Smartsheet vs Trello

2021. Trello is redesigning its project management platform for a remote work future



Productivity app Trello, a virtual whiteboard-style platform for organizing and managing projects, is announcing a major redesign today in addition to new features for helping businesses manage third-party integrations. The platform is getting a visual overhaul, both to its logo and the illustrations it deploys across its website and apps. It’s also getting multiple new ways to both customize cards and view your workload beyond the core whiteboard column view. The new cards include both mirror cards and link cards, which the company hopes will make it easier to manage other apps and services from within Trello. Trello is also introducing five new board views that deviate from the standard column layout the platform helped popularize.


2019. Smartsheet acquires Slope to help creatives collaborate



Smartsheet, the project management and collaboration tool has acquired Slope - collaboration tool designed for sharing creative assets. Bringing Slope into the fold will enable Smartsheet users to share assets like video and photos natively inside the application, and also brings the ability to annotate, comment or approve these assets. Smartsheet sees this native integration through a broad enterprise lens. It might be HR sharing training videos, marketing sharing product photos or construction company employees inspecting a site and sharing photos of a code violation, complete with annotations to point out the problem.


2018. Trello acquired business process automation tool Butler



Trello, the collaboration tool owned by Atlassian, announced an acquisition of light-weight business process automation tool Butler. What Butler brings to Trello is the power of automation, stringing together a bunch of commands to make something complex happen automatically. Over the years, teams have discovered that by automating processes on Trello boards with the Butler Power-Up, they could spend more time on important tasks and be more productive. Butler helps teams codify business rules and processes, taking something that might take ten steps to accomplish and automating it into one click. This means that Trello can be more than a static organizational tool. Instead, it can move into the realm of light-weight business process automation.


2018. Smartsheet got $1.9 billion valuation after IPO



Online project management and crowdsourcing company Smartsheet saw its share prices pop as they made their debuts on to the public markets. Smartsheet closed at $19.50, up 30 percent from its initial price of $15 and giving it a market cap of $1.9 billion. The company is coming to the market with net losses on its balance sheets, but evidence of strong revenue growth. Smartsheet reported a strong 3.6 million users in its IPO filings, with business customers including Cisco and Starbucks. The company brought in $111.3 million in revenue for its fiscal 2018 year, but as with many SaaS companies, it’s going public with a loss.


2018. Trello gets a newsfeed and improved notifications



Project management service Trello (owned by Atlassian), is getting a revamp. Trello is known for its cards and boards — and nothing else. But that also meant that power users often had to wade through a number of boards to figure out what they should focus on next. Now, Trello is getting a personalized newsfeed that will highlight activity from your Trello teams. The newsfeed will include sections like “Up Next” and “Highlights” to give you a better overview of what’s happening inside your projects.  Also new in Trello are improved notifications. You’ll now be able to change due dates and stop notifications from any given card right from the notifications. In addition, you can also mark alerts are “read” or “unread.”


2017. Trello comes to the desktop, gets Stride integration



Popular project management tool Trello (which was recently acquired by Atlassian) launched desktop apps for Mac and Windows. Until now, Trello only lived in the browser. Now, Trello users will get all of the usual features they know from the browser, with the added ability to get native desktop notifications and add cards from anywhere thanks to support for plenty of keyboard shortcuts, for example — and you can do all of that without being tempted to surf over to Facebook when you’re done. If you’re using an Apple laptop with the Touch Bar, then will also be able to use that to create new cards and open boards in a new window with just a tap. Given that Atlassian launched its Stride Slack-competitor last week, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Trello is getting some integrations with Stride now, too. Specifically, this means that you can now start Stride audio and video conferences right from within Trello so you can instantly start a conference call with all Trello board members without having to shift between different applications.


2017. Collaboration service Smartsheet gets $52M



Smartsheet, the service providing spreadsheet software that lets people set and manage tasks and work across teams of people, has picked up $52 million. The company currently has about 70,000 businesses paying to use the product, ranging from SMBs through to large enterprises. This works out to around 550,000 licensed customers, and “a few million” people who use it free of charge. Smartsheet was an early mover in that space, opening up for business in 2006 as an alternative to Google Docs, Excel and other spreadsheet packages on the market, with a firm focus on offering a way for multiple people to collaborate in those documents to use them more dynamically.


2017. Atlassian acquired Trello



Atlassian has acquired project management service Trello for $425 million. Just like with many of Atlassian’s other acquisitions, the company plans to keep both the Trello service and brand alive and current users shouldn’t see any immediate changes. With Trello, Atlassian is acquiring one of the fastest growing project management services. It now has about 19 million users. Trello brings more productivity to individual and team projects. It shows all of the projects from the entire team in a single glance. Assigning projects is easy, just put them in the assigned person’s or team’s list and when completed drag it to the completed list. Each “card” or task can be commented on and links can be added. Trello works across multiple devices and uploads files from Dropbox or Google Drive.


2016. Trello makes its Power-Ups available to free users



Project management service Trello made its Power-Ups (third-party integrations) available to all of its users, including those who are on the service’s free tier. Until now, only paying users were able to use this feature, which includes integrations with products like SurveyMonkey, join.me, Github and Slack, among many others. Free users were restricted to using three very basic Power-Ups: Calendar for seeing Trello’s calendar view, Card Aging for slowly fading out cards as they age, and Voting for (you guessed it) adding a voting option to cards. Besides, Trello is launching integrations with Intercom, Github Enterprise and Screenful. Trello itself is also launching two new Power-Ups itself: custom fields for users who want to be able to create new data fields and visual cues for their cards, as well as a Card Repeater that allows you to set intervals for repeating tasks. With Card Repeater, you can set up Trello to automatically create copies of certain cards for recurring tasks like expense report due dates. This feature is currently only available as a public beta, though, and admins will have to request access to it.


2016. Trello launched platform for developers



Project management tool Trello is opening its Power-Ups Platform to developers who want to integrate their services with Trello. Launch partners for Trello’s new developer platform include the likes of SurveyMonkey, Zendesk, join.me and Giphy. In total, Trello currently features about 22 add-ons in its directory. For Trello users, having access to these third-party tools directly inside the service means they won’t have to switch context quite as often to perform some routine tasks and will be able to automate more of their workflow inside of Trello. It’s worth noting that Trello has long had an API that gave developers access to some of Trello’s features from inside their own apps. With the new platform, though, developers can directly integrate certain features into the Trello user interface.