Trello Pricing: Which Plan Is Right for You in 2021?

If you’ve read our Trello review, you’ll know that the little kanban board that could is one of the best free project management tools out there. It’s easy to use, very 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.

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.

We’ll go into all the details below. However, 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.

• Is Trello Free to Use?

  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.

• Can You Pay Monthly for Trello?

  Trello’s Business Class plan has both month-to-month as well as annual subscriptions, though paying monthly means you’ll be paying about 25 percent more than people paying yearly.

Trello Pricing: Plan & Cost Guide

Below is the basic breakdown of all of Trello’s four plans: Free, Trello Gold, Business Class, 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.

Free 10 boards, unlimited cards and lists, 1 power-up, 10MB file attachments	FREE
Trello Gold 3 power-ups, custom backgrounds, 250MB file attachments	1-month plan $ 5.00/ month 1-year plan $ 3.75/ month $45.00 billed every year Save 25 %
Business Class Price is per user. Same features as Free, but with unlimited boards, unlimited power-ups, 250MB file attachments, advanced admin options	1-month plan $ 12.50/ month 1-year plan $ 9.99/ month $119.88 billed every year Save 20 %
Enterprise Price is per user. Price goes down with 250 users or more. Has even more advanced functions than Business Class.	$ 17.50/ month

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 with its competitor Asana (read our Asana vs Trello comparison), it offers a full basic suite: there’s no vital functionality missing to keep you from using it. 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 as well and get the same functionality without spending a cent (read our Asana review and TeamGantt review).

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.

In all honesty, though, we’re not really sure if Business Class is worth it. While $10 is still pretty reasonable compared to other services (Asana is $11), it’s still a lot of money. Jira, as you can read in our Jira review, is just $7 and offers more for the price. 

Enterprise Prices

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). 

In the table below, we’ve given a quick sample; check out how it works for yourself using the slider on the Trello pricing page.

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.

What Is Trello Good For?

Which raises the question, what makes Trello so good? The answer is simple: it’s a really good kanban board. You’d think there’s very little that could go wrong with a concept as simple as moving cards across columns (read our Trello tutorial for the details on that), and you’d be right. However, Trello offers a smooth functionality few other project management tools have been able to capture.

The free version offers everything you need in a kanban board (except a calendar; we complain at length about this in our Trello vs monday.com article). For anything else, you’re going to need to use add-ons. We really like the power-ups, but note that on the free plan, you only get one. You’ll need to upgrade to get more than that.

Also, power-ups are a mixed bag: the ones developed by Atlassian are pretty good, but the third-party stuff doesn’t always work as advertised and sometimes charges you on top of Trello’s fee. Overall, if you want a kanban board that can do more than the kanban can-can, check out monday.com. It costs the same and comes with a 14-day free trial.

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.