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Projectous vs Trello

You have a board per client, and what it costs, what you agreed and who owes what live in your head or your inbox.

Why choose Projectous over Trello

A client is a real thing rather than a naming convention everybody has to remember.
One view of what is drifting across every board you would otherwise open one at a time.
The hours and the invoice come out of the same work, instead of a Power-Up holding your time and a spreadsheet holding your money.
Fixed-price jobs carry their own margin, so you can tell whether the work was worth doing.

What Trello is genuinely good at

The simplest tool on this list by a distance. Nothing to learn, nothing to configure, and a card is a card.
A free plan with ten boards per workspace and unlimited cards, which a lot of small teams genuinely never outgrow. We have nothing free at any size.
Butler automation is built into every board including the free one. We automate a fair amount on our own, but there is no builder for you to write your own rules in.
Power-Ups for almost anything, and the ecosystem is old enough that somebody has already solved your odd requirement.

Side by side

Capability	Projectous	Trello
Works for client work on day one	Yes	No
Tells you what needs attention	Prioritisation and the Today tab on every plan; stale detection from the Team plan up	No
Drafts your standup from what actually happened	Yes	No
File storage that will not stop you	No	10MB per file on Free; 250MB per file on paid
Timeline or Gantt view	No	Timeline view on Premium, $10/user/mo
Work your team can claim, rather than be given	Yes	No
Notices client emails you have not answered	Yes	No
Helps the person doing the work, not the person watching	Yes	No
Time tracking	Yes	No
Invoice from the tracked time	Yes	No
Whether a project made money	Basic profitability reports on every plan; per-project margin tracking from the Team plan up	No
Hourly, fixed-price, at-cost and retainer	Yes	No
Fixed payouts to the freelancer doing it	Yes	No
The client can be in the work with you	From the Team plan up — the Solo plan has no client access. No separate portal either: clients are invited into the app and invoices are shared links	Single-board guests on Standard; multi-board is Enterprise
Internal and client conversation on the same task	Yes	No
Team chat with channels and direct messages	Yes	No
Encrypted vault for client credentials	Yes	No
Priced per team, with free clients	Yes	No

Amber means it exists behind a plan, an add-on or a caveat, and the row says which. Checked 2026-08-24 against Trello’s own pricing and documentation.

What you came to compare

Pick the argument you actually care about. They are different questions and they have different answers.

Trello on its own ground. It wins more of this than people expect, and where it stops is not about features.

What the tool knows about a client

Projectous

That they exist. A client is a real thing that projects, rates, contracts and invoices all belong to, so anything can be counted per client without you arranging it.

Trello

Nothing. A client is a board, or a label, or a name at the front of a card — a convention you and your team agree to keep. It works, and it stops working quietly when somebody new joins.

Seeing across eleven boards

Projectous

The default view is what slipped, went stale or is waiting on you, across every client at once. Stale detection needs the Team plan.

Trello

You open the boards. There is no cross-board view of what is drifting, because a board is deliberately a single place — that simplicity is the product, and it is also the ceiling.

Views beyond the board

Projectous

Lists, boards with status columns you name per project, a calendar and a day planner. No Gantt chart.

Trello

Calendar, Timeline, Table and Dashboard views arrive on Premium, at $10 per user per month billed annually. Below that a board is the view.

Checked 2026-08-25, here.

Getting a client into it

Projectous

From the Team plan up they are invited into their projects with no cap, and the task carries an internal thread and a client-facing one.

Trello

Single-board guests on Standard; multi-board guests are an Enterprise feature at $17.50 per user per month. A client who touches three of your boards is an Enterprise conversation.

Checked 2026-08-25, here.

What each one costs

Not the reason to switch, and not something you should have to go looking for either.

Projectous

Per team

One subscription covers a band of people rather than a price per head. Client and guest access starts on the Team plan — the Solo plan has none — and from there guests are free and uncapped.

Hiring does not change the bill until you cross a band. Checked against the live plans on 2026-08-24.

See the current plans

Trello

Per user

Free$0 — 10 boards per workspace
Standard$5 / user / mo — $6 billed monthly
Premium$10 / user / mo — $12.50 billed monthly
Enterprise$17.50 / user / mo — billed annually

Calendar, Timeline, Table and Dashboard views all start at Premium.
Guests are single-board on Standard; a client who touches three boards needs Enterprise.
No time tracking and no invoicing at any price — both come from Power-Ups.

Checked 2026-08-24 against their pricing page.

Where we will not go

Projectous exists to help people coordinate work with more clarity, trust and humanity.

Which means some things are permanently off the table, whatever a feature comparison says.

No screenshot monitoring
Nobody works better because software is watching their screen.
No keyboard activity scoring
Movement is not effort, and measuring it teaches people to move.
No public shaming dashboards
A league table changes behaviour. Never in the direction you wanted.
No manufactured urgency
If something is not actually on fire, we are not going to tell you it is.

Also weighing something else?

Keeping the money in a spreadsheet?

Try it against a real project of yours and see whether it tells you something your current stack does not.

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