Quick Snapshot: Trello vs Favro
If you’ve spent any time looking for simple, visual project management tools, Trello and Favro are names that crop up again and again. Trello is the archetypal kanban board: clean, intuitive and forgiving. Favro, on the other hand, leans into flexibility — it looks familiar at first glance but offers deeper ways to nest work, link items and model cross-team workflows.
Think of Trello as the dependable bicycle you can hop on and ride immediately; Favro is more like a modular e-bike you can customise with racks, lights and a cargo trailer. Both will get you where you need to go, but the experience and the eventual set-up can feel quite different depending on your team’s appetite for structure and complexity.
Layouts and Flexibility
Trello’s simple board-and-card metaphor is its superpower. Create lists (columns), add cards, move them across the board — it’s visible and immediate. The uniformity keeps teams aligned quickly, which is why Trello is popular with small teams, personal projects and marketing squads that need to move fast without much overhead.
Favro expands that metaphor. It keeps kanban boards but layers in additional views — like spreadsheets, timelines and nested boards — and lets you relate cards across multiple boards. If your work needs to live in several contexts at once (a ticket that belongs to a product backlog, a sprint and a marketing campaign), Favro’s flexibility can be a huge benefit. That said, the extra power comes with a slightly steeper learning curve and needs a touch more governance to avoid chaos.
Collaboration and Workflows
Both tools support collaboration, but they favour different patterns. Trello’s comments, attachments and simple automation (via Butler) are perfectly adequate for most day-to-day conversations and repetitive chores. Its visual simplicity makes it easy to onboard new contributors and stakeholders who don’t want to learn a complicated system.
Favro is built with cross-functional teams in mind. It’s easier to create reusable templates, link related work items and maintain multi-team backlogs. If your teams practice Scrum or use complex Kanban policies, Favro’s ability to model different workflows and grant more granular permissions can be invaluable. You’ll get more control over how work flows between teams, which is ideal for engineering-heavy organisations or agencies managing multiple clients.
Integrations, Automation and Power-ups
Trello’s ecosystem of Power-Ups is vast: calendar views, Slack integration, GitHub, time tracking and more. For many users, enabling a handful of Power-Ups transforms Trello into a lightweight work OS. Butler automation, while simple, covers a surprising amount of use cases without coding.
Favro also offers solid integrations and automation capabilities, often geared towards teams that want more programmatic control over processes. Where Favro shines is the ability to interlink boards and automate the movement of items across those links. If your workflows need tight syncing between tools and bespoke automations, Favro frequently provides more native options for complex scenarios.
Pricing, Scalability and Team Size
Trello’s free tier is generous and a great place to start for individuals and small teams. Paid plans add administrative controls, advanced automation and business-class security features. As you scale, Trello can still serve as a central lightweight hub, especially if you standardise on a small set of Power-Ups.
Favro typically targets teams that anticipate growth and require more structural features out of the box. Its pricing reflects the additional capabilities, but many organisations find the cost justified because Favro reduces the need for patchwork integrations and manual syncs. For large engineering organisations or enterprises with complex reporting needs, Favro often feels more scalable in terms of process sophistication.
Where Onlinetcards Fits In
If you’re considering Trello or Favro, it’s worth taking a quick look at alternatives like onlinetcards.com. It offers a free project management system with both kanban and scrum boards, which makes it easy to trial a workflow without committing financially. In many ways Onlinetcards blends the approachable UI of Trello with some of the structured board options you might find in Favro.
For teams on a budget or anyone curious about different ways to organise work, Onlinetcards is a sensible pit stop. It’s especially handy for smaller organisations or freelancers who want a no‑cost, no‑fuss option that still supports standard agile practices and visual board management.
Which One Should You Choose?
Pick Trello if you want speed, ease of use and minimal setup. It’s brilliant for small teams, marketing projects, event planning and solo workflows. If getting started quickly and keeping things visually simple is your priority, Trello will likely become your go-to tool.
Choose Favro if you expect to manage complex, multi-team workflows and need the ability to represent the same work item in multiple contexts. It’s better suited to development organisations, agencies juggling many clients or companies that want tighter process modelling. And if you’re not ready to commit, try a free option like onlinetcards.com to see which style of organising feels most natural to your team.
Ultimately, the best tool is the one your team will actually use. Start small, iterate on your board structure and make sure to build a simple set of rules so your workflows don’t become a tangle as you scale.