Why Trello is better than Monday.com
I couldn't build my perfect system for ad requests in Monday, but I could in Trello. Here's a use case review if you're trying to decide what project management tool to use.
We all know I’m a big Trello fan, so having me use Monday.com at work was something I set a VERY low bar for expectations. I couldn’t get my company to use Trello, and we really needed some tool to help us get on the same page, so I said, fine, I’ll work with whatever.
I have regrets.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a team player. But when I was tasked with building an ad request workflow, complete with QA checklists, filtering, and automation, I couldn’t do it just the way I wanted in Monday. But I knew exactly how I’d do it in Trello.
So for anyone else out there trying to decide between Monday and Trello, I’m giving a review here of a major use case for the platforms (handling tasks and requests), and discussing different features and how they perform against my requirements.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Add new requests easily
I’ll give Monday some points for their out-of-the-box form-to-card setup. You can just create a form for your stakeholders/requesters to fill out, then Monday creates a new item on your board filled with the information submitted in the form. This is nice, but Trello definitely has some easy ways to deal with this, as well.
1) Simplest for the user: Create a Typeform or Google Form and then connect it to your board.
2) Preferred option: Have requesters come to your Trello board, click a “new request” button (created as a Butler Board Button… say that five times fast), and then fill out the templated card that pops up.
The preferred option isn’t too difficult to set up. All you have to do is go to Butler —> Board Button, and then create a rule.
I also recommend employing the Custom Fields Power-Up where you can easily create additional fields for your Trello cards. The specific fields you use will vary depending on your requests and your needs. I tried to keep everything specific enough to move through a nice workflow, but generic enough that it could apply to multiple use cases.
Here’s an example of what a card would look like filled out.
Notice - in earlier versions, I actually included more details in my template card so people would understand how to fill out the template - hence the 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 instructions you see above. This didn’t always work, and unfortunately, no matter what tool you use, you’re going to have to deal with some user error and people who just can’t follow rules.
Voila. Each incoming request is one card and has all the information I need to get set up.
Credit where credit is due… Monday is a little simpler with this and allows for some idiot-proofing by creating a super simple form that creates that card.
Note: you can definitely re-create this functionality by setting up a Google Form or Typeform and having that info dropped into Trello through the Typeform Power-Up or Zapier.
Platform assessment
Trello: ✅ Bit of a learning curve with new users who feel overwhelmed with tools, but easily surmountable with a templated card and/or hooking up a simple form.
Monday: 🏆 ✅ I’ll give a slightly higher score to Monday, ONLY for the fact this simple, idiot-proof form is out of the box, doesn’t require people to have a Monday login to use, and doesn’t let them screw too much up.
High-level view with ability to dive into details
I manage a lot of campaign requests and needed something to quickly show me what stages these campaigns were in, what was needed next, and any action items associated with them, while also giving me the ability to quickly navigate into the weeds when I need to see specific details about a task or campaign.
Obviously, both tools are built on the premise of being able to do this, with having “cards” (Trello terminology) or “items” (Monday terminology) that hold all the details of a task/project, and having a board that summarizes that view.
In my opinion, although both tools “work” for this, Trello does it better. 😁
First of all, creating your birds-eye view in Trello requires creating a new board, and typing text for your lists.
Creating a birds-eye / Kanban style view in Monday requires you to create an item, customize options for the status field (and adding that if you didn’t happen to select a board where it’s the default), and then click “Add View” and select “Kanban”. You then have to drag the “lists” around in the order you want. Not the worst experience, but definitely not as simple as typing list names.
While Monday has a Kanban view you can add that lets you sort your cards in a list-style view similar to Trello, it feels like a little more work to dive into all the details.
It’s not terribly different, but I hate that I have to click another button to see comments, whereas in Trello, I can just scroll down.
Side note… I REALLY am not impressed with Monday’s commenting/updates section. It’s confusing. Do I add a new comment? Do I reply to a current one? Why are updates and files stored in different sections, and what the heck are an infobox and an item card? I feel like they made this needlessly complicated. And at first, I thought I might give it extra points for the formatting options, but I’ve actually grown quite accustomed to the clean view of Trello’s markdown formatting.
Platform assessment
Trello: 🏆 ✅ Quickly set up board by titling list name, add cards and click into one to see all the details you could need to see about that card.
Monday: 🤷♀️ I’ll just call this meh. It’s not horrible, doesn’t make me cry myself to sleep. But it also isn’t the simplest setup, and the details in the items are somewhat repetitive in some instances, and also more complicated than they should be.
