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Slack vs Trello: What are the differences?

Introduction

Slack and Trello are both popular productivity tools used in a workplace setting. While they both aim to improve collaboration and communication within teams, there are key differences between the two platforms. This article will highlight six key differences between Slack and Trello.

  1. User Interface and Functionality: Slack is primarily a messaging platform that provides real-time communication through channels and direct messaging. It offers various features such as file sharing, voice and video calls, and integrations with other tools. On the other hand, Trello is a project management tool that uses boards, lists, and cards to organize and track tasks. It focuses more on task management and visual representations of workflows.

  2. Organization and Workflow: Slack organizes conversations and information through channels, which can be public or private. It allows users to easily search and retrieve past messages. Trello, on the other hand, organizes tasks and projects using boards, lists, and cards. Users can create checklists, assign due dates, and track progress within the cards. It offers a more structured approach to project management.

  3. Communication vs Task Management: Slack is primarily used for communication purposes, allowing teams to discuss projects, ask questions, and share updates. It provides a more immediate and interactive way of exchanging information. Trello, on the other hand, focuses more on task management, allowing teams to create, assign, and track tasks. It provides a visual representation of tasks and workflows.

  4. Integrations and Extensions: Slack offers a wide range of integrations with other tools, allowing teams to connect their favorite apps and services. It can be integrated with project management tools, customer support systems, and many more. Trello also offers integrations with various tools, but its focus is more on extending its own functionality with power-ups, which are additional features and capabilities that can be added to boards.

  5. Collaboration and Team Management: While both Slack and Trello provide features for collaboration and team management, they approach it differently. Slack allows for real-time collaboration through chat, video calls, and screen sharing. It also offers features like mentions and threaded conversations to facilitate collaboration. Trello, on the other hand, focuses on task assignment and tracking. It allows users to assign tasks, set due dates, and monitor progress, enabling teams to work together towards a common goal.

  6. Cost and Pricing Structure: Slack offers both free and paid plans, with advanced features available in the paid plans. The pricing depends on the number of active users and additional features required. Trello also offers free and paid plans, with the paid plans providing additional features and integrations. The pricing for Trello is based on the number of users as well.

In summary, Slack is a real-time communication platform with a focus on messaging and integrations, while Trello is a project management tool that emphasizes task organization and tracking.

Advice on Slack and Trello
Needs advice
on
Aha!Aha!AsanaAsana
and
TrelloTrello

I'm comparing Aha!, Trello and Asana. We are looking for it as a Product Management Team. Jira handles all our development and storyboard etc. This is for Product Management for Roadmaps, Backlogs, future stories, etc. Cost is a factor, as well. Does anyone have a comparison chart of Pros and Cons? Thank you.

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Replies (1)
Max Stuart
Technical Project Manager at ShelterTech · | 6 upvotes · 213.9K views
Recommends
on
ClickUpClickUp

I just switched to ClickUp for my development agency - I am the product team, and I relay everything there betwixt designers, devs, and clients.

Clickup = Jira + Confluence but better - more ways to slice and dice your data & documents, make custom views, mind map relationships, and track people's work, plan goals... I even use it to manage project finances and household to-dos.

They have a very comprehensive free tier that never expires, and on top of that they're extremely generous with trials of their paid features, have more-than-fair pricing, and top-notch customer support.

https://clickup.com?fp_ref=max30

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Needs advice
on
SlackSlackDiscordDiscord
and
GitterGitter

From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."

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Replies (4)
Rebecca Driscoll
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack to increase productivity by simplifying communication and putting Slack in the middle of our communication workflow #Communications #Collaboration

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Arnaud Lemercier
Expert En Dveloppement Web Et Systmes Dinformations, Designer UX, UI, Co-grant at Wixiweb · | 4 upvotes · 192.6K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

We use Discord to tracking some action and errors (logs / alerting / assertion). it's free and simple to use with mobile application et notifications

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Michael Ionita
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack because we can let "tools talk to us" and automate processes in our dev team using bots.

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Julien Tanay
Lead DevOps. Every day product hacker. at Dior · | 2 upvotes · 188.1K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

Our Discord Server is our n°1 community stop; we gather feedback from our users from here, discuss about new features, announce new releases, and so on.

