Who saw this coming?
Atlassian, the software company behind services like JIRA and BitBucket, announced this week that it bought project management service Trello for $425 million. Trello’s 19 million users and its entire team will be folded into Atlassian, according to TechCrunch.
That might leave some users concerned about Trello’s future, given that JIRA offers a lot of the same team/issue management tools. But Atlassian President Jay Simons told TechCrunch his company wants to help Trello scale – not shut it down.
In case you’re still worried, though, I researched a few lesser-known alternatives to Trello. Trello’s popularity has created a huge ecosystem of similar products, so if you’re looking for an alternative to Trello, chances are you can find something you like.*
Taiga
This open-source Trello alternative is clean, simple and, frankly, extremely impressive. Within seconds of signing up I had a Kanban board ready for customization. It’s easy to denote which items require work from your team vs. those requiring work from the client.
Taiga’s open-source nature is by far its coolest selling point. As long as you’re comfortable with anyone being able to view your project, you don’t have to pay anything to use the software. I found all kinds of games, software and projects as part of Taiga’s “discovery” section.
Don’t want to share your project with the world? You can pay a few bucks for a private project or host Taiga yourself. That’s right: with a little work, you can run a private Taiga instance for you and your team. Neat, huh?
Restyaboard
Migrating away from a collaboration/project management platform can be a huge headache. After all, what’s the use in finding the best Trello alternative if you need to spend hours – or even days – recreating your Trello boards for it?
Trello lets users export their boards in JSON format, which is where Restyaboard comes in. Restyaboard requires a custom install, though they make it easy with one-click installation for Amazon Web Services and Linux scripts to handle the heavy lifting for you. Once you’re running Restyaboard, you can import Trello lists, boards, cards, attachments and more with a couple of clicks.
Restyaboard offers all the features you’d want from a free version of Trello. It’s also got chat functionality, so you won’t have to split your time between your team management software and a chat application like Slack.
KanbanFlow
I’m a chronic multitasker. It’s sort of a necessity at a digital marketing agency – if a client emails me with a question or request, I want to get back to them as quickly as possible. It’s amazing to see their reactions when I finish a seemingly complex request for them in half an hour.
Unfortunately, I lose a lot of time multitasking. Switching my focus from one task to another eats into productivity. That’s why I love KanbanFlow and its pomodoro feature. The pomodoro technique entails focusing on one task – and only that task – for 25 minutes. Then you take a five-minute break and repeat.
KanbanFlow comes with built-in pomodoro tracking, along with tons of statistics to help track and improve your productivity. I also like how you can set a maximum number of tasks allowed in a column – the idea is to force you to get stuff done and prevent bottlenecks. KanbanFlow is free. A premium version offering analytics and lots of integrations costs $5 per user per month.
Yalla
Come on, you didn’t think I’d pass up a chance at self-promotion, right? We’ve already written a breakdown of what Yalla can do that Trello can’t – including giving everyone a centralized to-do list and built-in time tracking.
So I’ll keep this brief: Yalla combines all the best features of software like Trello, Slack and Basecamp and puts it in an easy-to-use package. Feel free to give it a try.
*Special shout-out to Taiga and KanbanFlow, whose founders each quickly got back to me when I reached out to make sure I didn’t get anything wrong about their software 🙂