Trello: what it is and how to start

A visual board where tasks are cards that move across columns as work progresses, so the state of a project is visible at a glance.

Who it is for

Small teams and individuals who want shared visibility without learning project management software. Its strength is that a new person understands it in under a minute, which matters more than features for a team that will not be trained.

What it costs

The free plan is $0 and includes unlimited cards, up to 10 boards per workspace, unlimited Power-Ups per board, unlimited activity log, assignees and due dates, mobile apps and two-factor authentication. Its limits are up to 10 collaborators per workspace, 10MB per file attachment, and 250 workspace command runs per month for automation. Standard is $5 per user per month billed annually or $6 monthly, Premium is $10 annually or $12.50 monthly, and Enterprise is $17.50 per user per month billed annually. Paid tiers add unlimited boards, more automation, and calendar, timeline, table and dashboard views.

Quick facts

Category: Project Management — Boards & Task Tracking
Pricing model: freemium
Runs on: Web, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android
Difficulty for a beginner: beginner
Official site: https://trello.com

How to get started with Trello

Start with three columns and resist adding more: To do, doing, done. Almost every elaborate column structure collapses back to roughly this. Add a column only when you repeatedly cannot tell what state something is in.
Write cards as outcomes, not topics: "Booking form works end to end" can be finished; "website" cannot. A card that cannot be completed will sit in the doing column forever and quietly destroy trust in the board.
Give every card one assignee and a due date: One name, not several. Cards owned by the whole team are the ones that turn out never to have been started, and a date is what makes something visible when it slips.
Put the detail on the card, not in chat: Use the description and comments for decisions and context. Anything decided in a chat thread is effectively lost, and the board becomes fiction while the real project lives somewhere unsearchable.
Watch for a pile-up in one column: The main diagnostic value of a board is visual. A doing column with fifteen cards means the team is starting rather than finishing, which is the most common cause of everything being simultaneously late.
Archive done cards regularly: A done column with two hundred cards makes the board slow to read. Archive at the end of each week or project; nothing is deleted and the activity log keeps the history.
Check the free plan limits before scaling up: 10 boards per workspace, 10 collaborators, and 250 automation runs a month. Generous for a small team, and worth knowing before you plan around a board per client.

Should you use this instead of something else?

A spreadsheet shows everything at once and is better when dates and dependencies matter, but is worse at showing state at a glance. Asana and Monday offer more structure, reporting and views, at the cost of setup time and a per-user fee. Notion can be made into a board but requires you to build it. Trello wins on the thing that decides whether a small team actually uses a tool: nobody needs to be taught how it works.

Common beginner mistakes

Creating a column for every possible state, producing a board too wide to read and impossible to keep current.
Writing cards as topics rather than finishable outcomes, so nothing ever legitimately moves to done.
Keeping the real conversation in chat while the board rots into an inaccurate summary.
Assigning cards to several people, which produces work everyone assumed someone else had picked up.
Planning a board per client without checking the 10-board free limit, then discovering it mid-setup.
Never archiving, until the board is slow to load and unpleasant enough to read that people stop opening it.

Last verified: 2026-08-07. Source: https://trello.com/pricing

Read the full Project Management guide for how this fits into the wider process.