We even use it for internal meetings and calls !

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Decisions about Slack and Trello

As it is the communication tool chosen for the course, our team will be using Slack to monitor the course announcements from our instructor as well as to communicate with the instructor and industry partners. The tool for communicating within the team will be Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams enables the team to share documents and edit them synchronously(Google Drive is not an option due to one team member's location). Since it also provides a group chat feature, we chose to use it as our communication tool to avoid using too many softwares.

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Hirotaka Ishihara
Undergrad at University of Toronto · | 3 upvotes · 175K views

Communication We have chosen two tools for our team communication.

  • Slack

We choose Slack since all of us are familiar with this communication tool. We have a private channel for our team Sphinx for text messages. We added Github apps inside our private channel for repo update notifications. Furthermore, we could contact the subject matter experts within the workspace DCSIL directly for the issues we meet.

  • Microsoft Teams

We use Microsoft Teams for virtual meetings for its fast connection speed. In addition, the call feature in Slack is a paid feature, and we could have virtual meetings and share screens for free in Microsoft Teams.

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Samriddhi Sinha
Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling · | 10 upvotes · 99.8K views

Notion's novelty according to me is the fact that everything can be a potential document. Notion's as a product has two very contrasting features. One as a hybrid document editor that combines the goodness of Markdown of Dropbox Paper with a more extensive set of formatting blocks. The second as a task manager and an organizer like. Trello.

Every table on Notion can have multiple views saved for previews with different filters, sorting and table style applied. Also, elements in a table can also be a page making it easier to have a Kanban-style sub-task manager for a particular subtask on a Kanban board for your project.

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Remotor Consulting
at Remotor Consulting Group · | 13 upvotes · 116.2K views

Keybase is a powerful and secure team-organizing software. And because Keybase is so transparently good at what it does, Keybase is a foundational software that facilitates the future of work: effective, inclusive, secure Remote Teams.

Keybase is a free, end-to-end encrypted, open-source program with almost limitless flexibility. Each Keybase user or team is a unique cryptographic identity. Each message or interaction that a user has with a team or other user, is verifiable and digitally-signed. Custom combinations of users/teams/bots, can be designed to catalyze Remote Teams of all kinds, this process can also be automated. Keybase includes Git integration for versioning, bots from multiple platforms to facilitate audio/video-conferencing, a Cryptocurrency wallet, and many advanced privacy features to make you more or less traceable.

Services like Slack and Discord are centralized platforms that perform analytics on your behavior and can sell or leak this data to 3rd parties. Any audio/video features available within Slack or Discord, are bound to be less secure and less flexible than excellent alternatives such as Jitsi. Slack and Discord do have a fun, causal feel to them, which can potentially facilitate social engagement in certain conditions (also many users are already on these platforms).

Centralized and Proprietary team platforms such as Discord and Slack have a large market presence (at least in the USA) based on their first-mover advantage, name recognition, and network effects from size. However these products do not have the flexibility or power of Keybase. Keybase excels on its own excellence, and also has an open and active developer community.

Find us on Keybase: @remotorteam (Keybase username) @remotor.public (Public Keybase Team)

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Ivan Begtin
Director - NGO "Informational Culture" / Ambassador - OKFN Russia at Infoculture · | 5 upvotes · 212K views

Both Asana and Trello support Kanban style project tracking. Trello is Kanban-only project management, knowledge management, actually card-management tools. Asana is much more complex, supports different project management approaches, well integrated and helpful for any style/type project.

We choose Asana finally, but still some projects kept in Trello

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Abhay Vashishtha

Procezo is an excellent free-for-life task managing tool with several benefits. Its clear, user-friendly interface is perfect for small businesses and startups as well as enterprise-level use. It makes it a seamless transition from any other project management tools. Its simple but effective layout allows new users to quickly adapt to its ever-expanding set of features. Procezo allows users to create boards and provide access to users or teams as required, set priority and precedence of the task and allowing for subtasks and discussions to be created. With unlimited tasks, users, projects and free support, Procezo is quickly making its way into businesses from across the world and the ultimate growth hack tool.

