Brassdeck versus the alternatives
An honest comparison with Trello, Notion, Linear and a notes app, including the cases where you should use one of those instead.
Most comparison pages are written by the winner. This one is too, so here is the part those pages leave out: three of the four tools below are better than Brassdeck at the thing they were built for, and if that thing is what you need, you should use them.
What follows is what Brassdeck is actually for, and how to tell whether that is you.
What Brassdeck is
A canvas holding everything you have started, one card per idea, with an honest record of where each one stands. It is not a task list. A card is an intention worth keeping rather than a thing you owe, and deciding to stop one is an outcome the app is built to make easy rather than a failure it nags you about.
The whole design follows from one number: how long since this actually moved. That number only changes when something real happened. Renaming a card does not move it. Dragging it somewhere neater does not move it. Adding five steps you have not done does not move it, because planning is not progress. Nearly every other tool in this list will let you feel busy; this one will not.
Versus Trello
Trello is a board of columns you drag cards between, and it is very good at that. If your work has stages that a card genuinely passes through, and other people need to see which column it is in, Trello is the better tool and it is not close.
| Trello | Brassdeck | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Columns. A card is in exactly one of them. | A canvas. Position is yours and means whatever you decide. |
| What it tracks | Where a card sits in a workflow you defined. | How far an idea has travelled, and how long since it moved. |
| Stopping something | Archive it. It leaves the board. | Park or drop it. It stays, with the reason you stopped. |
| Best for | A team moving work through a pipeline. | One person carrying more ideas than they can hold. |
Use Trello if the question you keep asking is "what stage is this in". Use Brassdeck if it is "what have I let go cold".
Versus Notion
Notion will do everything on this page and a hundred things besides. That is its strength and the reason people bounce off it: before Notion can tell you anything, you have to build the thing that tells you. Databases, properties, views, relations, templates. Plenty of people enjoy that. Plenty of people spend a weekend on it and never open it again.
| Notion | Brassdeck | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | You design the system before you can use it. | Four stages and a card. Nothing to configure. |
| Flexibility | Nearly unlimited, and that is the cost as well as the point. | Deliberately narrow. It does one thing and refuses the rest. |
| Staleness | A "last edited" timestamp, which any edit resets. | A clock that moves only on real progress and never flatters. |
| Best for | A wiki, a docs home, a team knowledge base. | The list of things you started, kept honest. |
If you already have a Notion setup you love, keep it. Brassdeck is for the person whose Notion has three abandoned systems in it.
Versus Linear
Linear is the best issue tracker made, and if you are shipping software with a team you should be using it rather than this. It assumes work is assigned, estimated, and closed. Brassdeck assumes nobody assigned you anything and the hard part is remembering what you cared about in March.
| Linear | Brassdeck | |
|---|---|---|
| Assumes | A team, a backlog, cycles, an assignee. | One person and a pile of half-started things. |
| Pressure | Deliberate. Velocity and cycles are the point. | Deliberately absent. No ranking, no score, no streak. |
| Best for | Software teams shipping on a cadence. | Side projects, businesses, writing, a house move. |
Versus a notes app
This is the real competition, and the honest answer is that a notes app is where most of these ideas already live. The problem is not that Apple Notes cannot hold them. It is that a note never tells you it has gone quiet, so a hundred notes and one note feel identical until you scroll.
Brassdeck keeps notes too, for exactly this reason, and a note here has no stage and no clock on purpose. Something you wrote down to stop holding it should never grow an obligation.
Who should not use it
If you need assignees, due dates that chase people, time tracking, invoicing, Gantt charts or approvals, this is the wrong tool and it is not going to grow into the right one. Those are deliberate absences.
What it costs
Free is 4 cards with 20 steps each, and it stays free. Every new workspace gets two weeks of the paid tier with no card asked for, and when that ends nothing is deleted or locked. You keep reading and editing what you already wrote. See pricing for the rest.
If you want to know exactly how it works before signing up for anything, the manual is public and there is a PDF of it.