivot, and figure out their process before actually implementing a proper project management tool.
Ok, let's get into your best project management software options + project planning platforms ⤵
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.
That is, until 2008 when Dustin Moskovitz (Co-Founder of Facebook, now Meta) and Justin Rosenstein (former engineering lead at Facebook) co-founded Asana—which would go on to be the first project management tool accessible to the average business. Wild enough, Asana was actually built off of Facebook's internal task tool 🤯
At Asana, their mission was simple: create a software that anyone could use and to help teams collaborate better.
In 2010, after having just 15 beta users (oh, and just a small $9 Million in Funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz), they officially launched to the public. The response was incredibly positive, with many early users saying:
"Asana is one of the first project management tools that our team actually enjoys using."
One of their big differentiators was that they prioritized keyboard shortcuts from day one (which was super uncommon at the time), remember, we're still in the Adobe Flash era of the internet. And this was a huge productivity boost for a tool you'd be using sometimes many hours per day.
Today Asana is one of the main leaders in the project management space, with over 1,700 employees, for whom are still focusing on one thing: helping teams and companies to best manage their projects.
We actually used Asana for 7 years at Efficient App—in-fact, it was our favorite for a long time, but new innovation entering the market has caused us to switch to a new exciting contender in the space: Motion (more or on that later ⤵).
Shortly after Asana launched, Trello entered the market in 2011 with a project management tool with one key differentiation: kanban boards—different from that of the list-making style of managing tasks. Why was this a big deal? Well web technologies weren't anywhere near where they were now, and at the time, being able to visualize floating cards, dragging and dropping them between columns and statuses was a big deal that hadn't been seen outside of Flash.
Trello at the end of the day was incredibly simple to use, being geared more to individuals and small businesses that wanted a simple and visual tool to manage their tasks. While it was (and still is) a simple tool, it wasn't that powerful of a tool, as it was much like having a digital pen and paper as your task manager. The general attitude around Trello is:
Everyone has probably used Trello at some point
But it's hard to think of many teams that have stuck with it in the long-term. It's not a serious project management software that we'd recommend today as it stagnated a while back, and since Atlassian acquired them in 2017 for half a billion dollars—the stagnation sadly only continued as they tried repurposing it to more deeply integrate with their other tools (Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, etc.).
Then came others, like Monday.com (founded in 2012, previously known as Dapulse which rebranded to Monday.com in 2017):
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And ClickUp in 2017:
For a while, when you thought of project management software, you'd think of Asana or Monday.com. That was until 2019–2020 when ClickUp amped up their marketing. It felt like you couldn't go anywhere without seeing a billboard or advertisement with their software (in major US tech cities at least).
With all of that said, neither Monday or ClickUp actually re-thought project management—they just built the project management basics while focusing on expanding as quickly as possible to be the "now coveted" best all-in-one software on the market.
Their feature-set was similar to that of Asana, with just a slightly different interface. That and, well, way more features like embedding other apps, full note taking capabilities, and much more, because they wanted to be more of a "productivity suite" rather than just helping people with the task management involved with running large projects.
The truth of the matter is that since Asana in 2010, there hadn't been any true innovation in the project management space for nearly a decade, but rather just more tools competing for teams to manage projects.
More and more all-in-one tools entered the market, like Notion, which more recently is being pushed as a project manager (spoiler alert: it isn't).
With all of this came with it major frustrations. Many teams thought that Asana, Monday, and ClickUp would solve their productivity problems, saving them immense time as project managers, but people quickly found that adoption amongst other team members was quite poor, leading to large unexpected onboarding expenses and never-ending sinks of time.
As these tools moved up market, so came the enterprise team needs that Jira and Smartsheet had being so early on in the space (and focused on enterprises at the start). What this led to is Asana, ClickUp, and Monday.com focusing years on building these large team management features to try growing outside of the SMB space, hoping to expand.
