ClickUp vs. Trello: Which Project Management Tool Fits Your Workflow?

Ever wondered why your team still misses deadlines, even when the process looks solid on paper?

In many cases, the work is scattered. Tasks sit in spreadsheets. Updates end up buried in long email threads. Files are spread across different drives. Conversations disappear in long chat threads.

Your team isn’t slow. They’re just switching context so often that it exhausts them.

A good project management tool is designed to fix this. It gives you one central system where work, updates, files, and conversations live together.

That’s exactly why teams move from scattered tools to a Converged AI Workspace — because Work Sprawl isn’t just annoying, it’s the reason deadlines slip even when the process looks solid.

If you’re choosing between ClickUp and Trello, this guide will help you pick the right fit.

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ClickUp vs. Trello Comparison Table

Here’s a side-by-side view of how ClickUp and Trello differ in the areas most teams care about.

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What is ClickUp?

ClickUp is the everything app for work—combining projects, tasks, docs, chat, automation, and AI in one platform. Instead of jumping between tools, teams can plan, track, collaborate, and document work in a single connected workspace.

It adapts to your workflow, whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise with complex approvals.

With ClickUp, teams can manage tasks, create documentation, automate workflows, and track projects. ClickUp Brain adds AI summaries, insights, and suggested next steps on top of all that.

ClickUp features

ClickUp offers a robust, scalable feature set. It supports both simple task management and complex project execution.

Feature #1 Project and task management

ClickUp’s Project Management Solution gives you complete visibility. You can view both high-level project health and the details of the smallest tasks. You can break work into tasks, subtasks, and checklists. You can track dependencies, set milestones, and see everything update instantly across your workspace.

Here’s how these features work together:

• Customizable Dashboards for live project health and team capacity
• 15+ project views, including List, Board, Gantt, and Calendar
• Rich task communication with comments, Docs, links, and attachments
• Dependencies and milestones to keep work in the right order
• Custom Fields to track budgets, clients, priorities, or anything your workflow needs

With ClickUp Tasks, even the smallest action becomes part of a structured project system. It connects goals, deadlines, documentation, and team communication in one place. This also gives ClickUp Brain the context it needs to answer questions and generate summaries.

Here’s how ClickUp’s project management features come together:

• Dashboard customization: Build real-time views of project health, team capacity, budget status, and timeline progress using 50+ customizable dashboard widgets
• Multiple views: Switch between different ClickUp Views like List, Board, Gantt, and Calendar to manage work the way your team prefers
• Integrated communication: Keep everything in one place by linking tasks to ClickUp Docs, commenting directly within tasks, and embedding updates inside the work
• Task dependencies and milestones: Use ClickUp Dependencies to define task relationships like “finish-to-start” and set key milestones to structure execution in the right order
• Centralized hub of information: Add Custom Fields to any task and track tasks, files, deadlines, or resources—so teams always know where to find what they need, and ClickUp Brain can pull richer, more precise answers

Feature #2 ClickUp Automations

With ClickUp Automations, you can automate repetitive tasks, such as assigning work, updating statuses, or sending reminders—and let AI handle the busywork your team usually does by hand. You can also build advanced workflows with layered conditions and even connect actions across different projects. 

Example: When a “Design Needed” task is marked complete, ClickUp can automatically create a new task for the design team, assign it, set a due date, and notify the project lead.

You can extend these automations to tools like Slack, Email, and Dropbox, and choose from 100+ pre-built templates to set them up quickly.

With ClickUp Brain, the built-in AI assistant, you can generate summaries of projects and conversations, get real-time project updates, and ask natural-language questions about your work.

All this happens inside your ClickUp workspace. The AI is always context-aware and uses your tasks, Docs, and conversations as its source, not random web data.

ClickUp Brain MAX helps teams move faster by letting you dictate ideas, notes, or action items and turn them into structured tasks or Docs automatically. Instead of losing decisions in meetings or chat threads, Talk to Text captures context the moment it’s spoken and places it right inside your workflow. It’s the quickest way to keep projects moving without manual retyping or scattered notes.

