If one or two of you are tracking fewer than about thirty open jobs, stay in the spreadsheet. Trello is the right move when the work is a pipeline with a handful of stages and every person on the team will open it. Notion earns its price when a job carries a dozen properties and you want the same rows shown as a board, a calendar and a table. The subscription decides almost none of this, because all three are cheap at this size; the switch and the weekly upkeep are what you are really buying. Prices and limits checked September 2026.
That thirty is our own line and nobody else's. It comes from what we have watched happen to trackers. A sheet survives a long list of rows and dies when the number of people editing it goes up. Two people can hold a shared sheet in their heads. Five cannot, and the sheet starts drifting out of date.
The three tools split at the same two questions
All of them will give a job a row, a card or a page, and let you put a client name and a due date on it. They stop resembling each other over who owns a job right now, and over whether you can see every open job at once on Monday morning, arranged the way you need it that day.
Exhibit 1
The three lanes stay identical until you ask who owns the job, where the spreadsheet answer stops being a field
A spreadsheet does more than it gets credit for, and stops in one place
A spreadsheet will assign work and email the person you assigned it to. In Google Sheets you put the address in a comment with an @ in front of it, tick the box next to "Assign to", and Google emails them. The claim that a sheet cannot hand out work is false.
What it cannot do is make that assignment a field on the row. The owner lives inside a comment thread, so you cannot filter by owner, group by owner, or count what each person has open. With two people that costs you nothing, because you both already know. With five it is the whole problem, and no amount of conditional formatting fixes it.
Capacity is not the limit either. A Google Sheet holds up to 10 million cells, so you will run out of people willing to keep it current long before you run out of room.
The price is close to zero. Excel is free in the browser. If you want the paid floor, Microsoft 365 Business Basic is $7.00 user/month paid yearly, or $8.40 user/month on a monthly subscription, and the plan page lists web and mobile versions of the apps. Google Workspace Business Starter shows $4.90 per user per month today against a struck-through $7.00, marked 30% off for three months, and the same page shows $7.00 from December 15, 2026 onwards. That is a promotion expiring, so budget the $7.00.
Trello's free plan is generous until you want a calendar
Trello free is better than its reputation. You get up to 10 boards per Workspace, up to 10 Collaborators, 250 Workspace command runs a month for automation, and attachments up to 10MB each. Power-Ups are unlimited per board now, so the one-Power-Up-per-board warning in older comparison articles is out of date.
For a firm of five running a pipeline, that is a real answer and you can sit on it for a long time.
Where Trello asks for money is the view. Calendar, timeline, table, dashboard and map views all arrive at Premium, which is $10 per user per month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly. Standard, at $5 per user per month annually or $6 monthly, has none of them. So price Trello by asking two things: whether you have run past the free limits of 10 boards and 250 command runs a month, and whether anybody needs to see the board as a calendar. A team inside the free limits pays nothing. A team that has outgrown those limits and does not need the calendar, timeline, table, dashboard or map views wants Standard. A team that needs those views wants Premium.
Trello works only when the whole team lives in it. A board that half the team ignores is worse than the sheet it replaced, because now there are two places to look and neither is trusted.
Notion is a paid product the day a second owner joins
Notion's free plan has a cliff. Block restrictions apply to free workspaces that have more than one workspace owner. The cap is 1,000 blocks per workspace, after which the workspace must move to a paid plan before anyone can create content again, with a three-day grace period once you reach the limit. Free Notion is a tool for one person, and the day a second owner joins you should price it as paid software.
Free also caps external guests at 10 and file uploads at 5MB each. Plus is $10 per member per month, with Notion advertising up to 20% off yearly. Business is $20 per member per month.
What the money buys is the one thing neither of the others does. The same set of rows can be shown as a list, a calendar, a chart or a board, and properties on each item label and sort it. Relations link separate databases, so a client record carries its projects and a project carries its tasks, with nothing re-typed between them. That is the case for Notion, and it holds when a job has an owner, a stage, a due date, a value, a folder of files and a running note attached to it.
Automation is where the tiers bite again. Database automations are on paid plans; free and Plus workspaces get buttons only, and custom database automations start at Business. Automations can recur on a schedule. The recurring trigger works with every automation action except editing a property, so check that before you design around it. Plain reminders do not recur at all, though they do notify the person at the time you set.
If you are weighing the top tier, Notion AI is included with Business and Enterprise plans, and workspaces on other plans get a limited amount of trial usage. Notion Workers are free to try on Business and Enterprise during the beta, and from October 15, 2026 they will require Notion credits.
Exhibit 2
Notion's free plan hits its wall the fastest, and that wall decides this more often than the prices do
The bill you do not see is the switch and the upkeep
None of the numbers above is the expensive part. Moving thirty live jobs out of a sheet into a new tool is a day of typing, followed by a fortnight where two systems are half-true and half the team checks the wrong one. The fields you invent in week one will be wrong by week four, because you write the first status column for how you wish the work moved.
Upkeep is the second cost. A tracker is worth its price only while it is true, and it stays true because it is somebody's job to make it so, on a fixed day. That is a standing line in a weekly review, and if there is no half hour a week for it then no product on this page will survive.
A tracker will not speed up work that is stuck for a different reason, so if jobs sit still for days, go and find the bottleneck holding them up before you buy anything. And keep the tracker out of the accounts. Stage and next action belong in the tracker; invoices and payments belong in the accounting software you picked. A column called "paid?" in a project tracker is how two sets of numbers start disagreeing.
Which one for which firm
One or two people, fewer than about thirty open jobs, three or four things you need to know about each one. Use a spreadsheet, and there is nothing wrong with that. Add a column for stage and a column for the next action, sort by next action, and read it every Monday.
Three to twenty people whose work moves through a handful of stages, where everyone will genuinely open it: Trello. Start free, take Standard when you pass ten boards or 250 command runs a month, and pay for Premium only when somebody needs the calendar or the timeline. Ten boards and ten collaborators will hold you longer than you think.
A job that carries many properties, and a need to see the same rows as a board on Monday, a calendar in the planning meeting and a table at invoicing time. That is Notion, priced at Plus per member from the first day. Anything you build on the free plan with a colleague is a trial, and the 1,000 block limit will end it.
If two of those descriptions fit you, the tie-breaker is the person who will keep it current, and whether that person thinks in grids or in cards. We would sooner see a maintained spreadsheet than an abandoned Notion workspace, and we have seen far more of the second.
Exhibit 3
The number of people who will edit it decides this before any feature list does
Before you open any of the three products, write down the five things a job record has to answer in your business. Most of the decision sits in that list, and the properties worth having are usually the ones already on your client onboarding checklist. Working out which stages the business actually runs on, and which of these tools fits them, is part of what our management consulting work covers.