Plan a project without flattening it into a list
Most project tools ask for the plan in the shape of a list, which is a good format for tracking work and a poor one for deciding what the work is. Dependencies are relationships between things, and a list can only ever put them in an order.
Lay the shape out before the schedule
Put the workstreams down as columns or comment zones, drop tasks into them, and connect the ones that block each other with lines. The critical path stops being something you calculate and becomes something you can see.
Nested boards are what keep this readable at scale. A workstream that has grown its own plan becomes one tile on the parent, and opens into a full board of its own.
Cards that keep track for you
Task cards hold checklists. Progress cards show a metric against a target. Countdown cards run to a real date, so the deadline on the board is the deadline rather than a note about one.
Smart checkboxes are the difference from a static plan: give one a deadline and it resolves itself, or wire a button to a group of cards and one click acts on all of them. A timer card can drive other cards on the same board.
Everyone on it at once
Live cursors and presence, so a planning session works with everybody on the board rather than one person driving a screen share. Roles are per person: editors change the plan, commenters can only annotate it, viewers get a clean read-only copy for the people who need to see it and should not be moving things.
Collaboration is free, for any number of people. A Team subscription buys your own people the Pro tools; it is not permission to work together.
What this is not good at
There is no Gantt view, no resource levelling and no burndown chart, and boards do not sync with Jira or Asana. There is a Todoist integration for tasks. If your project is being run to a schedule that someone reports on, this is where the plan gets made and not where it gets tracked.
Questions
- Is there a Gantt chart?
- No. There are timeline cards that place events on a real-time track, and countdown cards that run to a date, but nothing that produces a Gantt view or a critical-path calculation.
- How many people can work on a board?
- Any number, on any plan, including free. Sharing and real-time collaboration are not metered.
- Can I connect it to my task manager?
- Todoist, through the smart checkbox card. There is no Jira or Asana integration.
Start a board
Free, uncapped, and no card. Boards, cards, collaborators and exports are not metered on any plan — hosted uploads are the one thing Pro adds that free does not have.