Jira vs Trello

Disclosure: Breeze publishes this comparison and is one of the tools discussed here. We try to be candid about where Breeze isn't the right fit; weigh that bias when reading our recommendations.

Review process: We compared current Atlassian documentation, pricing pages, published product interfaces, and independent user reviews on Capterra and G2. Pricing, plan names and plan limits were checked against support.atlassian.com, atlassian.com and trello.com on September 4, 2026; vendors change packaging often, so confirm the current total for your team before buying.

Trello is the better choice for small, non-technical teams that want a board they can use within a minute of signing up. Jira is the better choice for software teams that need issue tracking, sprints and workflows with rules attached. Both are Atlassian products, both are free for up to 10 people, and the gap between them is not really features. It is how much structure you are willing to set up and then keep maintaining.

The short version: Trello is a board, Jira is an issue tracker with a workflow engine attached. Almost everything else follows from that, including the price, the setup time, the quality of the reporting and the reason teams eventually leave one for the other. Below is what each tool does, what it costs on September 2026 prices, where each one stops fitting, and where a third option makes sense.

Jira vs Trello at a glance

Feature	Jira	Trello
Best for	Software teams that need issue tracking, sprints and configurable workflows	Small teams and individuals who want a visual board with almost no setup
Pricing	Free for up to 10 users, then Standard at $7.91 and Premium at $14.54 per user per month (checked September 2026)	Free for up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards, then Standard at $5 and Premium at $10 per user per month billed annually (checked September 2026)
Rating	4.4/5 on Capterra, 4.3/5 on G2	4.5/5 on Capterra, 4.4/5 on G2
Standout strengths	Scrum and kanban boards, backlog, sprint reports and custom workflows in every plan; Plans for cross-team roadmaps and capacity on Premium; the Atlassian Marketplace	Boards, lists and cards that need no explanation; Butler automation and Power-Ups on every plan; Planner links cards to Google and Outlook calendars
Main tradeoff	Someone has to configure and maintain it, and everyone else feels every required field	Thin reporting, no native dependencies or time tracking, and calendar and timeline views are Premium-only

Quick verdict: Jira vs Trello

Choose Jira if:

• Your team ships software in sprints and wants backlog, velocity and burndown reporting without add-ons
• Your process has real branches, approvals and states that matter, and you need rules about who can move what
• You already use Confluence, Bitbucket or another Atlassian product and want the integrations to just work

Choose Trello if:

• Your work is basically a queue: to do, doing, done, with a few labels and checklists
• Nobody on the team wants to be the administrator, and the tool has to make sense to a new hire on day one
• You want a free plan that stays useful for a small group instead of nagging you to upgrade

Choose Breeze if:

• You want Trello's board simplicity but with time tracking, budgets, a project timeline and reports built in rather than bolted on
• Your work is client projects rather than software issues, and you need clients in the tool without paying for their seats
• You would rather pay one flat per-user price than work out which Jira or Trello tier unlocks the view you need

Key differences between Jira and Trello

Jira models work. Trello displays it. That is the difference that decides everything else, and it is worth being clear about before you compare feature lists.

In Jira, every task is a work item with a type, a set of fields and a workflow that defines which statuses exist and which transitions are allowed between them. Boards are just a view of that data. You can attach conditions to transitions, require fields at particular stages, and give different projects different schemes. That is why large software organisations run on it, and it is also why a badly maintained Jira instance feels like paperwork: every rule someone added three years ago is still there, and everyone filing a bug has to click past it.

In Trello, a card sits on a list on a board, and that is the whole model. Moving a card to a new list is the workflow. There are no transition rules, no required fields, and no distinction between a bug, a task and a client request unless you invent one with labels. This is genuinely Trello's best feature, because it means anybody can use it immediately. It is also why Trello quietly loses track of things once you have a few hundred cards across a dozen boards: nothing in the tool knows how the boards relate to each other.

The practical consequences show up in three places. Reporting: Jira ships sprint reports, burndown charts, velocity and dashboards on every plan, while Trello's Dashboard view is a handful of charts and is Premium-only. Dependencies: Jira links work items and, on Premium, tracks dependencies across projects in Plans; Trello has no native dependencies at all. Time: Jira lets you log time against a work item, while Trello has no built-in time tracking and relies on Power-Ups.

