A kanban board answers one question well: what is everyone working on right now? It answers two others badly. If this card slips a week, what else slips? And will the work fit in the time we have? Trello is honest about where it stops on both, and if your team keeps asking them, you have outgrown the board rather than the tool. This post shows what Trello offers, what it says it does not, and how the same work is planned in Kavanah.
1. What Trello Says About Dependencies
Trello's help centre says plainly that Trello does not have built-in task dependency management. It suggests representing dependencies as checklist items on a card, or as link attachments between cards. That records the relationship, but nothing acts on it: when the first card's due date moves, the cards behind it do not know.
2. What Trello's Timeline Does
Trello's Timeline view, on Premium and Enterprise only, lets you give cards a start and end date, stretch them across days, group them by list, member or label, and zoom from days to years. It is a good picture of when work is scheduled. Its help article does not describe dependencies or a critical path, and it says Timeline is no longer available on mobile devices.
3. Dependencies and a Critical Path in Kavanah
In Kavanah, open a task and add what it is blocked by or what it blocks. The links are finish-to-start, and Kavanah refuses one that would create a cycle. The Critical path view in Planning then lays each task out as a bar from its earliest possible start, computes the slack on each, and highlights the tasks with none, the ones that move the ship date if they slip. The project's Timeline view shows who is on what by date, and both work on every plan, including the free one.
4. Hours Against the Work
Trello's pricing page does not list time tracking on any plan. Kavanah tracks time natively on every plan: start a timer on a task or log hours by hand, mark time billable with rates per entry, project or client, and round it to an increment if you bill that way. The planner then compares each person's estimates with the hours they actually logged, so a sprint is sized on how long work really takes rather than on hope.
5. Keep the Board
None of this replaces the board. Every Kavanah project still has one, with its own columns, and that is where most people work day to day. The difference is that the board sits on top of a plan: when a date moves, the chain shows it, and when someone asks whether the work fits, the hours answer. If you are moving, Kavanah imports Trello's board JSON export, so the board you have becomes the starting point.
If your Trello board keeps being asked questions only a plan can answer, that is the moment to move. For the full comparison of Kavanah, Trello, Asana and ClickUp, and what a Trello import keeps, see our Trello alternative page.