These features ranged from gantt charts, to reporting dashboards, and just generally custom dashboards overall. Companies found that to have success with project management software, they needed to take a lesson out of the enterprise playbook by hiring dedicated team members as standalone "project managers" and/or consultants to help them set up the tools properly.
All the meanwhile, the average small–medium sized businesses got left in the rearview mirror as they didn't require these highly custom and advanced tooling, but rather finding themselves floundering somewhere in the middle of being overwhelmed with features and having perceived productivity (aka spending time setting up project management tools rather than actually working on projects).
Motion started out simply as a calendar and scheduler tool. Upon perfecting the time management component (with deep Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 integration), they moved into task management for individuals. Re-thinking what a task truly was—not just a line item in a list or kanban view, but rather blocks of time that could be scheduled onto your calendar, as a task. No longer requiring 2 separate tools to manage your tasks and time:
Then in 2022, their project management tool (for teams) was released. Motion's 2022 press release stated:
“Despite impressive advances in software and AI in the last decade, productivity tools still require massive overhead and manual coordination. We set out to solve this problem in a way that 'just works.'”
Motion found that:
Knowledge workers spend 58% of their day coordinating work instead of doing work.
So they knew the clear path to take forward. It wasn't about the project management format or features, but rather the work involved with actually managing a project that was leading to the complexity and low adoption of project management tools.
That's where they introduced AI planning and auto-scheduling, so that teams could dramatically increase their productivity. They essentially created this over-encompassing category of time management, daily planning, and project management, all while mixing in the newfound era of AI (for task/event prioritization). All of this with the goal of giving everyone the experience as if they had a personal assistant when using the tool.
After 7 years of using Asana, we switched entirely to Motion because of the drastic time-saving component. With Motion, you create tasks, grouping them into projects. From there, you simply set the deadline, priority, and any blockers. That's where Motion uses AI to automatically schedule the tasks required to complete the project on each team member's calendars, all while taking into account any meetings and calendar schedules.
No more need for a standalone project manager to manage a project—Motion knows what tasks are blocking the rest of the team from getting the work done, and the capacity available for each team member, because your team's calendar is at the core.
Oh, and whenever things don’t go according to plan (which they never do), Motion automatically re-prioritizes everyone’s tasks and calendar so that everything gets done, on time. Helping de-stress teammates by offloading all of the cognitive processing surrounding what should be done next.
And that's why Motion holds the spot for the best project management software in the category. It has been the first tool to actually innovate the project management and time management/daily planner categories for over a decade.
That said, Motion is focused right now on small–mid-size teams, and individuals, so Asana still wins the category for larger teams over 100+ employees (as their features are more developed to accommodate complex projects and the reporting that is required for traditional project management needs).
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A shared documentation and note taking tool that tip-toes the line of a flexible no-code platform (for teams of all sizes).
Notion is part of a category of apps often referred to as an "all-in-one", for which we aren't particularly fans of.
The main problem we have with this is it feels more like a cop-out when asked to define what you are—we do everything.
Notion started as a team knowledge base app, and that's what it should really be defined as. The problem is, as you're doing well in a single category, some apps decide to double-down, while others look to increase their TAM (Total Addressable Market). Notion is in the latter camp.
We've found that rolling out all-in-one solutions with customers is actually more difficult to get team adoption due to overwhelm.
Take Notion, it's not opinionated. In them deciding to make it super flexible, allowing it to "do anything", it by design becomes overwhelming with time. We know, it'll be incredibly exciting at first—all of the limitless potential! But then that "potential" turns to overwhelm in weeks and months.
What structure should I add these notes in? Should I add tasks here? Or over here? Do I message you on Slack, or @comment you here in Notion? Because it does "everything", it introduces micro-fatigue for doing anything.
Although, if you're looking for an incredibly flexible note taking tool that struts the lines of "no-code builder", where you actually see structure as a negative, then that's where an all-in-one app like Notion will actually shine.
