Trello vs Monday: Which project management tool is right for you in 2025?

If you’re trying to get a project off the ground, the last thing you want is to be wrestling with spreadsheets and digging through endless email chains. We’ve all been there. Finding the right project management software can make all the difference, and two names you’ll see everywhere are Trello and monday.com.

At a glance, they might seem similar, but they’re built on fundamentally different philosophies. Trello is all about simplicity with its visual, card-based setup. Monday.com, on the other hand, is a powerful, all-in-one platform built for more complex workflows. This guide will give you a clear, side-by-side look to help you decide which one actually fits how your team works.

What is Trello?

Think of Trello as a digital whiteboard covered in super-powered sticky notes. It’s built entirely around the Kanban method, which is a fancy way of saying it helps you visualize your workflow. Everything is broken down into three simple parts:

• Boards: This is your entire project, like "New Website Launch."

• Lists: These are the stages within your project, like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done."

• Cards: These are the individual tasks you drag from one list to the next as you get things done.

Its drag-and-drop design makes it incredibly easy to pick up and start using in minutes. That’s why it’s so popular with individuals, freelancers, and smaller teams running straightforward projects. Trello is also part of the Atlassian family, so if you’re already using tools like Jira or Confluence, it often feels like a familiar piece of the puzzle.

What is monday.com?

If Trello is a specialized tool, monday.com is more like a giant, customizable toolbox. It calls itself a "Work OS" (Work Operating System), which sounds a bit corporate, but it gets the idea across. It’s designed to be a central place where you can build and manage just about any kind of workflow you can dream up, from multi-stage projects to sales pipelines and content calendars.

While it has a Kanban view, its real strength is its flexibility. You can build custom dashboards, track budgets, manage team resources, and set up some pretty complex automations. This makes it a solid choice for larger teams and businesses that need one platform to handle a lot of different, complicated work. Of course, all that power means it takes a bit more time to learn compared to Trello’s jump-right-in approach.

Trello vs Monday: Core features and functionality

While both tools help you manage work, how they do it is night and day. Their approaches to visualizing projects and handling tasks show you exactly what each platform values most: simplicity versus flexibility.

Trello vs Monday: Project views and visualization

• Trello: At its core, Trello is a Kanban board. That’s what it does best, giving you a clean, simple view of your workflow. While its paid plans do unlock other views like a calendar, timeline, or table, they can sometimes feel a bit tacked on rather than being a core part of the experience. For teams that live and breathe the Kanban method, Trello’s laser focus is a huge plus.

• monday.com: This is where Monday really pulls ahead. It offers a whole suite of views right out of the box, including Kanban boards, Gantt charts, calendars, timelines, and even workload views to see who’s swamped. This makes it incredibly versatile. Your marketing team might live in the calendar view for their content schedule, while the engineering team uses a Gantt chart to manage dependencies. Having that kind of built-in flexibility is a big deal for companies with different teams doing different kinds of work.

Trello vs Monday: Task management and customization

• Trello: Trello keeps task management pretty simple. Each card can hold descriptions, attachments, checklists, and due dates. It’s clean and gets the job done for most standard tasks. If you need a bit more firepower, paid plans let you add Custom Fields (like priority levels or budget codes) and Advanced Checklists, where you can assign people and due dates to individual sub-tasks. The customization is there, but it all works within Trello’s straightforward framework.

• monday.com: Customization is the name of the game here. Instead of a handful of custom fields, Monday lets you build out your tasks with dozens of different "column" types, like status trackers, number fields, formulas, and even a built-in time tracker. It also supports sub-items, which are much more robust than Trello’s checklists for breaking down big, chunky tasks into smaller pieces. It definitely takes more effort to set up, but the trade-off is that you can build a workflow that perfectly matches your team’s unique process.

Trello vs Monday: Collaboration and automation

Getting work done is more than just moving tasks around. It’s about how your team talks to each other and how you can get rid of all the tedious, repetitive stuff. Here’s a look at how Trello and Monday handle the human and the robotic sides of project management.

