A Trello alternative for the ideas you never finish
Trello moves work through columns. Brassdeck keeps track of what you started, what went quiet, and why you stopped. Here is how to tell which one you need.
If you are looking for a Trello alternative, the first question is not which tool is better. It is what Trello is doing wrong for you, because Trello is very good at the thing it does and most people who leave it were asking it to do something else.
Stay on Trello if
Your work genuinely passes through stages, other people need to see which stage a thing is in, and moving a card from one column to the next is a real event in the world. A support queue. A hiring pipeline. Content going from draft to review to published. For that, a board of columns is the right shape and it is not close.
Look elsewhere if
The columns stopped meaning anything. The board is a hundred cards, most of them in a column called "Backlog" or "Someday", and the ones you care about are not distinguishable from the ones you gave up on months ago. Trello has no idea which of those is which, because the only thing it knows about a card is where you dragged it.
That is the case Brassdeck is built for. It is not a board of columns. It is a canvas holding everything you have started, one card per idea, and the one number it cares about is how long since this actually moved. That number only changes when something real happened. Dragging a card somewhere neater does not move it. Adding five steps you have not done does not move it, because planning is not progress.
Side by side
| Trello | Brassdeck | |
|---|---|---|
| The shape | Columns. A card is in exactly one of them. | A canvas. Position is yours and means whatever you decide. |
| What it knows about a card | Which column it is in, and its checklist. | How far the idea has travelled, and how long since it moved. |
| Stopping something | Archive it. It leaves the board. | Park it or drop it. It stays, with the reason you stopped. |
| Going quiet | Nothing happens. A stale card looks like a fresh one. | The card fades, and the clock says how long. Never red, never a streak. |
| Automation | Butler rules you configure. | A sentence. "Tell me when the video passes a thousand views." |
| Best for | A team moving work through a pipeline. | One person carrying more ideas than they can hold. |
If your question is "what stage is this in", stay. If it is "what have I let go cold", that is what this is for.
Moving over
There is no importer, on purpose. A hundred Trello cards copied across would be a hundred cards you had already stopped looking at, now on a canvas that fades the ones you ignore. Write down the five that still matter. That is the whole migration and it takes ten minutes.
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. See pricing for the rest, or read the manual first; it is public and there is a PDF.
Also compared: Notion, Linear, and all of them at once.