Rating: B+
This is an area that Notion excels because at the end of the day, Notion is primarily just a database at the core. This means that the API is up there when comparing Airtable vs Notion on the database side of things.
Not to mention, the sheer number of tools built atop Notion, and the templates marketplace (all things that signify Notion is more of a database/no-code tool), add up to making Notion have a pretty solid and flexible API.
Start your free trial of Notion here.
When teams start having micro-success with Notion, they end up trying to use it for everything, and this is exactly where Notion's limitations and flaws are shown.
We're taking customer notes in Notion, what if we actually had our customer's information in Notion as well! Thus the mistake of trying to use Notion as a CRM is born. It will never be a proper CRM. Yes, Notion has relational databases at the core, and a CRM is really just a bunch of relational databases at the end of the day, but the difference here is opinionation and structure.
Versus getting into this point further here, that's where we've written a post explaining why Notion is not a CRM.
Your team is using Notion collaboratively with some of your clients now, eh? That's great! We have a collaborative shared knowledge base, what would make this even better? A project management tool—let's build that right into Notion as well, because tasks are really just line items in a database, right?
Wrong.
The same issue arises as before. What makes a good project management tool like Motion actually good, is the opinionation and structure. You can't just start connecting tasks to customers to notes to videos to XYZ. That's a surefire way to overwhelm absolutely everyone on your team.
The goal of a project manager is to actually get work done—with Notion as a project manager, you'll be spending more time building out a project manager, tip-toeing the line of product manager (instead of project manager).
Here's a more detailed post of our thoughts on how Notion stacks up as a project manager as compared to the leaders on the market.
Choosing to roll out something like Notion across your team requires immense thought, structure, documentation, and training.
So are you trying to build all of this out yourself? And if so, are you a product designer? Do you understand your team's specific needs even better than they do? Or are you just trying to build what you think is needed and then plan to have everyone use it in that way?
If the latter, adoption is more than likely to fail, and you might want to reconsider choosing an all-in-one tool like Notion, and instead opt for something more purpose-built as your team's internal knowledge base like an alternative like Slite.
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!
Routine app falls into the daily planner + productivity tools category. If you are looking for a habit tracking app to help with daily routine planning, task management and, time blocking for personal use, Routine is an app to consider.
Compared to Motion, Sunsama, and Akiflow which are all task management tools, Routine is the newest kid on the block in the category and aimed for more personal use, while the others are more professionally focused.
Routine is for individuals who are looking for a personal app to help with habit building, daily planning, task management and time blocking. It has a beautiful and thoughtful user interface that makes it very aesthetically pleasing. You can also use it as your main calendar (as it integrates with Google Calendar) and take personal notes within Routine. Routine is a great introduction to using a productivity tool to help form good daily habits and manage your daily schedule.
Motion, Sunsama and Akiflow were built to be tools that can help you better manage your workload, while Routine is something we'd consider using as a "light" version of task management. For example, if you want to time block in more or less static blocks of time and want to build a routine (without much regular rearranging of tasks) then Routine is a great app to consider. Tasks that should go in Routine are healthy habits (e.g. drinking water or tasks to help manage mental health like meditation).
Routine is very much for individuals at the moment, not professionals. Their integrations with project management tools are limited (Notion is currently available while Asana and ClickUp are coming soon, according to the Routine app website). So if you are looking to centralize your tasks from other tools, tools like Akiflow or Sunsama would be much better choices for you.
If you are looking for a comprehensive project management tool, Routine would not be a choice to consider as it is very much a personal routine planner, habit tracking app and task management tool. If your team is not yet using a project management tool (or you individually know you need to manage larger projects), then considering something like Motion might be best as it would eliminate your need for a project management tool + a daily planning tool (it offers daily planning, time blocking, and calendar scheduling capabilities in addition to full project management capabilities).