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Stefan Schuchlenz

We chose RocketChat over other communications suites like Cliq or Slack mainly because we can self-host it on our own infrastructure. Since we have quite some projects going on which demand that we stay in touch with a lot of different stakeholders, pricing was an issue, too. With RocketChat, we have a huge set of features basically for free, RC offers apps for all major devices and systems and overall, we're very happy with it. The only downside is the limited amount of apps and integrations, but we can make due with what we have available.

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I loved Slack. We used it for discussion. But somehow, it was always difficult to get things done. HeySpace is what replaced Slack and Trello as it combines the functionality of both tools.

So, now we keep on discussing as we did on slack, but once we to a point where we want to do something, we create tasks on a board and distribute them.

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Mohammad Hossein Amri
Chief Technology Officer at Planally · | 3 upvotes · 239K views

we were using slack and at the same time we had a subscription with office 365. after a while we hit the slack free limitation quota. and it got annoying. the search ability was useless in free tier. and more annoying whenever you search, it opens a webpage and doesn't do it in the app.

on mobile there were many cases that I didn't get notification of important discussions. rooms was the way to separate a talk. but it become tedious. each time for a new subject that you wanted to discuss, you needed to add all the team members into a new room. and after a while the room goes silent. you will end up with a tons of not-in-use rooms that you don't want to clean up them for history purposes. also the slack UI for sub discussion is very stupid. if someone forget to check the checkbox to post the subdiscussion in the main discussion thread, other team members even won't notice such discussion is in progress.

we was paying for office 365 and thought why not give the teams a shot. we won't be in worth situation than we are. we moved to teams and we loved it instantly, we had a separate tab aggregated all the files upload. we could reply on other talk. no need of creating a new room. this way room belongs to a team and not a certain topic. our sub discussion was visible to the whole team. enjoyed integration with azure and unlimited history. the best part was integration with outlook. it was a full suit solution. our stats become busy on outlook meeting events. we get weekly analyse. we didn't need to host our wiki seperated. we've created wiki per team. the communication was much more fun.

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Ram Kumar
CTO, Architect at Sarvasv.in · | 2 upvotes · 165.1K views

trello has a much simpler interface and easy to learn for any team member. asana might have more features and configuration options but do you really need a complex system for developers to manage tasks?

After Microsoft took over trello, it has become more restricted these days but still good for startups.

Keep it simple! Focus on your product, not tools.

