Trello vs. Jira: Which to choose (and how to use them together)

Trello or Jira? Jira or Trello? In your search for the perfect project management tool for your enterprise teams, odds are you’ve likely heard of both along the way. And when it comes to the Trello vs. Jira question, it can be hard to know which one is right for your org. 

The good news? While both tools have their own features and use cases, Trello and Jira are both parts of the Atlassian family—which means you can use them together, too. Here's a high-level overview of what each does:

• Trello Enterprise is a work management tool that's made for all teams across your organization—from dev to marketing (and everything in between). Any team that's looking to brainstorm, conduct better team meetings, and track processes across tooling can benefit from using Trello. The tool’s enterprise plan scales with your org and offers cross-team visibility, endless features, enterprise-level security, and admin user management. And to top it all off, there’s little to no ramp-up time for implementing the tool.
• Jira Work Management (JWM) lets business teams collaborate, align, and deliver work in one place. With flexible workflows, robust views, powerful automations, cross-team roadmaps, and advanced reporting tools, Jira Work Management unlocks your unique team’s potential.

• Jira Software is also a project management software, but it’s tailored for agile software development teams. Like Trello, Jira is a cloud-based solution, but it is also offered on-premise. With its robust reporting capabilities, project progress is accessible on Jira at all times. 

While we all enjoy watching Family Feud, there’s no need to pit these tools against each other. Although, you can still prepare for a future trivia game night—Atlassian themed— as we walk you through how these tools compare and complement one another. 

Trello: Key features of this flexible work management platform 

Trello comes with a wide range of features for every enterprise team to plan, track, and do their best work, including: 

• Views: Choose between Workspace, Timeline, Calendar, Dashboard, Table, and Map views to get real-time visibility into work being done across your enterprise—by location, workspace, due date, task, and more. 

• Power-Ups (a.k.a. integrations): Trello integrates with hundreds of popular tools—like Slack, Google Drive, and even Jira—so everything you need for your work is in one place. 

• Automation: Use Butler automation within Trello to automate everything from task management of assignments and due dates to updating cards. 
• Templates: Access a library of Trello board templates to support custom workflows across teams—without having to start a board from scratch. 

• Enterprise-grade security: Protect your org with Trello’s enterprise security features, including centralized admin controls, single sign-on, user provisioning, and two-factor authentication.   

How to use Trello within your organization 

Trello is a versatile work management tool—meaning that the software can be used in ways best suited to your enterprise needs. Our most popular use cases are: 

• Individual work management: Team members can set reminders, record notes, and manage smaller-scale projects in a personal project management board like this one. 

• Private team collaboration: Teams can use Trello boards to support their internal processes, such as daily standups, weekly team meetings, and 1:1 meetings. 
• Synchronous team activities: Teams can collaborate in designated spaces, whether it’s for brainstorming or retrospectives.
• Large-scale tracking: Teams can use Trello boards to manage large-scale projects and track its progress in an organized, flexible manner with multiple workspace view options.  
• Team culture initiatives: Use Trello boards to keep building up your team culture with offsite planning, team resource hubs, and beyond. 

JWM: Key features of this project management software

Jira Work Management (JWM) supports your business teams’ unique workflows with project management solution features like: 

• Real-time collaboration: Work together from anywhere with live updates as teammates update tasks and projects.

• Automation: Keep projects moving with automation rules that do the manual work for you.

• Advanced reporting: Understand the full picture and see how cross-functional teams collaborate to get work done.

• Views: From calendars to timelines to summary charts, pick the right view to get the info you need from your projects.

How to use JWM within your organization  

JWM is designed to help you track cross-functional processes from start to finish. The top ways the tool is used are: 

• Coordinated business processes: Use JWM to support detailed initiatives, like hiring, procurement, and go-to-market strategy development. 

• Company-wide collaboration: When paired with Jira Software, you can view and create dependencies that span across all sides of the organization so that teams don’t work in silos.

• Admin-level reporting: Team leads and admins can use Jira Work Management to check in on team members’ bandwidth, progress, and blockers.

• Custom workflows and permissions: Build fully customized workflows within JWM to take the manual work off your team’s plate.

Jira Software: Key features of this agile project management platform

Jira Software supports successful agile workflows for your dev teams with project management solution features like: 

• Boards: Jira has boards to support two widely used agile methodologies—Scrum and Kanban. Scrum boards help agile teams break up larger projects into smaller, manageable pieces, while Kanban boards allow teams to visualize workflows. 

• Roadmaps: Get dev teams and stakeholders in sync with roadmaps that offer full visibility into project progress across multiple teams and sprints. The project tracking feature helps you stay on track with releases, overcome blockers, and manage team capacity. 
• Advanced reporting: Access comprehensive agile reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs to optimize each sprint, stay on track to complete goals, and enhance the delivery pipeline. Atlassian Analytics adds another layer of visibility with custom analytics and a unified data lake to make it even easier to make informed business decisions. 

• Enterprise-level security: Keep your org secure with Jira’s robust enterprise security features like user management, IP allowlisting, data residency, and organization audit logs. 

• Change management: Prepare, test, and control rollouts of product changes using sandboxes and release tracks. 

How to use Jira Software within your organization  

Jira Software is built to support more detailed, complex work processes—especially when it comes to software development—like issue tracking and time tracking. The top ways the tool is used are: 

• Agile workflow management: Managers can optimize organization-wide performance by managing agile workflows, such as Scrum, DevOps, and Kanban, within the tool to make backlog and sprint planning a breeze. 
• Bug tracking: Monitor, track, assign, and prioritize bugs in one place using this Jira bug tracking template. 
• Collaboration across dev teams and organization-wide: Manage work across dev teams, from DevOps to QA, as well as enterprise-wide, for company initiatives that rely heavily on dev, like product launches. 
• Reporting: Use Jira reports to deliver updates on the progress of key initiatives, rollouts, and more. 

How to use Trello, Jira, and JWM together

Despite (and perhaps, because of) their differences, Trello and Jira work well together under the Atlassian umbrella. By integrating these tools, you’ll be able to supercharge project management across multiple departments. 

Trello’s Jira Power-Up makes it possible to attach Jira issues to Trello cards and to create Jira issues directly from Trello cards, too. These connections mean team members can track Jira ticket statuses right from Trello. That means stakeholders who don’t use Jira regularly won't have to go to the tool for updates (here’s a resource with more details on the Jira Power-Up). 

Your org can also use the Trello Sync for Jira to add Trello boards to issues within Jira. The integration functions as a two-way sync that allows for real-time information flow across both tools. 

Decisions, decisions: Trello, JWM, or Jira?

Now that you’ve got the scoop on all things Jira and Trello, it’s time to make a decision. Jira vs Trello—which do you choose … or do you even have to choose at all? It depends on your org. 

If you need a tool to support a wide range of teams and use cases, Trello is your go-to. If you need a more structured tool to support the complex processes of your dev teams, Jira might be the way to go. But if your org has both of these needs, using Trello and Jira together is definitely the right move all together.    

Want to see what these tools can do for your teams? 

Contact our enterprise sales teams for Trello, JWM, and Jira to learn more.