liveplanner vs Trello
The free Trello alternative
Trello made the kanban board familiar to everyone: lists, cards, drag and drop. liveplanner keeps that simplicity and puts more beside it in one plan: Sheets with real formulas, Dashboards of live slots and Forms whose answers arrive as cards, all free and ready without an account.
At a glance
| Feature | liveplanner | Trello |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, every feature | Free plan, then paid plans |
| Start without an account | Yes, create and edit as a guest | An account to create a board |
| Kanban boards | Yes, with WIP limits and swimlanes | Yes, its core |
| Custom fields | Card types with fields of your own | Custom fields on cards |
| Beyond the board | Sheets, Dashboards, Forms and Gantt and calendar charts in the same plan | Further views and Power-Ups for integrations |
Which to pick
Why pick liveplanner
- Boards with WIP limits: a column’s count turns amber the moment it goes over, and swimlanes split the board by assignee, type, priority or any field.
- One card, every board: the same card can sit on the sprint board and the roadmap, and moving it on one moves it on both.
- Card types of your own, with text, number, date, choice and linked-card fields, beside five built-in types.
- A Sheet tab with over 150 functions next to the board, reading its cards or listing them as rows that stay linked both ways.
- Forms on a public link: each answer becomes a card on the board, ready to move along, and no account is needed to answer.
- Dashboards that bring boards, sheets, charts and notes onto one page, all live.
- Free, with no ads, no trackers and no sign-up to start.
Where Trello is the better pick
- You want the most widely known kanban board, with polished mobile apps your team already uses.
- Your work leans on Power-Ups and integrations from Trello’s large ecosystem.
- Your organisation already runs on Atlassian, and Trello fits beside Jira and Confluence.
The board you know, with room to grow
A liveplanner board works the way a Trello board does: columns of cards you drag along as the work moves. Open a card for its description, checklist, assignee, dates and comments, and @mention a teammate to send them an email that opens it. Then the board goes a little further: WIP limits on columns, swimlanes by any field, header widgets such as Due Soon and Stale Cards that narrow the board to just those cards, and hidden writing with a reveal for retros.
Cards are items rather than copies, so one card can appear on several boards at once. A team board and a personal board can show the same work without anyone keeping two lists in step.
Everything for the work, in one plan
A plan holds as many tabs as you need. Beside a Board tab you can add a Sheet tab for the budget, a Form tab that collects requests, and a Dashboard tab that shows the board, the sheet and a Gantt chart of the cards on one page. Everything reads from the same cards, so nothing has to be copied across or kept in sync by hand.
Free, private, and yours to keep
Anyone can create a plan without signing up: a guest’s new plan is kept in their browser until they press Share, which syncs it in one step. A share link is an Editor, Participant or view-only link (a Participant can work on cards and cells, comment and vote without changing how the plan is set up), and it can carry a password or an expiry date.
liveplanner is free for everyone, with no paid tier, no ads and no third-party trackers. A board exports as CSV, an image, a PDF or a Markdown outline and a sheet as CSV, so your work is never locked in.
Coming from Trello? A board imports a CSV or TSV file: each row becomes a card, landing in the column its Status names and with the person its Assignee names. Only a title is required, and one undo takes the whole import back.
Trello alternative FAQ
Is liveplanner a free alternative to Trello?
Can I move my Trello boards across?
Does liveplanner have Power-Ups or automations?
Do my teammates need an account?
See how it feels
No sign-up, nothing to install, free forever. Start a plan and judge for yourself.
Comparisons reflect each product’s general positioning and may change. Check Trello’s own site for current details. Last reviewed .