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Pros of Slack
Pros of Trello
  • 1.2K
    Easy to integrate with
  • 876
    Excellent interface on multiple platforms
  • 849
    Free
  • 694
    Mobile friendly
  • 690
    People really enjoy using it
  • 331
    Great integrations
  • 315
    Flexible notification preferences
  • 198
    Unlimited users
  • 184
    Strong search and data archiving
  • 155
    Multi domain switching support
  • 82
    Easy to use
  • 40
    Beautiful
  • 27
    Hubot support
  • 22
    Unread/read control
  • 21
    Slackbot
  • 19
    Permalink for each messages
  • 17
    Text snippet with highlighting
  • 15
    Quote message easily
  • 14
    Per-room notification
  • 13
    Awesome integration support
  • 12
    IRC gateway
  • 12
    Star for each message / attached files
  • 11
    Good communication within a team
  • 11
    Dropbox Integration
  • 10
    Jira Integration
  • 10
    Slick, search is great
  • 9
    New Relic Integration
  • 8
    Great communication tool
  • 8
    Asana Integration
  • 8
    Combine All Services Quickly
  • 7
    Awesomeness
  • 7
    This tool understands developers
  • 7
    Google Drive Integration
  • 7
    XMPP gateway
  • 6
    Replaces email
  • 6
    Twitter Integration
  • 6
    Google Docs Integration
  • 6
    BitBucket integration
  • 5
    GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback
  • 5
    Jenkins Integration
  • 5
    Guest and Restricted user control
  • 4
    Gathers all my communications in one place
  • 4
    Clean UI
  • 4
    GitHub integration
  • 4
    Excellent multi platform internal communication tool
  • 4
    Mention list view
  • 3
    Perfect implementation of chat + integrations
  • 3
    Android app
  • 3
    Visual Studio Integration
  • 3
    Easy to start working with
  • 3
    Easy
  • 3
    Easy to add a reaction
  • 3
    Timely while non intrusive
  • 3
    Great on-boarding
  • 3
    Threaded chat
  • 2
    Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams
  • 2
    Message Actions
  • 2
    Simplicity
  • 2
    So much better than email
  • 2
    It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC
  • 2
    Great Channel Customization
  • 2
    Great interface
  • 2
    Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations
  • 2
    Markdown
  • 1
    API
  • 1
    Easy remote communication
  • 1
    Get less busy
  • 1
    Targetprocess integration
  • 1
    Better User Experience
  • 1
    Multi work-space support
  • 1
    Travis CI integration
  • 1
    It's the coolest IM ever
  • 1
    Dev communication Made Easy
  • 1
    Community
  • 1
    Integrates with just about everything
  • 1
    Great API
  • 1
    Very customizable
  • 1
    Great Support Team
  • 1
    Flexible and Accessible
  • 1
    Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock
  • 1
    Archive Importing
  • 1
    Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT
  • 1
    Watch
  • 1
    I was 666 star :D
  • 0
    Easy to useL
  • 0
    Platforms
  • 715
    Great for collaboration
  • 628
    Easy to use
  • 573
    Free
  • 375
    Fast
  • 347
    Realtime
  • 237
    Intuitive
  • 215
    Visualizing
  • 169
    Flexible
  • 126
    Fun user interface
  • 83
    Snappy and blazing fast
  • 30
    Simple, intuitive UI that gets out of your way
  • 27
    Kanban
  • 21
    Clean Interface
  • 18
    Easy setup
  • 18
    Card Structure
  • 17
    Drag and drop attachments
  • 11
    Simple
  • 10
    Markdown commentary on cards
  • 9
    Lists
  • 9
    Integration with other work collaborative apps
  • 8
    Satisfying User Experience
  • 8
    Cross-Platform Integration
  • 7
    Recognizes GitHub commit links
  • 6
    Easy to learn
  • 5
    Great
  • 4
    Better than email
  • 4
    Versatile Team & Project Management
  • 3
    and lots of integrations
  • 3
    Trello’s Developmental Transparency
  • 3
    Effective
  • 2
    Easy
  • 2
    Powerful
  • 2
    Agile
  • 2
    Easy to have an overview of the project status
  • 2
    flexible and fast
  • 2
    Simple and intuitive
  • 1
    Name rolls of the tongue
  • 1
    Customizable
  • 1
    Email integration
  • 1
    Personal organisation
  • 1
    Nice
  • 1
    Great organizing (of events/tasks)
  • 0
    Easiest way to visually express the scope of projects

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Cons of Slack
Cons of Trello
  • 13
    Can be distracting depending on how you use it
  • 6
    Requires some management for large teams
  • 6
    Limit messages history
  • 5
    Too expensive
  • 5
    You don't really own your messages
  • 4
    Too many notifications by default
  • 5
    No concept of velocity or points
  • 4
    Very light native integrations
  • 2
    A little too flexible

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is Slack?

Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together.

What is Trello?

Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Slack?
What companies use Trello?
See which teams inside your own company are using Slack or Trello.
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What tools integrate with Slack?
What tools integrate with Trello?

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Blog Posts

Sep 29 2020 at 7:36PM

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What are some alternatives to Slack and Trello?
Microsoft Teams
See content and chat history anytime, including team chats with Skype that are visible to the whole team. Private group chats are available for smaller group conversations.
Discord
Discord is a modern free voice & text chat app for groups of gamers. Our resilient Erlang backend running on the cloud has built in DDoS protection with automatic server failover.
Skype
Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are.
Asana
Asana is the easiest way for teams to track their work. From tasks and projects to conversations and dashboards, Asana enables teams to move work from start to finish--and get results. Available at asana.com and on iOS & Android.
Yammer
Yammer brings the power of social networking to your company. Collaborate securely across departments, geographies, content and business applications.
See all alternatives