2025 Showdown: Trello vs. Monday — The Ultimate Comparison Breakdown

Project management solutions are crucial for many companies, both online and bricks-and-mortar. Every year, a vast number of project management tools are introduced to the market, each claiming to streamline operations and boost efficiency by significant margins. However, the key factor is selecting the tool that best fits your specific business needs, which is the most important decision you’ll make.

In this comparison of Trello versus Monday, I will provide you with all the essential information to help you determine whether one of these platforms is suitable for your organization.

Both Trello and Monday are popular project management tools designed for project managers. They assist teams in organizing their work, tracking deadlines, and improving overall productivity.

Trello is a collaborative project management platform that utilizes boards to structure projects. It’s accessible via web and mobile apps, offering a straightforward way to enhance teamwork and productivity. Each board includes lists on the left side, where you can add various cards containing details like checklists, due dates, and labels. Trello is also part of the Atlassian suite and functions as a Kanban board tool, which is a workflow methodology that helps keep your content organized. This approach makes it easy to visualize task progress, moving cards across columns as work is completed.

Trello’s interface displays multiple boards, each containing columns that represent stages of the workflow. You can add cards for individual tasks, including details such as checklists, labels, and due dates, which makes tracking progress intuitive and visual.

Trello offers a free plan that is suitable for small businesses, providing core features without the need for a paid subscription.

Monday.com is a comprehensive project and team collaboration platform offering features that help keep projects on track. It provides tools like checklists, time-tracking, notifications, timeline views, and more, designed to streamline task management and team communication. Whether you’re managing a simple project or complex workflows, Monday.com is built to help teams stay organized and productive.

Monday consolidates all your work into a single, organized space centered around your people and projects.

While Trello mainly utilizes Kanban-style boards, Monday provides a variety of layout options. With Monday.com, you can choose from layouts like Kanban, Gantt charts, Timelines, Tables, Charts, Calendars, and more, giving you flexibility in how you view and manage your projects.

Other key features include the ability to customize workflows with templates, automate routine tasks to save time, set automated reminders and alerts, communicate within the platform, and much more.

Project management tools are primarily used to streamline task organization among teams. An intuitive, user-friendly interface is crucial for ensuring user adoption and success.

Trello might appear as a collection of colorful sticky notes on a board at first glance, but it can be much more functional when needed.

Trello is a web-based application that uses the Kanban methodology for project management. It offers a visual, drag-and-drop interface where you can move cards—each representing a task or item—between lists as your project progresses.

You can organize your tasks into different lists, add notes or details to each card, assign labels to indicate status, set deadlines, and more. Moving tasks along your workflow is simple: just drag and drop the cards from one list to another, which makes managing progress straightforward and intuitive.

The overall Trello workspace is a visual Kanban-style board providing a snapshot of projects, tasks, and related data. For more comprehensive tracking, Trello Premium allows viewing timelines, assignments, and other detailed information directly from your boards.

All your boards can be managed within a Group called a Workspace, which helps organize your team, side projects, or other initiatives. To start, you create a “Board,” where you add cards organized into lists, serving as your main workspace for managing projects, tracking progress, or organizing any task or process.

You can build from scratch or choose from a wide range of community-created templates. For example, the “Remote Team Hub” template is designed specifically for remote work environments and offers ready-made structures to help manage distributed teams effectively.

The task lists and cards are already prepared for you, but you can modify and customize them to fit your specific needs.

Overall, this is a highly effective tool for tracking workflows and setting task priorities. Its user-friendly interface provides clarity and transparency, making it easy for teams to see what needs to be done, who’s responsible, and the current status of each task. The visual, card-based system simplifies understanding your project organization and team contributions. Plus, because it’s a web-based platform, everyone can access Trello from any device with an internet connection.

