Twenty-eight percent of project managers admit they still use spreadsheets for managing projects.
While it’s clear this is inefficient and visually overwhelming, it can be tough to work out which project management tool would better suit your business.
Trello and Notion are two of the most popular tools on the market. But how do they stack up against each other? And are they even the best tools for small businesses to manage their workload?
Let’s break down the two platforms and discuss how Lark compares as an all-in-one alternative.
Trello vs. Notion in a nutshell
Trello and Notion are popular project management tools. While both tools offer a wide range of features, they cater to different needs and working styles.
Trello is ideal for users who need an intuitive platform with straightforward onboarding.
Its Kanban-style project management offers highly visual task organization with templates that suit agile teams. It offers simple workflow automation with good third-party and native integrations to increase its versatility.
But, on the flip side, it’s not particularly customizable and lacks collaboration tools.
Notion is a highly customizable, flexible project management software.
It offers a much broader range of features but has a significant learning curve.
For teams that need tailorable ways to visualize projects, Notion provides a flexible workspace to plan, organize, track, and discuss projects.
But if your team is looking for an all-in-one workspace that offers the best of both worlds, check out Lark.
Helping you organize projects and automate workflows, Lark also offers a range of communication and collaboration, document handling, and OKR features.
For teams that need intuitive, user-friendly solutions that are also flexible and comprehensive, Lark may be an excellent option.
Which has the best features?
To choose between Notion and Trello, you need to get a feel for their different features. Here’s a detailed comparison to give you a better idea of where each tool excels.
User interface
Trello has a simple Kanban board interface, using drag-and-drop functionality to simplify task organization.
It's quick to set up and straightforward to use, making it a compelling choice for teams that lack technical knowledge.
Notion is a little more complex. It’s a blank canvas, allowing you to insert different features to build your dashboard.
This customizability makes it highly flexible for more complex projects, but it means Notion’s initial learning curve is steep.
Task management features
Trello and Nation allow you to create and assign tasks with due dates. In this sense, they’re both suitable for managing individual tasks and project timelines.
Trello offers basic task prioritization, allowing you to organize tasks by category or importance. Notion offers far more sophisticated prioritization. Teams can set task status labels to prioritize using the Eisenhower Matrix or Marie Matrix.
Regarding tracking progress, Trello offers customizable checklists and automatic card movement through customizable stages. Notion’s progress tracking is more advanced, offering checklists, progress bars, and property views that help you track task status at a granular level.
When it comes to dependencies, Trello only offers basic features to show the connections between tasks. Notion provides advanced dependency management. This makes it easier to handle complex workflow organization.
Project management features
To handle project planning, Trello allows you to manually create boards and lists, offering basic customizable templates to help with this process.
Notion also offers customizable templates, timelines, and Kanban boards, which are far more detailed, with flexible features for different style projects.
When it comes to viewing projects, Trello offers multiple dashboard views, including Kanban, Timeline, Table, and Calendar. This makes it super easy to visualize projects in a way that suits each team member.
Notion has fewer traditional dashboard views because it’s designed for users to tailor their dashboard to their project needs.
It does offer Kanban, List, and Timeline views, but the visuals are mostly up to the user to create.
Collaboration features
Both platforms allow users to comment and tag other users, but this is the extent of their communication features.
Neither tool offers a built-in chat option, but Notion does provide integrations to make this possible.
In terms of document collaboration, Notion far surpasses Trello.
In Trello, users can link or add documents to task cards, whereas Notion provides powerful built-in document tools for creating, sharing, collaborating, and editing.
When it comes to reporting, both only offer limited features. Trello users have basic reporting capabilities, including chart creation and report building. Notion offers very limited reporting, but there are a few templates to help you generate reports.
Which has the best integrations?
Trello’s integrations fall into two categories. Some enhance the functionality of their Kanban boards so users can track time, attach resources, track bugs, etc. Others allow users to connect Trello with other applications so they don’t have to keep switching back and forth.
A wide library of popular integrations includes Mailchimp, WeForm, Burndown, TimeDoctor, and Freshdesk.
In addition to integrations with third-party apps, Trello also offers native integrations known as “Power-Ups.” It also connects with Zapier for more integrations.
Notion’s integrations focus on creating a more flexible workspace. Most are geared toward data management and workflow automation.
Interestingly, both tools integrate. This enables users to view Trello cards in Notion.
Remember, though, that while both tools offer a range of integrations, lots of connections can feel confusing and disjointed.
Instead, Lark acts as a super app. As an all-in-one solution for productivity, project management, and collaboration, you don’t need to switch between tools since Lark has all the features you need in one place.
Which comes out on top for pricing for businesses?
Both tools offer relatively affordable plans that scale as your needs grow.
Trello offers a comprehensive free plan with unlimited cards, power-ups, storage, and activity logs. But you're limited to 250 work commands per month, with only ten boards per workspace. You’re also restricted to Kanban View only.
Trello’s paid plans start at $5 per user per month, scaling up the features available on the free plan. The next plan costs $10 per user per month and offers enhanced views, AI features, and workspace-level templates.
Notion also offers a free basic plan. You get a collaborative workspace and integration capabilities, but guest access is limited to 10 people, and there’s only a 7-day page history.
