Compare
Pealboard and Trello
Both put the work on a board anyone can read. The difference is what sits on it. In Trello it is a Trello card. In Pealboard it is the GitHub issue an engineer already has open.
Which one fits your team?
Trello is a better fit if…
- Your work does not live in GitHub Issues, and much of it is not software work at all.
- You want the simplest shared board there is, with very little to learn.
- You want a large library of Power-Ups to extend a board.
- Everyone who needs to see or move a card is happy to hold a seat.
Pealboard is a better fit if…
- The card on the board is the GitHub issue itself. Move it, and GitHub is what changes.
- One board covers every repository you connect, instead of a board per project.
- Customers with no account at all can send requests and follow them in a portal.
- Every layout is on every plan, including Free. Nothing waits behind a tier.
What Trello offers
Every line below comes from Trello’s own pages. Each footnote names the page and the date we read it.
- The unit of work is a card, on a list, on a board. Trello has no built-in iteration 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 and 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, and the Enterprise plan includes Atlassian Guard Standard. Free’s "unlimited activity log" is an activity feed, not a compliance audit log.[4]
Side by side
| 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 on a Trello board. Every general tool in this research stores the work item in its own database.[5] |
| One board covers every repository you connect. You never have to pick which one to open. | A board is the unit. Free allows up to 10 boards per workspace.[1] |
| Customers with no account of any kind send requests in a portal and follow them. Each request becomes a GitHub issue. | 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 takes 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 we could not check
We could not confirm these details on Trello’s own pages, so we make no claim about them either way.
- Trello’s global search, bulk edit, and whether it has a named saved-view object. The pages that would confirm them were not obtained, and 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 can be about anything. Every Pealboard board is a view of GitHub issues.
So if your team’s work is not in GitHub, Pealboard has nothing to show you. Everything it offers rests on GitHub already holding the work. That is what lets you cancel without losing anything, keeps engineers off the bill, and makes a customer’s request the same object as the engineer’s issue.
Try it on your own repositories
The Free plan connects three repositories and needs no card. Nothing is imported. Nothing in GitHub changes.
More 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.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.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.
Our notes are in platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md and platform/research/portals-and-feedback-tools.md. Trello is a trademark of its owner. Pealboard is not affiliated with it.