Trello Pricing: Which Plan Is Right for You in 2021?
Trello is easy to use, flexible and lets you run any modestly sized project without spending a penny. However, its cost structure can be a bit confusing, so we decided to break it down for you with this short guide to Trello pricing.
If you’ve read our Trello review, you’ll know that it is one of the best free project management tools out there. However, it recently had a huge update that added several new features to its Business Class plan, making its paid plans a lot more attractive. We’ll go over all the main points in this short guide on Trello pricing.
Key Takeaways:
- Trello’s free plan is one of the best kanban boards out there, without a doubt. However, paying to unlock its full potential may not be the best way to go, as competitors offer more for less.
- Power-ups aren’t all free; some require separate payment, further increasing the cost of using Trello.
- Payment for the Enterprise plan is per month only, and its pricing scales with the size of your team. If your team is large enough, it even becomes cheaper per user than Business Class.
If after reading up on Trello you decide it’s not the best option for you, we recommend you check out the best project management software solution out there, monday.com. It costs about the same as Trello does, but you get a whole lot more bang for your buck, as you can read in our full monday.com review.
Trello has an excellent free plan that lets you use the kanban board to its fullest extent. However, if you want to add more functionality using integrations, you’ll need to pay for the Business Class plan.
Trello’s Business Class plan has both month-to-month and annual subscriptions, though paying monthly means it will cost you about 25 percent more than paying yearly.
It added four views to the Business Class plan — namely, a calendar, a timeline, a table and a dashboard. On top of that, there were also a number of smaller, cosmetic additions to cards, like having video previews show up on them.
In 2020, Gold went from five power-ups to three, but other than that there have been no major changes to the plan.
Trello Pricing: Plan & Cost Guide
Below is the basic breakdown of Trello’s four plans: Free, Trello Gold, Business Class and Enterprise. Underneath the main table, we’ve also added a smaller one with a sample of what pricing looks like for the Enterprise plan with teams larger than 250 people. Also, please note that you can only pay monthly for Enterprise.
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Free
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Trello Gold
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Business Class
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Enterprise
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Trello Free Plan
Of course, the main attraction of Trello is its excellent free plan, which comes with one “power-up” — Trello’s term for add-ons. We use the kanban board ourselves at Cloudwards to keep track of our editorial calendar. Plenty of other media outlets do, too, not to mention all the other companies out there that need to track tasks on a daily basis.
The reason the free plan is so popular is that, much like its competitor Asana (read our Asana vs Trello comparison), it offers a full basic suite: there’s no vital functionality missing. You’ll still need to pay for Trello to get the most out of it, but it works fine even if you never spend a penny — we haven’t.
How Much Does Trello Cost?
The most basic upgrade is Trello Gold, which is just $5 per month, but it’s only for personal boards, so freelancers and other one-man bands.
Gold gets you three power-ups and a few other goodies, but we don’t really see the utility in it. In comparison, you could sign up for Asana or TeamGantt and get the same functionality without spending a cent (read our Asana review and TeamGantt review).
Trello Business Class and Trello’s 2021 Update
The next step up in the pricing plans is Business Class, which is $9.99 per user per month and unlocks unlimited power-ups, priority support and a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s pretty much the ultimate form of Trello; the functionality that Enterprise offers is very specific to large organizations. If you want to make the most out of Trello, Business Class is the way to go.
Until February 2021, we weren’t sure whether or not Business Class was worth it: at $10 per user per month, there were other contenders out there. However, it recently added several new features to the paid plan, chief among which were four new views.
The new calendar view and timeline are pretty cool, but offer nothing that wasn’t available before as a power-up. The dashboard gives you a great overview of the status of tasks, but again didn’t blow our socks off. However, we really like the table view as it gives you a great overview of tasks, much like monday.com and Asana do. This is a real winner in our book.
Still, though, whether unlimited power-ups and an added table are worth Trello’s price tag is a tough question. Seeing what else is available, we recommend you check out Business Class using the 14-day free trial before committing to anything.
Trello Enterprise Pricing
If you’re considering going with the Enterprise plan, note that pricing can be a bit…weird. Much like with its Atlassian sibling Jira, Trello’s Enterprise pricing goes down by less than a penny for every team member above 250 (read our Jira pricing article for the details).
| Number of users: | 100-250 | 251 | 300 | 350 | 400 | 500 | 1,000 | 2,500 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price: (per user per month) | $17.50 | $17.49 | $17.08 | $16.79 | $16.56 | $16.25 | $13.13 | $9.75 |
It may be interesting to note that, at 2,265 users, the Enterprise plan is $9.98 per user per month. This means that if you have an organization of that size or even larger, Enterprise is cheaper than the Business Class plan.
Final Thoughts
Trello is one of the best kanban-based project management tools, and we love it for its strengths. However, unless you specifically need to tack on a ton of functionality to a kanban board, we wouldn’t recommend paying for Trello. It’s just not worth the price of admission, for all its utility.
What do you think of Trello and its pricing? Did we get the math right? What is your favorite project management tool? Let us know in the comments below and, as always, thank you for reading.
Fergus is the former chief editor and resident curmudgeon of CommQueR.com. Though he no longer steers the team, he's stuck around to write investigations and news stories (and to annoy newer team members with tall tales). You can contact him at fergus [at] commquer.com if you've got a hot lead; anything else will likely get ignored.