I come from a background working daily in JIRA. Working with automating infrastructure and Linux, JIRA was the chosen project management tool and quickly stood out as the preferred tool.

Over the years I saw it expand with new features and become bulkier. Also, as the policy was to move JIRA technology to the cloud, and the obscene number of bells and whistles, I started using Trello as a viable alternative for project and client management.

I will never forget the day I saw huge wallboard complete with PostIt notes, created by a project manager and the confounded glances from various colleagues as they gazed along a wall of PostIt notes. They needed to understand what tasks were upcoming, and their associated priorities. Yes, digital project management tooling has a place in the world of collaboration tooling, there is just no doubt at all about it.

Working in the cloud is so much easier and translates well to easier project management, with fewer dependencies on technical skills and systems inside the organization. Forget about system requirements for installing JIRA on-premise, with a backend database, the network configuration, and then the user management! Things can get overly complicated very fast, which I learned the hard way.

Enter JIRA Cloud and Trello (always was in the cloud). I had to get up and running with user stories and technical requirements as well as content management. I had to get going fast. Initially, the quickest decision route was to go for JIRA. After all, I had worked with it for years and it had done the job. But I was also aware of the growing impatience with the bulky size of JIRA, and I did not even want to open the door to unnecessary features. Trello was more of a rumor to me than a tried solution. But I decided to give it a go. Within two days I was up and running as a sole user. Within one week I had the user management set up, and the appropriate permissions for different boards.

What Trello doesn’t have

Let’s face it. JIRA and Trello are competing products to some extent. To some extent, I mean that both are used for Kanban boards and project management, and both are owned by the same company. Trello can be considered to be a lightweight version of JIRA, but they have different code bases. Also, Trello was released in 2011, whereas JIRA was released in 2002.

JIRA is more limited when it comes to the number of users. Trello on the other hand allows an unlimited number of users, but only 10 boards per team in the free version.

JIRA is not limited to Kanban though. You can choose to work according to SCRUM, with all the bells and whistles for software project management.

Trello stood out for me as a general-purpose project management tool. I simply wouldn’t choose one over the other. It depends on the situation and what it is that has to be managed.