Trello is the board most people learned project management on, and for a lot of teams it is still enough. The ones that go looking for an alternative usually hit one of four walls: the views they need once a project has dates, dependencies between cards, a monthly cap on automation, or hours that have to be tracked somewhere. This post takes each wall in turn and says, from each vendor's own pages as of today, how Kavanah, Asana and ClickUp handle it. We make one of the three, so we have tried to be specific rather than flattering.
1. Wall One: Views That Need Premium
Trello's pricing page lists Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views on Premium, at $10 per user a month billed annually or $12.50 monthly. Its help centre says Timeline is only for Premium and Enterprise Workspaces, that there are no current plans to bring it to free Workspaces, and that it is no longer available on mobile. Asana lists timeline and Gantt views from Starter, at $10.99 per user a month billed annually. ClickUp lists Gantt charts from Core, at $9 per user a month billed yearly, with a trial on Free. Kavanah has board, list, calendar, gallery and map views and a timeline on every plan, including the free one.
2. Wall Two: Cards That Depend on Each Other
Trello's own help article says Trello does not have built-in task dependency management, and suggests checklist items and linked cards instead. That works until a slipped date needs to push the work behind it. In Kavanah a task can be blocked by another task, the link refuses to create a cycle, and the Critical path view in Planning draws the chain as bars from each task's earliest start and marks the ones with no slack. Asana's and ClickUp's pricing pages, the pages we checked, do not describe dependencies, so check their product pages before you decide.
3. Wall Three: Automation by the Month
Trello meters automation per Workspace: 250 runs a month on Free, 1,000 on Standard, and unlimited runs on Premium within an operations quota of 150,000 a month plus 10,000 per user, capped at 250,000. Quotas reset on the first of the month. ClickUp lists 100 automation actions a month on Free, 1K on Core and 10K on Business. Asana lists unlimited automations from Starter. Kavanah's automations run on triggers, and its plans do not cap them by run count; what is metered is AI, in credits.
4. Wall Four: Hours
Trello's pricing page does not list time tracking on any plan. Asana puts native time tracking, comparing estimated with actual time, on Advanced, at $24.99 per user a month billed annually. ClickUp lists time tracking from Core. Kavanah has native time tracking on every plan, with billable time and rates for client work, and its planner compares each person's estimates with the hours they actually logged.
5. Where Each One Fits
Asana fits teams that want timelines, goals and portfolios and will pay for Advanced to get them; it also imports CSV data from tools including Trello. ClickUp fits teams that want docs, goals and time tracking in one configurable tool, and it imports Trello boards as Spaces. Kavanah fits teams that want dependencies, time tracking and a client portal on every plan, a direct importer for Trello's board JSON, and AI employees that do coordination work under approval rules, at $3 a seat a month on Basic or with no seat fee on Pay as you go. And Trello still fits a small team whose work is a shared board: its Free plan covers up to 10 collaborators per Workspace, and its AI features start on Standard.
The right Trello alternative is the one that fixes the wall you actually hit, not the one with the longest feature list. For the full dated comparison of Kavanah, Trello, Asana and ClickUp, and exactly what a Trello import keeps, see our Trello alternative page.