Is Jira better than Trello?

Jira is better than Trello for software teams and for any team whose process has enough steps and rules that a plain board would lose them. Its sprints, backlog, reports and workflow controls are built in, and it scales to thousands of users and hundreds of projects without changing shape.

Trello is better than Jira for small teams whose work fits on a board and who do not want an administrator. It is faster to learn, cheaper at the Standard tier, and its free plan is more useful day to day than Jira's for a group that is not writing software.

For a small, non-technical team the honest ranking is Trello first, unless someone on the team has already run Jira and is willing to own the configuration. Jira does not reward you for its complexity until you have a process worth modelling.

If Jira is the side you are moving away from, plenty of teams also browse alternatives to Jira before settling on Trello, because the lighter options in that list have reporting Trello lacks.

If it is Trello that has stopped fitting, Trello alternatives covers the wider field, including tools that keep the board and add the structure.

What is Jira?

• Pricing: Free for up to 10 users, then Standard at $7.91 and Premium at $14.54 per user per month (checked September 2026)
• Rating: 4.4/5 on Capterra from 15,468 reviews, 4.3/5 on G2

Jira is Atlassian's issue tracker and the default project management tool for software teams. Work is organised into projects, each with its own work items, fields and workflow. Every plan, including Free, ships with a backlog, scrum and kanban boards, a timeline, and the sprint reports agile teams expect: burndown, velocity and cumulative flow. Automation is built in and metered by steps. Workflows, permission schemes and custom fields can be configured to match almost any process.

On the Premium plan, Jira adds Plans, which pull work items from several projects into one roadmap with cross-project dependencies, capacity planning and what-if scenarios. Premium also brings unlimited storage, a sandbox for testing changes and 24/7 support. Around all of this sits the Atlassian Marketplace, which is the largest add-on ecosystem in the category and also the most common reason a Jira bill ends up higher than the headline price.

What users say about Jira

Across roughly 15,000 Capterra reviews and 7,500 on G2, Jira's strengths and weaknesses are remarkably consistent. Reviewers rate it highly for agile support, sprint planning, backlog management and the visibility that custom dashboards give managers. Capterra scores it 4.4 overall but only 4.1 for ease of use, and the complaints follow that gap: a steep learning curve, an interface that new users call overwhelming, slowdowns on very large projects, and a setup process that G2 reviewers describe as complex enough to need dedicated time and training.

Sources: Capterra, G2

What is Trello?

• Pricing: Free for up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards, then Standard at $5 and Premium at $10 per user per month billed annually (checked September 2026)
• Rating: 4.5/5 on Capterra from 23,599 reviews, 4.4/5 on G2

Trello is a kanban board. A Workspace holds boards, a board holds lists, and a list holds cards, each of which can carry a description, checklists, due dates, labels, members and attachments. Atlassian bought it in 2017, but it has kept its own pricing and its own product direction, and it is deliberately not a smaller Jira. There are no work item types, no workflow rules and no permission schemes.

What Trello adds on top of the board is Butler automation, which runs rules such as moving a card when a checklist completes, Power-Ups that bolt on integrations and extra fields, and, on Premium, alternative views of the same cards as a calendar, timeline, table, dashboard or map. Trello Planner, a newer addition, connects Google Calendar and Outlook so you can schedule time for cards, with its Smart Schedule feature on Standard and above.

What users say about Trello

Trello's reviews are among the most positive in the category: Capterra puts it at 4.5 overall with 92% positive sentiment, and it scores 4.5 for ease of use where Jira gets 4.1. Reviewers on both Capterra and G2 praise the drag-and-drop board, the visual clarity, and a free plan many say they have used for years without upgrading. The criticism is just as consistent. Capterra's largest negative themes are noisy, inconsistent notifications and limited granular access controls, while G2 reviewers point out that Trello has no task dependencies, thin reporting without paid Power-Ups, and gets cluttered once a team and its projects grow.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Jira vs Trello features

Jira and Trello overlap on the basics, since both give you a board with cards you drag between columns. The differences are in what sits behind the board: workflow rules, reporting, dependencies, time and permissions. The table covers the areas that decide the choice for a small team.