ClickUp Agents take automation a step further. They act like always-on teammates who follow your workflows, monitor project changes, and nudge work forward without waiting for manual updates. They watch for stalled tasks, surface blockers, share progress snapshots, and trigger next steps automatically. It’s proactive project coordination that never drops the ball.

Feature #3 ClickUp Board View

ClickUp’s Kanban Board gives project managers control and visibility over their workflows. When paired with AI, it becomes a live, self-updating snapshot of progress.

You can drag and drop tasks to update status or priority. You can see progress at a glance and organize work however your team needs. You can use Custom Fields, colors, or nested subtasks, depending on what makes the work easiest to see.

For a project manager, this means fewer manual updates, clearer priorities, AI summaries of changes, and easier tracking of who is doing what.

ClickUp’s Boards stand out from basic Kanban tools because of extra features that make complex projects easier to manage, such as:

• Board grouping flexibility: Group tasks not just by status, but by assignee, priority, due date, tags, sprint points, or any custom field
• One-stop access to task details: Every card on the board is a full ClickUp Task. You can open it to see and edit subtasks, comments, docs, checklists, attachments, and time tracking without leaving the board
• Work-in-progress limits: Set column limits to prevent overload. This helps teams manage capacity and avoid missed deadlines
• Real-time collaboration: Boards update as soon as teammates make changes. You can comment, assign, or update tasks without refreshing or switching views

ClickUp pricing

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What is Trello?

Trello, now part of Atlassian, is a simple Kanban-style tool for visual task tracking. Boards, Lists, and Cards form the core of the system. This makes it easy for individuals and small teams to organize work without much setup or training.

It is intuitive, lightweight, and fast to adopt, but it prioritizes simplicity over depth.

Trello features

Trello is a simple project management tool for teams that want to manage multiple projects with minimal setup. It has an easy learning curve, so even new users can get started in minutes.

Here are some key features you should consider while choosing between ClickUp and Trello:

Feature #1 Butler Automation

Trello’s Butler automation lets you create rules, buttons, and scheduled commands to automate routine actions within your boards.

With Butler, you can trigger automations when:

• A card is moved to a specific list
• A due date is approaching or has passed
• A label is added or removed
• A card is created, or a checklist is marked complete

Butler also integrates with tools like Slack, Jira, and email, making it useful for simple automation chains.

Butler works best for lightweight workflows, especially inside a single board.

Feature #2 Trello Inbox

Trello Inbox acts as a central space to capture tasks, notes, and ideas from your email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. Or you can simply jot down an idea as it comes without any setup.

You can gather rough thoughts in the Inbox and organize them later by dragging each item into the right board or list. It’s a practical tool for fast-moving teams that need a quick way to capture work without disrupting their flow.

For smaller to-dos, Inbox lets you mark tasks as “Done” directly, so smaller actions don’t pile up unnecessarily.

Inbox is a handy capture tool for teams who prefer a simple, low-setup workflow.

Feature #3 Planner

Connect your Google or Microsoft calendar with Trello Planner to easily plan your day. Just drag and drop tasks from your Trello Inbox or boards onto your Planner. Capture and organize your plans, whether you’re at your desk or on the go. Now block your focus time and meet deadlines as a project manager. 

Planner is best suited for personal scheduling or straightforward timelines.

Trello pricing

• Free
• Standard: $6/month per user
• Premium: $12.50/month per user
• Enterprise: $17.50/month per user (billed annually)

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ClickUp vs. Trello: Features Compared 

Both ClickUp and Trello are project management software that help you plan projects, manage tasks, and collaborate with your team. And while there are many similarities in their core functionality, they’re built with different priorities in mind.

Let’s take a closer look at how they differ, beyond the usual “Trello is simple” and “ClickUp does more,” by comparing the features at a granular level. 

Task management

ClickUp operates under the hierarchical order of Workspace → Space → Folders → Lists → Tasks → Subtasks → Checklists.

In ClickUp, you can break down complex deliverables into subtasks and nested checklists. You can set dependencies to define task order. You can also apply Custom Fields to track details like budgets or client names. ClickUp also offers pre-built task templates, which help you scale repeatable workflows.

Trello, on the other hand, follows a much simpler structure: Boards → Lists → Cards → Checklists.