Monday offers a visual approach that helps team members see upcoming deadlines, ongoing tasks, and responsibilities, which reduces unnecessary meetings and enhances communication. This intuitive task management platform is both attractive and easy to use, allowing customization with various color schemes. It even enables quick status updates for deadlines, helping users stay on top of their work with minimal hassle.

A variety of onboarding guides, tutorial videos, and support articles make learning the platform straightforward. Creating new projects, tasks, or workflows takes just a few moments, and the drag-and-drop feature makes organizing and visualizing reports much easier. Each user works within a “Workspace,” which is a centralized hub to organize boards by team or project.

To get started, you need to set up a workspace, then add boards and team members. You can create a board from scratch or select from numerous templates categorized by functions such as Marketing, Content Production, or Project Management, which you can further customize to suit your needs. The platform offers a wide range of templates to streamline your setup process and tailor the workspace to your specific workflow.

Choosing a template means your dashboard is ready to go, with the entire workflow set up so you can dive in whenever you’re ready. You can also customize the template to suit your specific needs.

For instance, the “Recruitment and Onboarding” workflow template provides three pre-made boards: the Recruitment Pipeline, Employee Onboarding Checklist, and Employee Directory. These tools help streamline the hiring process, from application to onboarding, all managed from one central location. There are over 100 templates available to match different industries and organizational requirements, giving you plenty of options to find the perfect fit.

This template helps you with everything, from applying to onboarding. You can use it to manage the whole recruitment and onboarding process efficiently from a single platform. Plus, there are over 100 options available that cater to various industries and needs.

Final Verdict: Both Monday and Trello shine equally in their user interface and ease of use, thanks to their drag-and-drop functionality and attractive visual design. Trello might be slightly simpler to navigate because it doesn’t have as many layout options and features as Monday.com.

2. Project Management and Task Organization

Managing projects and tasks is essential for keeping your work organized and prioritizing responsibilities. Let’s compare how Trello and Monday perform in this area.

Trello provides a straightforward project management tool that helps improve focus, planning, and task tracking. When you first open Trello, you’ll see a blank board ready for you to add your boards, lists, and cards with a click of the + button. You can assign titles, descriptions, due dates, priorities, and attach files to each card. The system of boards and cards can replace email chains and spreadsheets, offering a flexible way to organize workflows.

Its layout consists of multiple lists, columns, and cards—each containing specific information. These elements can be combined to create a streamlined process for managing projects and tasks. Additionally, Trello offers a pre-made project management template to help you get started quickly.

Get started by adding your team members, creating tasks, and assigning them using cards within your columns, called lists. These cards serve as the main elements for tracking your projects and tasks, allowing you to perform a variety of actions for efficient management. You can organize work flow with proper hierarchy, assign labels with different colors for quick identification, and attach detailed descriptions, comments, and files to each card for clarity. If needed, set deadlines, update task statuses, and assign responsibilities to team members easily. Additional features include adding cover images, location details, checklists, and integrating third-party tools through power-ups for enhanced functionality.

The ability to add colored labels helps classify tasks conveniently. For example, a red label can indicate urgent projects. You can customize labels to suit your team’s needs, including color-blind friendly options and creating new labels with your preferred colors. Collaborating with your team becomes seamless with options to comment on cards, mention team members with @tags, and keep everyone notified through email alerts. You can enrich discussions further by adding emojis, linking to other cards or boards, or even embedding videos using Loom, which allows sharing live screen recordings or camera footage directly in comments. This speeds up communication and clarifies instructions without lengthy messages.

Automation features in Trello let you set rules to perform actions automatically, saving time. For instance, you can configure Trello to automatically add an urgent label when a task surpasses its due date or move cards to different lists based on certain triggers. This way, your workflow remains organized and responsive without constant manual updates. Overall, Trello offers a comprehensive and flexible platform to oversee all aspects of project management, keeping your team aligned and productive by providing an at-a-glance view of ongoing tasks and their statuses.

