Trello alternative

A Trello alternative for teams who outgrew ten boards

Trello made work visible to everyone. Visible work is still work waiting for a person.

The short answer

Polaris is a free alternative to Trello for small teams that hit the ten-board limit or want more than a board. Trello Free allows ten boards and ten collaborators per Workspace, with Standard at five dollars and Premium at ten dollars per user per month billed annually, checked 21 August 2026. Polaris adds docs, team chat and AI workers who deliver tasks.

Trello Free: 10 boards / Workspace
Trello Standard: $5 / user / month annual
Trello Premium: $10 / user / month annual
Checked: 21 Aug 2026

The wall people hit

Trello is the easiest tool in this category to start. That is not faint praise; getting a whole non-technical team to adopt anything is the hard part, and Trello does it in an afternoon. The wall arrives later, and it is usually one of two.

The first is structural. Checked on 21 August 2026, Trello Free allows up to ten boards and ten collaborators per Workspace, ten megabytes per file and two hundred and fifty Workspace command runs a month. Standard is five dollars per user per month billed annually or six billed monthly, Premium is ten annually or twelve fifty monthly, and Enterprise is seventeen dollars fifty per user per month billed annually, listed as two hundred and ten dollars per user per year.

The second is that a board full of cards is an accurate picture of what has not happened yet. Trello never claimed otherwise. The question worth asking in 2026 is whether some of those cards can be picked up by something other than a person.

Head to head

Trello prices from trello.com/pricing, checked 21 August 2026.

Trello

Polaris

Free plan limits

10 boards and 10 collaborators per Workspace, 10 MB files, 250 command runs a month

No limits on humans, tasks, workstreams or docs

Paid cost

$5/user/mo Standard, $10 Premium, $17.50 Enterprise, billed annually

$0 for software at any size

Views

Board, plus table, calendar, timeline and dashboard on paid tiers

List and board sharing the same lanes, plus a Focus lane across today, this week and next 30 days

Automation

Butler rules, with monthly command run quotas by tier

AI workers assigned tasks like colleagues, no rule quota

Docs

Card descriptions and attachments

A nested doc tree with block editor, versioning, file review and comments

Chat

Card comments

Team chat in the product, plus a Slack-fed Inbox of prefilled task suggestions

Who clears the card

A person, every time

A person or an AI worker on a cloud machine that returns files as a comment

What you pay for

Places to put cards

Human-equivalent hours of work delivered, about $2 each, itemised on a work log

When you should stay on Trello

Trello wins on the axis that matters most for some teams: nobody has to be taught.

Your collaborators are not software people
Volunteers, contractors, a client, a committee. Trello's board is understood on sight with no training, and that is a genuine advantage no feature list captures.
Butler already runs your process
Teams with mature Butler rules driving card movement, due dates and checklists have automation that works today, tuned by someone who understood the problem.
You are one person with a personal board
At a team of one, five dollars a month for Standard is not a problem worth solving, and Trello's Free plan may cover you outright.
Power-Ups connect you to something specific
If a Power-Up is bridging Trello to a system you depend on, that bridge is part of the product you bought.

The board-count arithmetic

What the ten-board ceiling costs when a team crosses it. Trello list prices checked 21 August 2026.

Trello Standard, per user per month

Billed annually, $6 billed monthly

$1,200

Ten people on Trello Standard, per year

Before Premium views or any Power-Up

Polaris software, ten people or a hundred

No seats, no board cap, no tier

Moving from Trello

Trello is one of the friendlier exports in this category. Each board exports as JSON or CSV containing lists, cards, descriptions, labels, due dates, checklists and comments, which maps cleanly onto Polaris workstreams, lanes and tasks. Attachments come across as links rather than files, so anything stored only on a card needs pulling down first.

Butler rules do not transfer, and there is no equivalent object to import them into. The replacement is different in kind: instead of a rule that moves a card when a date passes, you brief a worker on what should happen and assign it the task. That is better for judgement work and worse for deterministic housekeeping, and it is worth knowing which of the two your rules are.

Go deeper

Trello pricing, checked August 2026

The cheapest tracker on this list, and the one teams outgrow fastest.

Trello vs Asana

For a small team on a free plan this is no longer close. For a team with dependencies it never was.

Trello vs monday.com

Both put cards in columns. Only one of them expects the columns to do arithmetic.

Replacing Trello and Slack

A board that everyone can read and nobody maintains, plus a channel where the real assignments happen.

Replacing Notion and Trello

A page describing the project and a board describing the same project, kept in step by somebody's memory.

Polaris for small business

The jobs that never get done in a small business are not hard. There is simply nobody free to do them.

Questions people ask

+Does Polaris have a board view like Trello?

Yes, and it shares its lanes with the list view, so a workstream is organised once and read either way. Everything drags. The extra piece is the Focus lane, which is pinned first in every view and holds the non-negotiables across today, this week and the next thirty days.

+Can I import my Trello boards?

There is no one-click Trello importer, but Trello's JSON and CSV export contains lists, cards, descriptions, labels, due dates, checklists and comments, which lines up well with the Polaris task model. Attachments export as links, so download anything that lives only on a card before you move.

+What replaces my Butler automations?

Nothing does, directly. Butler is deterministic rule automation and Polaris does not have a rules engine. What Polaris has instead is AI workers you brief and assign tasks to, which suits judgement work like research or drafting far better than it suits moving a card when a date passes.

+Is Polaris free forever or is this a beta price?

The software is free with no seat count, and that is the model rather than a promotion. Polaris is in free public beta with no customers yet, and the revenue line is delivered agent work at roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour, logged and challengeable job by job.

+We are five people and Trello Free is fine. Why switch?

If you are inside the ten-board and ten-collaborator limits and nobody is waiting on work that a machine could do, there is no argument here worth making. The case starts when cards sit untouched because the person who owns them has no time, which is the specific problem an AI worker on a cloud machine addresses.