Rating: C
When comparing Routine app to it's two closest competitors, Sunsama and Akiflow, Routine doesn't have too much differentiation with key features. It feels several steps behind the two apps and while it allows you to have note-taking capabilities (differentiating the tool), we much rather recommend people use proper note taking tools instead like Slite or Notion. The reason is because all your notes end up getting stuck within Routine and you can forget ever being able to collaborate on notes with others. The only share feature Routine has with notes is "exporting" which essentially copies the entire text. Depending on where you send the notes, all formatting can be lost which makes for a very frustrating experience. If you take notes in Routine, we'd recommend making sure they are just for yourself and you won't plan on needing them anywhere else!
Beyond that, Routine is much more a tool to use if you want to plan out your morning routine, or are craving a habit tracking tool with the ability to use free time slots to schedule daily tasks.
Rating: A-
This is where Routine shines. It is the most beautiful task management productivity tools on the market in terms of design. Aesthetically it is very pleasing to use, a gorgeous interface with minimalistic design.
Rating: C-
While Routine is gorgeous to use, we found the user experience limiting and frustrating quite quickly. Initially, integrating with Google Calendar, adding tasks, and dropping them on your calendar is easy.
But what if a task will take you two hours to do, and you urgently need to get it done and you have other tasks on your calendar? You'd imagine that dropping in a task at a specific time would automatically move your other tasks to accommodate for the new task, right? This isn't the case with Routine. You can drag the task to be as long as the free time slot, and beyond that you need to manually rearrange your entire schedule to accommodate the new task 😬😬😬
When you compare Routine vs Motion, Motion uses AI capabilities to arrange your day. Simply making a task low, medium or high priority will auto-schedule it for you based on importance, rearranging all your other tasks. This makes it way easier to arrange your schedule instead of spending time fighting with the tool to get your schedule right. This is why we say Routine app is much better for habit building and planning your daily routine rather than granular tasks.
Because of this, we'd say Routine might be helpful for static tasks like "Mental Health Check-In" or "Cook Dinner" but it's difficult to get super granular with tasks and time blocking as you would need for professional work.
Rating: B-
Routine only has an iOS app which is relatively new (only 4 reviews on the app store to date), with Android is coming soon. Routine can be used as your main calendar app on your phone (instead of Google Calendar) and it is much more beautiful than the others on the market.
Rating: C-
Routine currently doesn't integrate with very much beyond your Google Workspace tools and Notion. You can add tasks in from your email, Notion or manually enter tasks into the app. According to Routine's website, Slack, Asana and ClickUp integrations are coming soon. Although, even with these integrations, the tool doesn't appear to have an API coming in the near future which would make it difficult to build workflows with Routine. If you are using Asana or ClickUp and are looking for a time management tool with deep integrations and powerful workflows, consider Motion or Akiflow.
Is Routine app worth it? Routine currently has a free plan for hobbyists and students and this is where we think the tool probably fits best (not professional use). If you are looking for a productivity tool to help you track new habits, healthy habits, banish bad habits, and plan your daily routine then we think it can be a great app for that. The premium version is very much still under construction (coming soon).
If you're a business, we'd say it's probably best skipping Routine and opting in for something like Motion that along with their AI capabilities, will make you feel like you have a personal assistant helping you plan your projects, tasks and day. Alternatively, if you still enjoy manually planning your day, perhaps Sunsama would be the next best alternative for a workplace app.
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!
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!
A cross-platform native collaborative task manager for small + mid-size teams.
Superlist is very much still in private beta, but we recently got access and have some initial thoughts. I do want to preface this with the following: I have been extremely excited to check this tool out. I've been on the waitlist for 2–3 years, checking in with them monthly about getting access.
The largest appeal is that it was created by the team behind Wunderlist (which is a task manager that was sold to Microsoft in 2015 for between $100–200m). So if there's a team that understands task management deeply, it's this team.
They've even teased Superlist at Google I/O 2022 on stage, as an example of a tool built in Flutter (an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase). This is important because this means everyone gets a native app—imagine having native MacOS + iOS + Android + Windows apps all generated from the same codebase.