Implementing Automation For Quality Assurance
A critical piece for me was implementing a workflow for quality assurance. We were having some issues with things falling through the crack, and can you blame me? It’s difficult to remember the right size for ad creative, checking URL parameters, ensuring other team members have signed off on aspects.
Maybe your workflow doesn’t look quite like mine, but chances are you still have certain things that need to be accomplished at each stage. Thanks to checklists and Butler automation, it’s super easy in Trello. However, it’s MOST frustrating on Monday and this disappointed me greatly.
I spend a lot of time on this section because it was so important to me, and I think it’s something that really separates the two tools for me, so if you don’t care about this keep scrolling.
Trello cards include “checklists”, which you can think of as handy little subtasks or tasks within a task. You can have multiple checklists on a card. It’s extremely satisfying to check off everything in a checklist because your checklist does a fun little wiggle. (Note: this is just a simple checklist, if you’re using Trello Business Class you can create advanced checklists that and assign due dates and members to each item. IMO, I find this to generally make a card more complicated than it needs to be, but I know this works and is preferred for a lot of people.)
But it doesn’t stop here… using Butler, I can easily create rules that automatically add a checklist to a card when it moves to a certain list, or has a certain label applied.
I could then create a checklist for my requester when it moves into Requested, so as soon as they request an ad, they can make sure they’ve performed the appropriate tasks. They can go to the card and check each item off as it’s completed. Once everything is checked off, I can make a Butler rule to move the card to “Ready for Launch” and add my launch checklist to the card. I could even make it send me an email letting me know that ad is ready for launch and here’s my checklist.
This is precisely what I want to occur!
With Monday, you also have access to automation features, so I can replicate SOME of these things, but none of them in exactly the way I want.
First of all, Monday doesn’t exactly have item checklists like Trello. Instead it has two other (subpar) options: Subitems or Update comments that you can add checkboxes list types into.
Subitems are kinda icky in my opinion. They are basically additional items that are indented below the “parent” item. They take up a lot of screen real estate, as they’re basically additional items/rows.
If you want to collapse them, it’s kinda tricky. You’d think you can click that little blue circle with arrows right? No, that gives you options to sort them alphabetically. (I… guess that’s cool and totally necessary?)
Here’s how you expand/collapse.
You’re probably like, “Ah that’s a pain, but there’s definitely a keyboard shortcut for that, right? Or at least a single click that opens or closes all the subitems for ALL the items on a board, right?” Nope. Not that I have seen, and not according to this article in the Monday community.
So I tend to prefer the second alternative, which is update notes with the checkbox list type formatting. They’re not completely horrible.
You just add an update, which is basically a comment, and one of the ways to format includes little circles that when you click it crosses them out.
You can make that update, and pin it to the top, so your checklist is always handy.
You can even see progress on that checklist in the main title of the item.
So, now I just need to automate it right?
Monday’s automation are a bit more more visual than Trello’s, so you can give it a point there. But otherwise the functionality is pretty poor. Especially for what I want to accomplish.
First of all, you can trigger an update to be added to an item when it moves to another status, but you can’t easily format the update to include the checklist items! (Apparently there’s a workaround grabbing HTML code, and it’s not too bad if you’re not scared of code so I’m actually going to be using this when I have to use Monday.)
Even then, you can’t automatically pin that update to the top, and I don’t see any automation options for updating anyone or moving to a new status when the checklist is complete! Aside from that, once the automation has posted the update, you can’t edit it. Which makes it difficult if you need to customize anything on the checklist.
Platform assessment
Trello: 🏆🏆🏆 ✅ I can’t decide if Monday is severely deficient here or if Trello just goes above and beyond with automation and sub task organization. But in any case, Trello is the C L E A R winner here. The way to create and organize subtasks is super simple, easy to view without being cluttered, and automating the creation of these checklists takes seconds, along with moving the card to a new stage once the checklist is completed.
Monday: 🛑 😭 This is just more complicated than it needs to be, and still doesn’t work quite the way I’d prefer. The subitems aren’t the easiest experience to navigate, and while the Checkbox list type in Updates works, automation with them is quite clunky.
Creating views and filtering
When you have a board with a million different people in every day, you’re quickly going to have a lot of information, and it’s going to be a mess for any stakeholders who are coming in to look at. In fact, it may even be too overwhelming for you. It’s important to have a tool that will let you organize your views so you can find what you’re looking for, and no more (and no less).