Each Trello card functions as a task. You can add descriptions, checklists, due dates, attachments, and comments. This simplicity works well for basic workflows. But you cannot build dependencies or add Custom Fields without Power-Ups. Trello also has no native support for time estimates on complex projects.

Project views and flexibility

In ClickUp, you can visualize your projects in over 15 views and switch between them to access both high-level and granular views. This flexibility allows you to manage daily tasks and long-term planning in one place. 

However, Trello offers only the Kanban Board view as its core feature. While you can add a Calendar, Timeline, Table, or Dashboard view, most of these require Power-Ups, and only one Power-Up is allowed on the free plan. Besides, view switching in Trello isn’t as seamless as Power-Up works, as it operates as a separate layer.

Team collaboration

Team collaboration is deeply integrated into ClickUp. You can co-edit Docs in real time, brainstorm on ClickUp Whiteboards, assign comments to teammates, and let ClickUp Brain capture meeting decisions and convert them into actionable tasks automatically.

ClickUp Calendar, its native scheduling tool, adds another layer of coordination. Much like Google Calendar or Outlook, it helps you manage meetings and events, but with the added benefit of being integrated within your task management ecosystem. You can create, organize, and search Docs, wikis, and tasks all in one place.

Trello, on the other hand, offers collaboration through card-level comments, mentions, checklists, and attachments, making it easy to track activity on each task. However, it lacks built-in chat and real-time document editing, relying instead on external tools and integrations for deeper teamwork.

Help and support

ClickUp offers a wide range of support options. This includes 24/7 live chat for all users (yes, even free ones), an in-depth Help Center, guided in-app walkthroughs, webinars, and ClickUp University, offering free training videos. 

Enterprise and Business plans have dedicated customer success managers.  

Trello, however, provides a searchable Help Center, community forums, and a ticket-based support system. Live support is available only to users of Premium and Enterprise plans.

Reporting and analytics

ClickUp offers advanced reporting and analytics through customizable Dashboards, with ClickUp Brain generating plain-English summaries on top of the numbers. You can track progress, team workload, task status, time, budgets, etc. With 50+ widgets, you can create detailed, real-time visual reports by filtering data across Spaces, Lists, and Custom Fields.

Trello, on the other hand, has limited built-in reporting. To access analytics features such as time tracking or workload insights, you’ll need to rely on Power-Ups or third-party tools, which often require additional setup or paid plans.

Artificial Intelligence

ClickUp Brain is ClickUp’s built-in AI suite that connects tasks, Docs, people, and workspace knowledge into a single reasoning layer, helping you work smarter across the entire platform. It can summarize comment threads, generate or edit Docs, extract action items, create tasks, and answer questions about your internal projects or Docs, using your workspace content as its source of truth.

Trello, on the other hand, offers AI features through Atlassian Intelligence, which is still evolving. It provides smart suggestions, summaries, and automated insights across Atlassian tools, including Trello—but it’s currently more generic and offers fewer deep, task-specific, and workflow-aware capabilities than ClickUp Brain.

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ClickUp vs. Trello on Reddit

To conclude the debate, we took it to Reddit. While there are no specific threads, here are some user opinions on both tools. 

According to one ClickUp user, Trello would be a more fitting choice for managing personal tasks.

However, if native integrations are an essential tool to you, this user who made a shift from Trello to ClickUp is someone you could listen to.

In terms of scalability, ClickUp appears to be a better alternative to Trello, according to this comment by a Reddit user.

The main theme across Reddit is clear: Trello works well until your work starts to scale. ClickUp is built for what happens after that.

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Which Project Management tool reigns supreme?

Final verdict: ClickUp wins 🏆

Trello is excellent for simple, personal, or lightweight team workflows. But when your projects grow—or your team does—you quickly hit its limits.

ClickUp gives you everything Trello offers, plus the depth, automation, reporting, AI, and scalability modern teams need.
It’s built for teams who want to move faster, collaborate smarter, and manage projects without duct-taping tools together.

Try ClickUp for free and experience what it’s like to manage tasks, docs, and collaboration in a single workspace.

Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.

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