- Trello
Ideal for: Project management (visual workflow).
Cost: Free and paid from $5 per month per user
Trello is a project management tool to make team collaboration more efficient. With the dashboard, you can easily manage projects and boost team productivity.
Create a dashboard for each project and use lists and cards to divide tasks and manage roles and responsibilities. Trello uses a visual workflow to make it very easy to see all tasks, who is responsible for what and move items around based on progress.
Features:
Comprehensive free plan with unlimited personal boards, 10 collaborative boards, plus unlimited lists, cards, storage and users.
Can be assigned to more than one person per task
Disadvantages:
Only one super power user on the free plan.
File size is limited per attachment depending on your plan
The only view option Trello offers without using a booster is the visual dashboard view
- Asana
Ideal for: Project management (multiple workflow view options).
Cost: Free and paid from $11 per month per user.
If you like the features of Trello but prefer something less visual, try Asana. This tool offers more flexibility for viewing projects and tasks: dashboards, lists, calendars or timelines. It’s ideal for growing teams.
Features:
Free plan with unlimited tasks, projects, activity logging and file storage.
Attachment size is larger with Asana’s free plan compared to some of its competitors
Ideal for teams that are growing or plan to increase capacity
Disadvantages:
The free plan only allows you to collaborate with 15 teammates
Only gives you 100 MB per file upload regardless of the plan
Does not allow you to have multiple assignees per task
- Zapier
Ideal for: Marketing automation
Cost: Limited free plan and paid plans starting at $20 per month.
Zapier connects your apps and automates tasks so you can focus on running your business. Select your most used apps and create connections, known as Zaps, between them in your main dashboard.
Features:
Integrates the most popular apps (ecommerce, email marketing, finance software, project management, calendars, etc.).
Zaps can vary in complexity depending on one or more steps in the actions, i.e. tasks.
It makes Zap recommendations to you based on the selected applications.
Disadvantages:
It takes learning to know how to configure tasks and Zaps.
The free plan only gives you 5 Zaps active at the same time and 100 tasks per month.
These three tools help you with team collaboration, automation and efficiency so you have more time to manage other aspects of your online business.
For project management, Trello offers a visual work style and more administrative access controls, while Asana has more workflow style options and greater scalability for growing teams.
On the other hand, setting up Zapier can be complex; the most important thing is to evaluate your app usage to determine if it’s worth automating the connections between them.
