Project management can quickly become complicated waters to navigate, especially as your projects and business grow. Not only will you have to tackle more projects, but you will have more stakeholders working to make them a reality. As those numbers grow, you need the right project management tools to keep work flowing smoothly and deadlines on track.
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To complicate matters further, the number of tools and services available to help you manage those projects and documents is staggering. What are you turning around? Which service do you use? Are you going for kanban, Gantt, Wiki, tasks, calendars or a combination?
When looking for the right project management software, you will come across both Notion and Trello. These two project management platforms overlap quite a bit, but Trello and Notion are also quite different. Which of these services is right for your business. Let’s dig in and find out.
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What is understanding?
Concept is a project management and document management platform designed to help your teams collaborate with tools to coordinate deadlines, objectives and assignments. Within a single workspace, your teams can think, write, plan, capture thoughts, manage projects, and lead departments. With tools such as kanban boards (Image A), workspaces, meeting notes, documents, tasks, assignments, and calendars, Notion may be the perfect platform for any team looking to merge document management and project management.
Image A
What is Trello?
Trello may not be one of the most popular workflow management tools on the market, but it can certainly compete with the competition by providing all the features you need in an easy-to-use, modern interface (Figure B† Trello provides workspaces, kanban, timelines, tables, calendars, dashboards, cards, templates, filters, automation, and powerups to add new features.
Figure B
Common Features of Notion and Trello
Work flow
If there’s one buzzword that deserves its time in the spotlight, it’s workflow. When you have an efficient and smooth workflow, project management becomes a breeze. Between the two, Trello has a workflow edge simply by sticking to a layout that makes it easy to switch between the different (yet closely related) tools. With an interface that makes it really easy to not only switch between those tools, but also see how integrated they are, Trello gives a slight edge.
But – and this is a big “however” – Notion offers a more complete package for teams to work together. Notion, for example, includes additional features that work together to provide a more complete workflow. Start with meetings, convert them into documents, create tasks from the documents, build boards to manage the tasks, assign tasks and keep track of it all in a calendar view. That’s a complete workflow that benefits almost every team.
Project management
While Notion splits its time between project and document management, the project management aspect of the service is as strong as many others in the field. For instant project management, though, Trello pulls the punch by adding just the right set of features that most teams are used to using.
Another advantage of Trello is its interface. While Notion makes it easy to switch between functions, the layout is rather old fashioned and at times feels more like a wiki on steroids than an actual project management suite.
Collaboration
I’ll have to give Notion the edge in the collaboration arena. While Trello offers plenty of powerful collaboration tools, once you get started with Notion, you’ll understand that this platform is all about collaboration. Notion offers plenty of collaboration options, from meeting notes to documents to assignments and the ability to link a workspace to a Slack channel. After you add team members, you can add them as stakeholders to various items. Those stakeholders automatically send emails about additions and updates.
That doesn’t mean Trello is missing out on collaboration options. For example, you can share an entire board or a single card with team members and even invite non-members to join the collaboration.
Templates
Notion and Trello provide numerous templates to make creating project management spaces easy. Trello offers templates for things like one-to-one meeting agendas, agile boards, business overviews, design huddles, go-to-market strategy, kanban, mise-en-place productivity, project management, remote team meetings, and more. Notion categorizes its templates by purpose, such as design, student, engineering, human resources, marketing, personal, product management, sales, and support.
While both services approach templates very differently, they simplify the process of creating new assets from scratch.
Feature Comparison: Notion vs. Trello
| Concept | Trello |
|---|---|
| Project and document management | Project management |
| Multiple workspaces | Multiple workspaces |
| Wiki-like layout | Modern layout |
| Kanban, tasks, documents, calendars, meeting notes | Kanban, timelines, tables, calendars, dashboards and maps |
| Limited Templates | Unlimited Templates Designed by the Trello Community |
| Slack, Jira, GitHub and Asana integration | Numerous third-party integrations |
| Subscriptions ranging from free to $8/user/month | Subscriptions ranging from free to 17.50/user/month |
If I had to make a choice, the win would go to Trello because the modern interface will be much easier for new team members to get started. That doesn’t detract from Notion, but the Wiki-like user interface may put off some project members who are more used to mobile interfaces with easy drag-and-drop tools.
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