Compare
Pealboard and Trello
Both put work on a board that a non-engineer can read. The difference is what the card is: in Trello it is a Trello card in Trello's database, and in Pealboard it is the GitHub issue an engineer already has open.
Which of these is you
Choose Trello
- Your work does not live in GitHub Issues, and much of it is not software work at all.
- You want the simplest possible shared board with a very short learning curve.
- You want a large ecosystem of Power-Ups to extend a board.
- Everyone who needs to see or move a card is willing to hold a seat.
Choose Pealboard
- Your engineers work in GitHub Issues and you need the board to be that work, not a copy of it.
- You need one board across every repository rather than a board per project.
- You need customers without any account to submit and follow requests.
- You want every layout on every plan rather than views that arrive with a tier.
What was confirmed about Trello
Each line was read on Trello's own pages on the date in its source. Nothing about Trello appears on this page without one.
- The unit of work is a card, on a list, on a board. Trello has no native sprint or cycle concept.[1]
- Free allows up to 10 collaborators per workspace and up to 10 boards per workspace, with unlimited cards, a 10 MB per-file limit, 250 automation runs a month and an unlimited activity log.[1]
- Standard is $6 per user per month billed monthly and $5 billed annually. Premium is $12.50 monthly and $10 annually. Enterprise is $17.50 per user per month, billed annually only, and the price decreases at higher seat counts.[1]
- Free and Standard have the board view. Premium adds calendar, timeline, table, dashboard and map.[1]
- Custom fields start at the Standard tier.[1]
- Butler is built-in automation, capped at 250 runs a month on Free, 1,000 on Standard, and unlimited from Premium up.[1]
- Templates are offered, along with Slack, Teams, Outlook and Gmail integrations and a unified Inbox.[2]
- There are iOS and Android applications.[3]
- SAML single sign-on is Enterprise only, through Atlassian Guard; the Enterprise plan includes Atlassian Guard Standard. Free’s "unlimited activity log" is an activity feed, not a compliance audit log.[4]
The difference, line by line
| Pealboard | Trello |
|---|---|
| The card on the board is a GitHub issue in one of your repositories, with its GitHub comments, labels, milestone and project fields. | The card is a Trello card in a Trello board. Every general tool in this research stores the work item in its own database.[5] |
| Cross-repository scope is the default. One board spans every repository the workspace connected. | A board is the unit. Free allows up to 10 boards per workspace.[1] |
| Portals: customers with no account of any kind submit requests that become GitHub issues, and follow them. | Every participant needs a seat in the tool. No path for a person outside it was found in this research.[5] |
| Every layout — list, board and table — is on every plan, including Free. | Free and Standard have the board view; calendar, timeline, table, dashboard and map start at Premium.[1] |
| Annual billing is 20% off both paid plans. | Trello Premium is $12.50 monthly and $10 annually, a measured 20.0% — the precedent Pealboard’s own discount was set from.[6] |
What was not verified
These are gaps in the research, not findings about Trello. They are here because a comparison that prints only what was confirmed reads as though the rest was checked and found wanting.
- Trello’s global search, bulk edit, and whether it has a named saved-view object: the pages that would confirm them were not obtained. The features page returned a client-side error placeholder.
- Trello’s keyboard shortcuts: two guessed documentation URLs returned 404.
- Trello’s import and export.
- Trello’s REST API and webhook documentation. The Power-Up developer ecosystem is referenced on the platforms page; the API documentation itself was not fetched.
What Trello is better at
Trello covers work that has nothing to do with software, and Pealboard cannot: a Trello board is a board about anything, and every Pealboard board is a view of GitHub issues.
If a team's work is not in GitHub, Pealboard has nothing to show them. That is not a limitation to be lifted in a later release; it is the shape of the product. The whole claim — that canceling loses nothing, that engineers cost nothing, that the customer's request is the engineer's issue — depends on GitHub already holding the work.
Look at your own repositories
The Free plan connects three repositories and needs no card. Nothing is imported, and nothing in GitHub changes.
Other comparisons
- Pealboard and Jira Software
- Pealboard and Linear
- Pealboard and ClickUp
- Pealboard and GitHub Projects
- Pealboard and ZenHub
- Pealboard and Canny
Sources
trello.com/pricing— the free-tier limits, the tier prices, the Butler automation run caps, which views each tier has, and that custom fields start at Standard. Fetched 2026-09-09.trello.com/tour— templates; Slack, Teams, Outlook and Gmail integrations; the unified Inbox. Fetched 2026-09-09.trello.com/platforms— iOS and Android applications, with direct App Store and Play links. Fetched 2026-09-09.trello.com/enterprise— SAML single sign-on is set up through Atlassian Guard, and the Enterprise plan includes Atlassian Guard Standard at no extra cost. Fetched 2026-09-09.rohan-platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md §3.2— the report's own synthesis across the ten general work-management tools it examined. Fetched 2026-09-09.rohan-platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md §4.1, §4.3— the annual-discount band across vendors that publish exact figures, and Trello Premium’s measured 20.0% discount, which is the precedent for Pealboard’s own. Fetched 2026-09-09.
Recorded in rohan-platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md and rohan-platform/research/portals-and-feedback-tools.md. Trello is a trademark of its owner; Pealboard is not affiliated with it.