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Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

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Re: Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True regarding Atlassian, though Greenhopper is awesome. https://www.atlassian.com/software/greenhopper/overview

I love Jira 5.

I don't, they updated the task/chart/planning boards without warning.

Re: Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

#32

We use Trello at work. We use it as a ticketing system/issue tracker, to-do list, and workflow system. I think it is great as far as it goes. It's got a great visual design, it's very simple and free-form. Frankly however it forces too many decisions on me. I don't want to have to think about all the things that you're required to think about. It's a bit too free-form. Tickets and issues and all that isn't something…

Trello and Asana both are pretty generic and seem to refrain from enforcing any particular use case through UI. I also found this genericness hard at first, especially having used FogBugz and other “traditional” PM / ticket tracking tools that do all the decisions for you.

However, I seem to be stopping caring too much about creating “proper” cards (we use Trello as well), adopting the “create a card with whatever is on your mind if you feel there's a need for it”-like approach. I like it, and it's fast, maybe it'll will work for you, too?

Of course, some things still have to be considered before creating the card—e.g., task atomicity—but that's the case with any tool.

It depends on your workplace and workflow, though. If there's a certain degree of formality there, I think it's much better to have this enforced by UI, because then decision making is likely to become a real problem.

Re: Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

#33
post #23

One of the cool things I've seen people use Zapier for is to test out other collab tools ( https://zapier.com/zapbook/asana/trello/ ). You can test out Trello for a week by piping in data from Asana without the fear of losing a weeks worth of data in Asana if you don't like Trello.

That's super handy. Zapier is shaping up to be my favorite out of IFTTT and Wappwolf. However, would decent if they allowed selective Dropbox permissions (eg limited to a single folder). It's disturbing when startups (even a single individual/founder) has access to all my private data. It's not necessary most of the time either. "Please trust us" seems suboptimal.

You trust Dropbox. You could presumably trust Zapier.

That you don't isn't really an argument for them changing their practices.

For example Mint.com keeps your banking passwords in order to do offline-logins, but people still trust Mint not to steal their money.

If many people don't trust a startup, I think they likely need to change their presentation style and not their practices.

Re: Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

#35
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's super handy. Zapier is shaping up to be my favorite out of IFTTT and Wappwolf. However, would decent if they allowed selective Dropbox permissions (eg limited to a single folder). It's disturbing when startups (even a single individual/founder) has access to all my private data. It's not necessary most of the time either. "Please trust us" seems suboptimal.

You trust Dropbox. You could presumably trust Zapier. That you don't isn't really an argument for them changing their practices. For example Mint.com keeps your banking passwords in order to do offline-logins, but people still trust Mint not to steal their money. If many people don't trust a startup, I think they likely need to change their presentation style and not their practices.

IIRC Mint uses a read-only API run by Yodlee

Re: Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

#37
post #13

I found Trello kind of awkward to work with. Lots of long dropdown menus without any icons or well written titles. Just lots of long menus in general, forcing me to do a full scan every time I want to do something. Just unintuitive and hard to get fast at. I keep having to remember how to do things. I find Asana the exact opposite. It's extremely polished and everything behaves and works as I would predict. Feels kin…

Agreed with your first paragraph, it's kind of what I Was getting at with my response on this topic. Trello is a decision factory. The 100th time I create a ticket I shouldn't still feel like I have to figure out where to put it, how it gets categorized, etc. But I do.

Odd. Trello is the first task list tool I've actually enjoyed because of its simplicity. To add a task I just need to click, type, and press enter. Done. To reassign a task I click and drag. Done + the satisfaction of seeing my todo list shorter and completed list longer. Love it. I don't even make use of 90% of the features but they're basically invisible to me.

This is a "nice to have" feature, but my main complaint is probably how I feel it's difficult to report off of my data (see trends, etc.).

I'd never heard of Asana but now I'm curious to try it out.

Re: Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

#38

Huge fan of Jira for tickets, it's flexible enough to be a to-do list or really whatever you want, especially since if you need 10 or fewer people, you're only out $10 for a perpetual license.

Seriously? I was very disappointed when I got to try Jira. It's slow, clunky and ugly. Bugzilla is a bliss compared to Jira..

Re: Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

#39
post #38

Huge fan of Jira for tickets, it's flexible enough to be a to-do list or really whatever you want, especially since if you need 10 or fewer people, you're only out $10 for a perpetual license.

Seriously? I was very disappointed when I got to try Jira. It's slow, clunky and ugly. Bugzilla is a bliss compared to Jira..

When was the last time you tried it? I just did a deployment at work (hopefully replacing BMC SDE) and it's rather snappy. Not as fast as plain HTML of course, being Tomcat on the back end, but I couldn't possibly describe it as slow, or clunky, or ugly.

Re: Trello vs. Asana - what is your favorite collaboration tool?

#40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed with your first paragraph, it's kind of what I Was getting at with my response on this topic. Trello is a decision factory. The 100th time I create a ticket I shouldn't still feel like I have to figure out where to put it, how it gets categorized, etc. But I do.

Odd. Trello is the first task list tool I've actually enjoyed because of its simplicity. To add a task I just need to click, type, and press enter. Done. To reassign a task I click and drag. Done + the satisfaction of seeing my todo list shorter and completed list longer. Love it. I don't even make use of 90% of the features but they're basically invisible to me. This is a "nice to have" feature, but my main complain…

Just FYI, Trello can be much more than a task-list-tool. It can be.. whatever.

It's extremely flexible. We used it for a system design, and the lists are not todo's. One list lists all the database tables for example, but we're still experimenting so this might not be the best way to do it.

Only drawback so far is that it's kind of slow on my machine.. And i fear what thy may charge eventually.

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