Monday is a versatile project and task management app available for both Android and iOS, making it a great choice for organizing your workflows efficiently. It promotes team engagement by providing transparency about everyone’s tasks and goals, ensuring everyone understands their roles and the purpose behind each activity. One of its main advantages is that it offers both high-level overviews of entire projects and detailed task organization, helping you keep everything structured. Similar to Trello, Monday.com provides a variety of pre-designed project templates—five in total—that cater to different needs, including managing work calendars, individual projects, complex project workflows, and request approval processes. These templates are tailored to various scenarios, such as handling incoming project requests in a centralized manner, with real-time notifications to keep your team updated on project status and sudden changes.

You can switch between different layout options based on your work style—such as Timeline view to quickly assess project timelines and durations or other views like calendar, chart, table, Kanban, workload, or Gantt charts. Multiple viewing options help you visualize your work in the way that’s most effective for your project. Moreover, you can set milestones, due dates, and labels like “Stuck” or “Working on it” to track progress easily. The platform also allows you to keep files, conversations, and updates in one place, mentioning team members to notify them directly about your progress. Additional columns, such as checkboxes, item IDs, world clocks, locations, statuses, subitems, color pickers for design systems, and time trackers, add extra functionality to your projects.

However, one downside is that its team communication features aren’t as seamless as Trello’s. Opening a new section for discussions can interrupt workflow, though you can access chat functions directly from each board. Visuals, like charts and timelines, enhance clarity, and file sharing and real-time notifications foster collaboration. Resource management tools are included to monitor project needs, and customizable widgets—like batteries, to-do lists, or quotes—can be added to personal dashboards for quick updates. For example, the battery widget helps track overall progress, making it easier to see at a glance how close your team is to completing tasks.

Overall, Monday.com is a comprehensive project management platform that suits businesses of all sizes. Its advanced capabilities are paired with a user-friendly interface, making it easy to navigate and manage complex workflows.

Final Verdict: Monday.com is an excellent choice for organizations seeking robust project management tools combined with ease of use, helping teams collaborate effectively and stay on top of their tasks.It provides a range of features including budgeting tools, time tracking capabilities, widget customization, resource management, and more.

Trello is also a straightforward and effective alternative, particularly suited for individuals or small startups.

3. Workflow Automation

Automating your workflows can significantly boost your team’s efficiency, organization, and overall performance. Both Monday and Trello support automated actions and workflows, but they have different features and approaches.

Trello:

Trello is a highly user-friendly tool for managing team workflows, covering essential aspects such as scheduling, task management, and collaboration. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface helps you visualize your tasks or projects ahead of time, allowing you to easily organize everything by moving cards into the appropriate lists.

Additionally, Trello offers an automation feature called “Trello Automation,” which reduces manual management and frees you to focus on executing tasks efficiently.

With Trello automation, you can:

– Set up rules that automatically trigger responses based on specific events, schedules, or deadlines. For example, moving a card to the “Done” list could automatically mark it as completed and remove team members from it.
– Create custom buttons to perform frequently used actions quickly.
– Generate email reports, such as weekly summaries of upcoming or overdue cards.

These automation options are simple to configure and help save time, making project management smoother.

Monday:

Monday.com provides the ability to develop multiple automated workflows across your boards and email notifications. Its standout feature is creating scenarios that automate routine tasks like data entry, scheduling reminders, or generating task lists.

If you regularly respond to clients or schedule follow-ups, Monday can automate these processes entirely. Automation categories include recurring tasks, status updates, item creation, due dates, moving items, managing subitems, and dependencies.

For example, under “Item Creation,” you can set up workflows that automatically generate new tasks based on certain triggers, and these can be added effortlessly by clicking “Add to Board,” with Monday handling the setup.

Furthermore, you can customize automation if the pre-built options don’t suit your needs, and track all automation activity to monitor project progress and team actions.

Final Verdict: Monday.com is considered superior due to its extensive library of pre-set workflows and advanced automation features.