Monday lets you create multiple views, which is pretty nice. You can easily have a Kanban view, you can create views that only show certain items (including some and/or logic). You can make timeline views. You can even hide certain columns so viewers on those tabs aren’t overwhelmed with info, and you can link to certain tabs so people can go straight to them rather than try to apply filters and navigate the chaos you just created.
Great job, Monday!
Trello isn’t too shabby here either, and they’ve just added some new views you can use in Business Class that make it even better.
First of all, you can use the “Search” settings (shortcut is command/ctrl + F) and view only the labels, members, or due dates you care about.
If you’re using Business Class, you have some more options.
You can view by calendar, timeline, or on a map (if you have location info on your cards). You can also go to a table view of your cards with options for filtering, similar to setting up filters on Monday boards.
I don’t believe there’s an “OR” option on these filters, whereas on Monday you can add multiple types and create AND/OR logic on if contents must contain one or all of those requirements. As far as I know, that’s not an option in Trello, but in general I prefer organizing cards with lists and labels so that I can easily filter and sort by what I’m looking for, so this isn’t usually an issue for me.
Platform assessment
Trello: ✅ Both are great, I’m not sure there’s really a winner here unless you need some super advanced filtering, but if you just want to be able to see the info that is most relevant to you, Trello is a keyboard shortcut away from that.
Monday: ✅ Same as Trello, fairly easily to set up and has a lot of views of options available so you can display as needed.
Organizing data and reporting
Here’s the problem… neither tool is FANTASTIC at data and reporting, but guess what. It’s not a spreadsheet. Excel is horrible at helping me keep track of projects. We all have our strengths. I will say, that each tool has some interesting ways of keeping track of numbers and data and letting you “report” and showcase what’s working.
In Monday, you can create columns of numbers, and you can even create a column that has a “formula” field, so it returns a number (or statement) based on other columns/fields.
I’ve actually been using this in Monday at work to calculate CPA for an ad because I’ll manually input a number for the Spend column and another number for the Responses column, then the formula field takes Spend / Responses to calculate the CPA. It will also perform functions on these number columns, like summing or averaging. Kinda cool, but it feels much cleaner in a spreadsheet.
Likewise, Trello has the Custom Fields Power-Up that lets you add a field to a card (kinda like columns in Monday). You can customize these to be number fields, and input numbers you want. Using the Number Stats Power-Up, you can see the aggregation of these numbers across the entire board.
You can also create formulas in fields too, but it requires adding a premium/paid power-up called Smart Fields Power-Up. It’s $5 a month at the time of this writing, and $50 a year, then $12 for additional boards. If you see yourself using this frequently and on several boards, it could get costly. But… if you see yourself using this frequently, I think you might want to considering move that piece of your workflow to a spreadsheet. Fo free.
As far as dashboarding reports, both tools have options for this, and I’ll the first to admit it’s not something I’ve needed to use, and for my current use case it’s not something I’m expecting too much out of.
I will say that Monday’s dashboards seem to require some configuration, but seems pretty customizable, while Trello’s are ready to go out of the box, but don’t offer a million options for customizing. That being said, there’s a whole market of Power-Ups that offer reporting and dashboarding features, so if you’re looking for something specific, there’s a good chance you’ll find it (or someone will create it soon).
Again, I don’t use this often so it’s not really a deal breaker for me, but I could imagine getting more interested in the future.
Platform assessment
Trello: 🏆 ✅ Best of both world here. Out of the box, simple reporting, and if you need something more advanced, you might have to dig but you can probably find a power-up for it.
Monday: ✅ Requires some configuration, but seems very customizable.
In Summary
Okay, I’m going to stop this now as I feel like this covers a lot and is getting quite wordy, but I hope you found it helpful.
To put my thoughts in a single paragraph… I find Trello to be a fairly superior tool, just because it’s more flexible and easier to get up and running with, while also giving you the features that you’ll want as you scale and start diving in deeper. Monday might look a lot flashier but they’re kinda all bark and no bite with their features. Their product team seems to have overprioritized useless features and overcomplicated or ignored the basics ones.
If you made it this far, dang. Congrats 🎉 Hope you feel ready to make a choice if you’re evaluating project management platforms!
What do you think? Was this helpful? Happy to do this for other platforms, like Clickup vs Trello, Asana vs Trello, etc if people find this format helpful for comparison!