Area	Jira	Trello
Core model	Projects containing typed work items with fields, statuses and transition rules; boards are views of that data	Workspaces containing boards, lists and cards; moving a card is the workflow
Views	Backlog, board, timeline and reports in every plan; Plans with cross-project roadmap and capacity on Premium	Board in every plan; Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views on Premium and Enterprise only
Agile support	Scrum and kanban boards, sprints, story points, burndown, velocity and cumulative flow built in	Kanban only; sprints, points and burndown charts need Power-Ups or manual conventions
Automation	Rules metered in steps: 150 per month on Free, 400 per user on Standard, 750 on Premium, 1,000 on Enterprise	Butler rules metered in runs: 250 per Workspace per month on Free, 1,000 on Standard, unlimited on Premium
Dependencies	Work item links in every plan; cross-project dependency tracking in Plans on Premium	None built in
Time tracking	Log time on a work item by typing it in, with estimates and remaining time; no start and stop timer	None built in; third-party Power-Ups only
Reporting	Sprint reports, dashboards with gadgets, and cross-project reporting in Plans	Dashboard view with a few chart types, Premium only
Permissions	Everyone is an admin on Free; project roles, permission schemes and work-level security from Standard up	All members are admins on Free; Workspace admin controls on Standard, board creation and guest restrictions on Premium
Storage	2 GB on Free, 250 GB on Standard, unlimited on Premium	Unlimited storage, but 10 MB per attachment on Free and 250 MB on Standard and above
Ecosystem	Atlassian Marketplace, Confluence and Bitbucket integration	Power-Ups, unlimited per board on every plan

Jira stands out for what is in the box on every plan. A free Jira site already has a backlog, sprints, a timeline and the agile reports, which is more than Trello offers at any price without Power-Ups. The catch is that a free Jira site also cannot customise roles or permissions, so everyone is an admin, and Jira pauses email notifications after 100 in a day.

Trello stands out for the things it refuses to have. No transition rules means nobody is ever blocked by a missing field. Unlimited Power-Ups on every plan, including Free, means the integrations you actually use cost nothing extra. The price of that simplicity is that the views most teams eventually want, calendar and timeline in particular, are locked behind Premium at double the Standard price, and dependencies and time tracking are not available at all without a third-party Power-Up.

Jira vs Trello pricing

Both tools have a genuinely free plan and both charge per user above it. The figures below were checked against Atlassian's pricing pages and support documentation on September 4, 2026. Jira's prices are per user per month at list price and step down at higher user tiers; Trello's are per user per month with a lower rate for annual billing.

Plan detail	Jira	Trello
Free plan	Up to 10 users, 2 GB storage, 150 automation steps per month, community support, no audit log, 100 email notifications per day	Up to 10 collaborators and 10 open boards per Workspace, 250 automation runs per month, 10 MB per attachment
Standard	$7.91 per user per month; 250 GB storage, 400 automation steps per user per month, audit logs, configurable permissions, business-hours support	$5 per user per month billed annually, $6 billed monthly; unlimited boards and collaborators, 1,000 automation runs per month, 250 MB attachments, custom fields and advanced checklists
Premium	$14.54 per user per month; unlimited storage, 750 automation steps per user per month, Plans, sandbox, 99.9% uptime SLA, 24/7 support	$10 per user per month billed annually, $12.50 billed monthly; unlimited automation runs, Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views, admin and security controls
Enterprise	Contact sales; 1,000 automation steps per user per month, up to 150 sites, 99.95% SLA	$17.50 per user per month billed annually; unlimited Workspaces and organisation-wide controls
Automation overage	$0.50 per 1,000 additional steps when extra usage is enabled	Rules stop running for the month once the Workspace quota is used up

Jira pricing: Free for up to 10 users, then Standard at $7.91 and Premium at $14.54 per user per month, checked September 2026. Jira meters automation in steps, and each trigger, condition and action in a rule counts as one, so a busy Standard site with a few users can hit its allowance faster than the headline number suggests.

