sjTasks vs Trello
Trello is a board of cards, priced per person. sjTasks gives you the board, the list and the calendar of the same work on every plan, for one flat price.
A client on five of your projects costs what a client on one does: nothing. And every task carries an owner, a priority, an estimate and a due date, so what is late and who is overloaded is a question with an answer.
What your team gets with sjTasks
Your client can use it on day one
Invite them by email. They choose a name and a password, and they are in. They see the projects you gave them and nothing else of yours. They read, write notes, and can answer by replying to an email. Guests are free and never counted, on every plan, Free included.
Trello includes a guest on one board on Standard and Premium. A guest on more than one board is billed as a member.
One price, and nobody to call
A flat monthly price, and on every paid plan adding a person never changes it. You sign up, choose a plan in Billing, and cancel any time. The Free plan takes no card and does not expire.
Trello charges per person: 10 people on Standard is $50 a month billed annually, and on Premium $100.
The email carries the work
An email from sjTasks says what happened: the note in full, the brief of a task handed to you, each change on its own line. A daily status each morning and a weekly summary. You can read your day without signing in, and what only concerns the watchers stays in the app, so the inbox stays quiet.
Reply by email, send work by email
Reply to any email about a task and your reply becomes a note on it. Forward a client’s email to a project’s address and it becomes a task, with the attachments on it.
Files live on the work
The brief, the photo and the signed contract sit on the task they belong to, each shown as a picture. Up to 2 GB a file on every plan. Nobody scrolls back through a thread to find one.
Trello limits a file to 10 MB on Free and 250 MB on Standard.
Estimates and hours on every task
Time tracking is on every plan, Free included: one switch in Team settings, and every task takes an estimate and the hours logged against it. The report that sets hours against estimates, by person and project, is on every plan too.
Each person sees what they need
Access is set per person: the whole team, named projects, or every project of one client. A field worker sees only the jobs assigned to them, finishes them, leaves notes and photos, and logs hours. Field workers are on every plan, and on Free they count among its 5 people.
Your data leaves when you want it to
An admin can export the whole team at any time: the data, the notes, the time, and the files, up to 5 GB; past that, we send the files another way. If a plan ends, the team goes back to Free with everything in it, and the export keeps working.
Trello’s pricing page lists data export with Premium.
Where they differ
| Topic | Trello | sjTasks |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per user. Standard is $5 per user a month billed annually, or $6 billed monthly; Premium is $10, or $12.50; Enterprise is $17.50 billed annually. | Flat, and stepped by room: Standard at $35 a month for 25 active projects and 50 GB, Unlimited at $119 for as many active projects as you like and 250 GB. Unlimited people on every paid plan. |
| Clients and guests | A guest on a single board is included from Standard. Their page says a guest on more than one board in the Workspace is a multi-board guest, billed at the same rate as a member. The Free plan allows up to 10 collaborators per Workspace. | Never counted, on any number of projects. |
| Features by tier | Unlimited boards, card mirroring, custom fields and 250 MB files at Standard; the Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views, unlimited automation and data export at Premium; multi-board guests and single sign-on at Enterprise. | Every plan has every feature: the board, the list, the calendar and the table of every task among them. The time report is on every plan too. |
| Free plan or trial | A Free plan: up to 10 collaborators, 10 boards, 10 MB per file and 250 automation runs a month. Any Workspace can start a trial of Premium; their page does not state its length. | A Free plan with every feature — 5 people, 2 active projects, 1 GB. No card, and it does not expire. |
| 10 people and 20 clients | 10 members on Standard: $50 a month billed annually, or $60 billed monthly, provided each client sees only one board. A client on two boards is billed as a member. The Table, Calendar and Dashboard views need Premium: $100 a month billed annually. | Standard, $35 a month, with the calendar, the table of every task, the Workload report, and the time report included. |
Where Trello fits better
If a board of cards is all your team needs, Trello is quick to start, and its Power-Ups add a great deal to it.
Also on every plan
- Ask a question in plain words — “what is late for Jane this week” — and get the list back; ask how something works and get the answer from the guide.
- A board, a list and a calendar of the same project.
- Project templates: four to start from, or save any project of yours as one.
- Subtasks that are real tasks, with their own owner, date and estimate; one can block its parent.
- Tasks that arrive by email, a project's news in a Slack channel, and notifications you can reply to.
- A project connected to a Gitea repository: a task with the right tag opens an issue, its state comes back, and a developer chooses line by line what a client sees.
- Almost nothing is destroyed: work is canceled, projects are archived, and what an admin deletes waits 30 days in a trash.
Try it on a real project
The Free plan is every feature, your clients invited as guests at no charge, and no card. Pay only when you outgrow the room.
Start free — no card neededTrello’s prices and plan details were read from their pricing page on 2026-09-25 and may have changed since; anything that page did not say is left out rather than guessed. Ours are on our pricing page. Trello is the name of a product that is not ours.