4. Monitoring Projects and Team Activity

Trello:

Trello’s Kanban-style boards offer a clear overview of what each team member is working on. While it doesn’t include native time tracking or activity logs like Monday, you can enhance its capabilities through integrations and power-ups. These add-ons allow access to visual reports, timelines, task assignments, and data analytics. Keep in mind that many of these features are available only with Trello’s paid plans starting at $10 per month.

Monday:

Monday.com simplifies project management by breaking work into manageable steps, providing tools to track daily progress and visualize ongoing tasks. It helps you stay on top of what needs to be done and manage resources effectively, including a dedicated template for resource planning. This comprehensive approach ensures you can handle everything from personnel management to asset allocation efficiently.

Other than this, there’s also a workload view that provides a comprehensive overview of your team’s tasks and overall workload. This feature helps you understand who is working beyond their capacity and who has room for additional tasks. It allows you to allocate future work more efficiently and maintain a balanced workload across your team. This makes task management and team oversight much simpler and more effective.

You can easily identify team members who are over- or under-utilized and assign new projects accordingly. Keeping track of individual responsibilities and project progress becomes more straightforward, making it easier to manage resources and deadlines effectively.

Final verdict: Monday.com stands out due to its advanced capabilities in resource management and visual workload display, making it a top choice for project management.

Third-Party Integrations

Integrations, also known as apps, enable you to connect external tools with your project management platform. This integration allows seamless access to other apps directly within your workspace, saving time and reducing the effort needed to switch between different platforms. Many platforms, including Trello and Monday, offer extensive native integrations to enhance functionality.

Trello provides hundreds of integrations, called power-ups. These cover a wide range of applications such as reporting, time tracking, and custom fields. This flexibility makes Trello compatible with almost every tool you might use in your workflow. Popular power-ups include integration with Evernote, Confluence, Wrike, Slack, MailChimp, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Bitbucket, and more.

Monday.com also offers numerous integrations with popular tools and services. These include Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Excel, Gmail, LinkedIn, Jira, Salesforce, Zapier, Adobe Creative Cloud, and others. Setting up these integrations is straightforward, often done with a single click through Monday’s recipes, making it easy to optimize your workflow without hassle.

Additionally, Monday.com integrates with many other essential project management, CRM, marketing, and software development platforms, providing a versatile ecosystem for various business needs.

Pricing Plans Comparison

Trello offers a free basic plan along with three paid options. These paid plans unlock additional features and increased usage limits, catering to different team sizes and complexity levels. The pricing structure is designed to be flexible, allowing teams to choose the plan that best fits their needs.

In summary, both Trello and Monday.com provide extensive integration options and flexible pricing plans, making them suitable for a wide range of projects and business requirements.

Monday.com provides four subscription tiers, including a free plan that allows for unlimited boards and documents.

The available plans are:

Note that pricing increases as the number of seats increases.

As a business owner, managing your operations, clients, team, and tasks is essential. You might be evaluating whether to adopt a project management tool like Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Monday, or others.

Trello and Monday are among the top project management solutions available. They offer benefits such as goal tracking, progress monitoring, task creation, mobile compatibility, an intuitive interface, quick customization options, a free tier, and helpful resources like self-help articles and video guides to ease usage.

Choosing the right platform depends on your key needs and the size of your business.

Use Trello if you’re working as a freelancer or run a small to mid-sized company, especially if you prefer Kanban boards, color-coded labels, and an easy-to-navigate platform.

Consider Monday if you require advanced automation, need tools suitable for agile workflows, favor color-coded blocks, want resource and workload tracking, or operate a medium to large organization.

This overview wraps up the comparison between Trello and Monday.com. Which platform are you planning to use? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Further insights available on StepThroughThePortal.com include guides on whether agile project management suits your business, along with a curated list of the best agile tools for 2025. Additionally, you can explore comparisons like Asana vs Monday, ClickUp vs Monday, Trello vs Monday, and ClickUp vs Asana to find the best fit for your needs.