Trello pricing: Free for a Workspace of up to 10 collaborators, then Standard at $5 and Premium at $10 per user per month billed annually, checked September 2026. The number to watch is the 10-collaborator cap on Free. It applies to the whole Workspace, not to a board, and when you exceed it every board in that Workspace turns view-only and automations stop until you remove people or pay.

For a team of 10, Trello Standard is the cheapest paid option here at $50 a month on annual billing, but it does not include the calendar or timeline views. The moment you need those, Trello Premium at $100 a month is more than Jira Standard at $79, and the Jira plan includes reporting Trello Premium still does not match. The better value depends less on the sticker price than on which tier holds the one view or report your team actually needs.

Jira vs Trello ease of use

Trello is easier to use than Jira, and it is not close. A new Trello user can create a board, add lists and start dragging cards without reading anything. Capterra's reviewers score it 4.5 for ease of use against Jira's 4.1, and that half-point gap understates the difference in the first week.

Jira's learning curve is not really about the board, which looks much like Trello's. It is about everything behind it: work item types, workflows, schemes, fields and permissions. Jira has guided setup and templates, and a team-managed project is far simpler than the company-managed kind, but somebody still has to decide how the project is structured and then keep it that way. Most complaints about Jira are complaints about a particular instance nobody has pruned in years.

Where Trello gets harder is scale, not onboarding. A Workspace with thirty boards and no shared view of them is disorienting, and the tools that would fix it, the Workspace Table and Calendar views, are on Premium. If your team is small and the work is a queue, Trello stays easy. If the work has real structure, Jira's steeper start pays back within a few months and Trello's easy start turns into a spreadsheet on the side.

Jira pros and cons

Jira pros

• Backlog, sprints, story points, burndown, velocity and cumulative flow reports in every plan, including Free
• Workflows with statuses, transitions and conditions that can model an approval process, not just a queue
• Dependencies between work items, and cross-project dependency and capacity planning in Plans on Premium
• Built-in time logging with estimates and remaining time, and time tracking permissions to control it
• Granular permission schemes and audit logs from Standard up
• The Atlassian Marketplace and native Confluence and Bitbucket integration

Jira cons

• Configuring workflows, schemes and permissions is genuinely complex and usually ends up owned by one person
• The interface and vocabulary feel heavy for non-technical teams; ease of use is Jira's lowest review score
• Free plan makes everyone an admin and caps notifications at 100 emails per day
• Automation is metered in steps, and popular capabilities often mean paid Marketplace apps on top of the subscription
• Reviewers report performance dropping off on very large projects

Trello pros and cons

Trello pros

• Usable within a minute of signing up, with the highest ease-of-use scores in the category
• Free plan that stays genuinely useful for a group of up to 10, with unlimited Power-Ups per board
• Butler automation on every plan, including Free
• Standard at $5 per user per month is the cheapest paid plan of the two
• Planner connects cards to Google Calendar and Outlook so scheduling happens next to the board
• Flexible enough to run personal to-dos, an editorial calendar and a hiring pipeline in the same Workspace

Trello cons

• Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views are Premium-only, at double the Standard price
• No native task dependencies and no built-in time tracking
• Reporting is a Dashboard view with a few charts, and only on Premium
• The 10-collaborator limit on Free applies to the whole Workspace and turns every board view-only when exceeded
• Nothing in the tool knows how boards relate, so oversight gets harder with every board you add
• Reviewers' most common complaints are noisy notifications and limited access controls

When Jira is the better choice

• You ship software in sprints and want the backlog, velocity and burndown reporting without buying add-ons
• Your process has approvals, gates or states that matter, and you need rules about who can move what and when
• You have more than one team and need a roadmap that spans them, with dependencies and capacity, which is what Plans on Premium provides
• Confluence, Bitbucket or another Atlassian product is already in place and you want the integration to be native
• Someone on the team is willing to own the configuration, because without that owner Jira decays into the instance everyone complains about