This was the largest appeal, alongside the sheer beauty of their marketing site and in-app teaser screenshots:
They have this concept behind endless sub-tasks and collaboration, even tying in external tools like Gmail and Slack (as seen in the screenshot above).
In playing with it though, the allure of "how would some of the team that created one of the most successful task managers of our time re-think task/project management from scratch", is kind of a letdown so far to be honest.
They've been hyping up what they've been building for nearly 4 years now, to only just begin letting people in to use it, and it feels incredibly pretty—amazing UI/UX interactions. Heck, even marking a task as "complete" and "incomplete" plays the most relaxing noise (and it changes each time).
I think we're seeing what happens when you get tens of millions of dollars in venture backing and some of the best designers in the world to focus in the UI/UX. I mean heck, just go visit their website, it's incredibly beautiful.
I just fear that they spent too much time building in private, trying to get every UX interaction to be amazing, and not enough on actually being a useful and differentiated project. Genuinely trying to not be too hard on them since it is still in beta, but I also can't give them too much lax because they've been building in private alpha for so many years now. I think they should have launched way sooner and gotten product feedback from more teams using it. It's almost like they are afraid to launch and not be perfect because of all the eyes they have on them.
I even feel like the fact they have so many native integrations out of the gate (like Gmail/Slack/Google Calendar) is somewhat of a red flag... No products should wait until they've integrated with everything before releasing, because I'm willing to bet you a lot (as someone that literally builds integrations for teams of all sizes) that your end-users had a different idea of what "integration with XYZ software" means to them as compared to what you've put together.
I'm really struggling here with this one. Beautiful UI/UX is incredibly important (especially for a product person like myself), and yet here it is, and I'm just left wondering what it's trying to be.
They are sorta going for this task manager-focus meets Slite, Notion, and Coda but once you enter the documentation category, you're against big competition that has essentially outgrown that category and has evolved more into no-code tools.
I feel like modern day task/project managers have evolved over the past couple years more into this daily planner/calendar-focused time management platform space (e.g. Motion), they understand that getting meaningful work done is more complex than just building out beautiful task lists.
I just feel like the project management landscape has changed, and Superlist is still building for the older days of Todoist/Wunderlist/Trello/etc. and if this released back then, it'd have taken the world by storm! We just aren't in that world anymore though. To not have your team's calendar at the core of getting work done, I can't help but feel like you're missing a huge boat here.
With the task list approach, I do have concerns about how this will scale across large teams. I also have a bit of concern with how much focus they are putting on personal/work coinciding, because what makes a great personal task manager does not make a great team-focused task manager.
Personally, I prefer to use my project management tool like Motion/Asana for work only—and yes, with Motion being more tied to my calendar, and my calendar being my day (which is a mixture of personal/work), it does feel more natural to throw a personal task or two on there, but using it as my main note taking/task management app for personal would be a mistake. Also, what happens if you leave the company and all of your personal tasks/notes are in there?
I just have some concerns around the scalability of the UI/UX when you're trying to focus on personal (prosumer?) and work, but what I've seen is it's better to focus on one main persona first and foremost. Questions start coming up around how I can ensure that my work doesn't get access to my personal tasks/notes if I leave, and now Superlist has to invest all of this time into personal/work account security management, further pulling them away from the ideal customer profile (being teams at companies).
The truth of the matter is that I just had higher expectations with how long they've been working internally on this. They probably spent a lot of time on the last 20% polish and integrations side of things, and I just don't feel like that's enough to encourage a team to switch over from say Asana or ClickUp.
I genuinely feel like they need to think more about calendar at the center. Project management is just so much more than just tasks, notes, comments, and deadlines. People have meetings and so much more time complexity that actually affects getting work done. We're going to continue using and recommending Motion for that reason.
Although I genuinely hope to be proven wrong! I love this task management space and I'm always on the lookout for teams that are reinventing the space and thinking differently about what makes task management what it is currently today.
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!
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.
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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