Trello is where a lot of agencies start, and for good reason. A board with lists and cards is the simplest way there is to see work moving. For a small team it costs little or nothing.
Agencies usually outgrow it in the same way. The boards are fine, but the questions get harder. How many hours did this job really take? What did each person do today? Has the client seen the latest version? And the answers live in a time tracker, a chat tool and an email thread, each paid for separately.
What you'd be moving to
Trello is a visual board tool, simple by design. Suprwork is one workspace for running a small service business. It has a board too, but alongside it are time tracking, team chat, daily check-ins, a client portal, proposals and invoicing, for a flat monthly price with everyone on the team included.
What it costs
As listed on trello.com/pricing in November 2026: the free plan covers up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards per workspace. Standard is $5 per user a month billed yearly ($6 monthly). Premium is $10 billed yearly ($12.50 monthly).
Trello teams typically add chat. We've used Slack Pro at $7.25 a user a month billed yearly, as listed on slack.com/pricing in November 2026.
Suprwork, from our pricing page: Starter $49, Basic $99, Plus $199, Max $249 a month, with everyone on the team included. Plans differ on monthly AI usage and storage. We assumed Basic for 10 people and Plus for 25.
| Monthly cost | 10 people | 25 people |
|---|---|---|
| Trello Free | $0 | not available (10-collaborator limit) |
| Trello Standard ($5/user, yearly) | $50 | $125 |
| Trello Premium ($10/user, yearly) | $100 | $250 |
| Standard + Slack Pro | $122.50 | $306.25 |
| Premium + Slack Pro | $172.50 | $431.25 |
| Suprwork (Basic for 10, Plus for 25) | $99 | $199 |
| Suprwork, one plan up (Plus, Max) | $199 | $249 |
Be honest with yourself about the first rows. A 10-person team on Trello's free plan, with a free chat tool, pays nothing, and Trello Standard alone is half the price of Suprwork Basic. If boards are all you need, Trello is the cheaper tool.
The comparison changes once you're paying for chat and a time tracker next to Trello, and once you're past 10 people.
What you get that boards alone don't give you
Time on the ticket. Start a timer on a ticket from the browser, the desktop app or your phone, or log the hours afterwards. The estimate accuracy report then compares estimates with logged hours for each person, which is how you learn whether a "two-day" card is really four. If you've struggled to get a team to log time at all, time tracking your team won't quietly sabotage is worth reading first.
A daily picture of the team. Moving cards tells you something changed, not what someone actually did. Check-ins collect each person's plan and what got done, typed or spoken, and give you one written summary of the whole team each day with blockers pulled out.
Chat that sits next to the work. Channels, DMs, threads and voice notes, with clients invited into a single channel if you choose.
A client view. The client portal shows each client a written summary of where things stand and the deliveries waiting for their sign-off. If they want changes, those become change requests rather than a reply buried in email.
When the business grows, proposals, invoicing, hiring and time off are already there.
Moving from Trello
In Trello, open each board's menu and export it as JSON. Upload all the files to the migration assistant in Suprwork's settings. Each board becomes a project and each Trello list becomes a status. Cards keep their members, labels, due dates, checklists, descriptions and comments.
Two limits come from Trello's export, not from the import: archived cards don't come across, and only comments within a board's last 1,000 actions are included. On a long-running board, older comments may be missing.
When Trello is the better choice
You're small and the boards are enough. For a team under 10 that only needs to see work moving, Trello's free plan is hard to argue with.
You want the simplest possible tool. Trello has almost no learning curve. Suprwork does more, which means more to learn.
You use Power-Ups and automations you depend on. Trello's ecosystem of add-ons is much larger than Suprwork's integrations.
You don't bill by time and don't need to track it. If your work is fixed-scope and the team reports well already, you may not need what Suprwork adds.
You need a free option. Suprwork has a 14-day trial and then a paid plan.
How to decide
If your Trello setup has picked up a time tracker, a chat tool, a shared spreadsheet for estimates and a habit of asking people what they're doing, count what that stack costs per person. Then import one board into Suprwork and run it for two weeks with check-ins on. If the daily summary and the time on each ticket answer questions you used to ask about, you've outgrown boards. If they don't, Trello is still the right tool.
See also: monday.com alternative for agencies and Asana alternative for agencies.