When Trello is the better choice

• Your work is a queue: to do, doing, done, with labels, checklists and due dates on the cards
• The team is 10 people or fewer and you want the free plan to carry you for a while
• Nobody wants to administer a tool, and a new hire has to be productive in it on day one
• You are not writing software, or you are but a simple kanban flow is enough and sprint reports would go unread
• You can live without dependencies and time tracking, or you are happy to add a Power-Up for them

Breeze as an alternative

There is a third case, and it is the reason Breeze appears here. Some teams find Trello too thin and Jira built for someone else. Their work is projects and clients rather than software issues, and what they are missing from Trello is not workflow rules but the things Trello puts on Premium or leaves to Power-Ups: a timeline, reports, time tracking and a way to see all projects at once.

Breeze is built around projects, each with a board that works the way Trello's does, plus a list view, a calendar with a project timeline, and a team workload view across every project. Time tracking is built into each task with a start and stop timer as well as manual entry, and time entries can be marked billable, which is the piece both Jira and Trello leave out. Projects carry a budget in hours and money, tasks can have custom fields and dependencies across projects, and automation covers recurring tasks, assigning and archiving on rules. Reports cover time, tasks due and how long tasks take to move across the board. It is one plan at $9 per user per month with every feature included and unlimited free client users, and a 14-day trial. There is no free tier.

It is not a Jira replacement for software teams. Breeze has no sprints, story points, velocity or burndown charts, no workflow transition rules, no permission schemes and no Marketplace. If the reason you are reading a Jira comparison is that you need those, Breeze is the wrong choice and Jira is the right one. Breeze is a Trello replacement for teams that have hit Trello's ceiling and would rather pay one flat price than work out which Premium view or Power-Up closes the gap.

Both of those claims are worth checking rather than taking on faith. Breeze against Trello lays out what arrives built in instead of through Power-Ups, and Breeze against Jira is honest about how much configuration each one asks you to own.

Which tool should you choose?

Choose Jira if:

• You run sprints and want agile reporting built in
• Your process needs rules, not just columns
• You are already on Atlassian and someone will own the setup

Choose Trello if:

• Your work is a queue and the team is small
• Nobody wants to administer anything
• The free plan or the $5 Standard tier covers what you need

Choose Breeze if:

• You want the board plus time tracking, budgets, a timeline and reports on one flat price
• Your work is client projects and clients need to be in the tool for free
• You have outgrown Trello but Jira's structure would go unused

The question is not which tool is better. It is whether your work needs modelling. If your process is genuinely a queue, Jira will feel like paperwork and Trello will feel like relief. If your process has branches, approvals and states that matter, Trello will quietly lose track of them and you will end up keeping the truth in a spreadsheet next to the board. For a small non-technical team with no existing allegiance, start with Trello, and move only when a specific report, dependency or view is missing, because by then you will know exactly what you are moving for.

If Trello is the side you are sure about and Jira is the doubt, Trello vs Asana and Planner vs Trello compare it against tools closer to its own weight. If Jira is the side you are sure about and you want to see what else sits at that end, ClickUp vs Jira and YouTrack vs Jira cover the two most common alternatives software teams weigh against it.

FAQ

Does Trello have built-in time tracking?

No. Trello has no native time tracking; none of the Power-Ups Trello makes itself track time, so it comes from third-party Power-Ups. Jira lets you log time on a work item by typing it in, but has no start and stop timer either.

Which Trello plan includes the calendar and timeline views?

Premium. Trello's Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views are on the Premium and Enterprise plans only, at $10 per user per month billed annually or $12.50 billed monthly as of September 2026. Standard gives you unlimited boards but not those views.

How many people can use Jira and Trello for free?

Both cap the free plan at 10 people. Jira Free allows up to 10 users on one site with 2 GB of storage. A free Trello Workspace allows up to 10 collaborators and 10 open boards; go over 10 collaborators and every board in the Workspace becomes view-only until you remove someone or upgrade.

Is Trello good enough for software development?

For a small team running a simple kanban flow, yes. Trello has no sprints, story points, velocity or burndown charts and no native dependencies, so a team that works in sprints or has to report on them will outgrow it and land on Jira, where all of that is built in.