Paid plans start at $8 a month per seat. This gives you a 30-day page history and unlimited block and file uploads.
The next plan costs $15 a month and offers better privacy, more comprehensive analytics, and up to 250 guests.
While both platforms are well-priced, no matter which you choose, you’d still have to integrate with many other tools. This requires multiple subscriptions. Lark’s pricing calculator can help you discover how much you can save by consolidating tools and using one superapp instead of multiple single-purpose apps.
Lark saves on these, offering all-in-one functionality as a superapp.
Which has the best support for businesses?
Trello has many free self-support options, including webinars, guides, a knowledge hub, and developer documentation.
Users on the free plan have community support, while the paid plans have access to phone and email support, varying hours depending on your plan level.
Notion also offers excellent self-support. There’s a blog, an academy, guides, webinars, tutorials, API docs, and a hub for knowledge.
Customer support is available to all users, but it's only email support, so some users complain that it’s a little slow.
Which one is easier for your team to get started with?
While Trello and Notion have straightforward sign-up processes, Trello is significantly quicker.
Trello is far easier to fathom when getting on board with the technology.
Its intuitive drag-and-drop functionality and Kanban boards make it easy for the average user to understand how the dashboard works.
Its core features are straightforward to understand, with lots of templates to help users arrange task boards for clear visual organization.
The Power-Ups and automation capabilities can take a little time to learn, but Trello’s support documents help.
Notion is a much more versatile tool. Unfortunately, this means it comes with a very steep learning curve.
Its advanced features and high degree of customization mean teams must decide exactly how they want their workspaces to look and build them accordingly.
This means users need to get to grips with all the available features at the very start to build a tailored dashboard that works for their needs.
What do their users say about them?
Trello users receive praise for its simplicity. They say it’s easy to use and straightforward to set up. As one user puts it:
“I taught myself Trello on a day when there was no one else on my team in the office. It was fairly straightforward to figure out with no assistance.”
Despite its ease of use, Trello users complain about its lack of communication features.
As one user notes: “I think apart from writing comments under each card, there should also be different sections where you can add private notes, ideas, etc.”
Users also say that Trello is missing a lot of key features, most notably time-tracking capabilities.
Another user says: “There is no time tracking feature implemented in Trello by default which is very crucial for Project Management. While we can implement required features using add-ons, but they cost extra to integrate which is not very ideal.”
Customer feedback for Notion highlights how good its customizability is.
As one user says: “What I like best about Notion is its flexibility and adaptability. Whether I'm organizing tasks, managing projects, or taking notes, Notion provides customizable tools and layouts that suit my specific needs.”
But the biggest problem users identify is the very steep learning curve.
As one customer states: “Yes, there was a learning curve. I kept it as is for more than a year because I felt overwhelmed.”
Users also note that Notion doesn’t feel very straightforward. Users have to put in lots of time to practice using the dashboard to understand how to show problems.
As another user puts it: “Not the most intuitive in some ways and it took a lot of practice and troubleshooting to figure out the best way to get the results I wanted.”
Where do Trello and Notion miss the mark?
Trello is super easy to use, but its simplicity can also be a drawback.
Its overly basic functionality means it doesn’t cater to complex projects. It’s missing sophisticated features that help build complex workflows, like advanced automation and task dependencies.
Beyond this, lots of users say Trello misses very important core features like time-tracking and collaboration capabilities. With no way to communicate beyond tagging and commenting, Trello isn’t suitable for working together on real-time projects.
Notion also has some drawbacks.
The steep learning curve and overly complex customizability can be off-putting to no-tech-savvy teams.
Setting up the original structure and creating templates can feel tedious and overwhelming, causing users to switch to a simpler tool.
Rather, the balance between flexibility and simplicity? Lark provides a seamless experience. You can collaborate on projects, build automated workflows, and manage all tasks in one unified workspace.
Notion vs. Trello: Which is the right PM tool for your business’s needs?
Trello’s your best bet if you’re looking for simple project and task management.
It’s ideal for teams that don’t need much in-app communication but would benefit from intuitive boards and pre-built templates that make it easy for those new to project management tools.
Notion is all about flexible project management. It offers extensive customization options, but you need to be prepared for lots of learning at the beginning.
If your team needs to collaborate on documentation, this is a far more suitable tool since you can store and work together mixed media related to all your projects.
If you feel like you’re compromising whichever tool you choose, consider Lark.
Lark combines the best of both tools.
As an all-in-one project management tool, Lark offers various project management tools to help you work on every aspect of your workflow without switching tools.
Enjoy Lark Base and Meegle for workflow automation and task management, Lark Docs and Wiki for documentation and collaboration, and Lark Messenger and Meetings for communication.
With automated in-app translation and transcription, Lark is the perfect tool for global teams to collaborate in real time with an easy-to-use interface and amazing customer support.
As one happy user puts it: “It's an integrated Google docs / Slack / Kanban and everything else replacement. The group chat features are intuitive and well-designed. I manage workstreams across xfn colleagues across English and Chinese, and the translation tools are top-notch as well. A lot of sensible design decisions and clearly empathy for use cases.”
Stop juggling. Manage every part of your project in one place.
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