Trello vs Monday: Team collaboration and communication

• Trello: In Trello, collaboration happens right on the cards. You can leave comments, @mention teammates to pull them into a conversation, and see a running log of every change that’s been made. It’s fantastic for keeping discussions tied to specific tasks, but it doesn’t offer much for broader team chats or working on documents together.

• monday.com: Like Trello, Monday has a commenting system for task-level updates. But it takes things a bit further by including built-in real-time documents (they call them Workdocs) and digital whiteboards for brainstorming. This means your team can plan a project, draft the brief, and discuss it all without having to jump over to other tools like Google Docs or Miro.

Trello vs Monday: Workflow automation capabilities

• Trello: Trello’s automation feature is called "Butler." It’s a simple, no-code tool that lets you create rules to handle repetitive actions. For example, you can set a rule that when a card is moved to the "Done" list, Butler automatically checks off the due date and archives the card. It’s great for keeping your board tidy, but your automations are limited by the number of "command runs" you get each month, which depends on your plan.

• monday.com: Monday also has an easy-to-use automation builder that works with "recipes", simple if-then statements like, "If a task’s status changes to ‘Approved,’ then notify the project manager." Its automations feel a bit more deeply woven into the platform and can connect with other tools more easily. For instance, you could set up an automation to create a new task in Monday whenever a specific email arrives in your Gmail. Just like Trello, these are limited by the number of "actions" your plan allows each month.

Trello vs Monday: Pricing and plans compared

Let’s be honest, pricing is often the final hurdle, especially for growing teams where every penny counts. Trello and Monday approach pricing very differently, and what looks cheaper at first glance might not be, depending on your team’s size and needs.

Trello pricing

Trello is well-known for its generous free plan, which is often more than enough for individuals and small teams.

monday.com pricing

Monday’s free plan is quite limited, which usually nudges most teams toward a paid plan. The most important thing to know is that all paid plans require a minimum of 3 seats, which can make it a pricier option for very small teams.

Beyond project boards: Where Trello and Monday fall short

Here’s the thing with any project management tool, whether it’s Trello or Monday: they’re great for tracking what’s happening right now. But what about the "why" behind a decision made six months ago? All those important conversations, documents, and bits of context get buried in completed cards and archived boards. When someone new joins the team or you need to find an old answer, you end up either digging through a digital graveyard or bugging a colleague.

Project management tools track what you do, but they aren’t built to organize what you know. This is where you might need something more. Instead of forcing you to move everything to yet another system, a tool like eesel AI works with the platforms you’re already using.

eesel AI’s AI Internal Chat plugs directly into your company’s knowledge sources, whether that’s Confluence, Google Docs, or even past support tickets. It gives your team instant, accurate answers right inside Slack or Microsoft Teams. It essentially becomes an expert on your company’s work, making all that valuable info from past projects easy to find. Best of all, it can be up and running in minutes, not months, helping you make your project data truly useful without a massive setup process.

This image shows eesel AI providing instant answers to company questions directly within Slack.

Trello vs Monday: Making the right choice for your team

So, after all that, which tool should you go with? The best choice really comes down to your team’s size, the complexity of your work, and what you value most.

Choose Trello if: You’re an individual or a small team that just wants to get organized without a lot of fuss. If you love the Kanban method and need a straightforward, visual way to manage tasks with a top-notch free plan, Trello is tough to beat.

Choose monday.com if: You’re a growing or larger team juggling complex projects with lots of moving parts. If you need serious customization, multiple ways to view your projects, and advanced collaboration features all under one roof, Monday is the more powerful and scalable option.

This video provides a head-to-head comparison of Trello vs Monday to help you decide which is the better project management tool for your needs.

But remember, just managing your tasks is only half the job. To really help your team grow, you also need to manage the knowledge you create along the way. A well-organized project board keeps you on track today, but a smart, accessible knowledge base ensures your team gets smarter tomorrow.

Get your workflows in order with Trello or Monday, but give your team’s collective brain a boost with AI. See how eesel AI can connect your company’s intelligence and automate support, getting you started in just a few minutes.