Why OpenProject is the better Trello alternative for Enterprises

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Agile project management is around now for quite a long time and became popular for most industries and organizations. It is now a well-established methodology to foster collaboration and to quickly react to market trends and changes.

Still, it is often a challenge to select an appropriate Agile project management software supporting your teams and strengthen the implemented methodologies, such as Scrum or Kanban. Offering the right feature set to support your teams, being not too complex at the same time is a challenge to face. Trello is a popular software to support agile teams. But it has some limitations. Read below why OpenProject is the better Trello alternative for enterprises.

Agile Project Management Software

Often, Agile project management software is quite specialized on very specific Agile use cases and does not necessarily support other requirements from the team’s daily project tasks. Most of the programs offer a board view, to create flexible boards with lists and cards on it. Probably the most popular to name is Trello. Especially in the Generation Z, Trello is quite successful, as just shown on the Newsweek and Statista Inc. rating of Best Business Tools 2019.

You can create multiple Agile boards to visually and intuitively manage a project. Within these boards the project tasks can be displayed, prioritized, and tracked. The boards cover various use cases in a project, such as for prioritizing and tracking tasks, planning sprints or versions, managing risks, following-up on ideas, fixing bugs, and much more.

Boards-overview OpenProject’s flexible Agile Boards view

Combining the best of both worlds

However, these Agile boards often reach their limit when it comes to bigger and more complex projects. In this case, a much more comprehensive planning and execution of the project is necessary. Trello only offers boards. However, more complex projects need a detailed project plan to manage the overall timeline of a project. From this point, teams can break down their activities and manage them in an Agile approach. Often, this leads teams to choose an additional and much more sophisticated project management software.

The challenge is now to combine both worlds. This is where OpenProject has a big advantage compared to Trello. With OpenProject projects can be planned in a Gantt chart, to create and manage a detailed project plan and break-down activities. From this point, teams can individually manage their requirements and tasks in Agile boards in an intuitive and flexible way. At the same time, having all relevant project information tightly included in one system.

Additionally, OpenProject offers many other project management features, such as time tracking on activities, cost reporting and project budgets, wiki for documentation, and much more. The features can easily be combined and are all integrated with the Agile board module, e.g. to track time or costs on a card within a board.

combining classical project management and agile project management Combining classical and agile project management in one software.

On-premise and open source Trello alternative

Furthermore, enterprises have high data security and privacy requirements and often want to run the software behind their firewall. Compared to Trello, OpenProject can be installed on-premise within the company’s own infrastructure. Also, OpenProject is open source software. Thus, all software code is publicly available on GitHub. Also, feature requests and developments as well as bug fixes are discussed openly. Especially security and vulnerability issues can much better be monitored and fixed quickly. See this post as a reference.

For switching from Trello to OpenProject, the easiest way is to export your boards from Trello Enterprise to Excel. Then, you can easily import your tasks from Excel to OpenProject to get started with this comprehensive but still easy to use and lightweight software to manage your projects.

Here you can compare Trello’s and OpenProject’s features side-by-side.