Trello and OpenProject both help teams organize work, but they sit at opposite ends of the project management spectrum. Trello, owned by Atlassian, is a simple cloud app built around cards on a Kanban board. OpenProject is an open-source suite with timelines, budgets, time tracking, and role-based access. Choosing between them is less about feature lists and more about how structured your projects actually are. Price matters too, but the deeper difference is where your project data lives and who controls it. This comparison breaks down the practical differences so you can pick with open eyes.

At a glance

• Work model. Trello tracks cards on boards and lists; OpenProject tracks typed work packages with relations, estimates, and schedules.
• Planning. OpenProject includes auto-scheduled Gantt timelines with dependencies and baselines; Trello offers a timeline only as a paid power-up.
• Money and time. OpenProject tracks budgets, labor costs, and logged hours; Trello has checklists and due dates but no financial layer.
• Hosting. Trello is cloud-only SaaS run by Atlassian; OpenProject can be self-hosted on servers you control.
• Pricing. Trello has a free tier plus per-user paid plans; the OpenProject community edition is free to self-host.

Where OpenProject wins

Complex, deadline-driven work. Dependencies between tasks reschedule automatically on the Gantt chart, and baselines show how the plan has drifted over time. Budgets, planned costs, and logged hours connect directly to the work packages they belong to, so project reporting does not need a spreadsheet on the side. Permissions go deep: clients and contractors can see their slice of a project without exposure to the rest. Self-hosting keeps confidential plans on your own hardware, and the GPLv3 license means team growth does not inflate a per-seat bill.

Where Trello wins

Speed and low friction. A new board takes seconds, and anyone understands cards, lists, and drag and drop within a minute. The free tier is generous for small teams, and the power-up marketplace adds calendars, voting, and automation without any server configuration. For editorial calendars, marketing boards, event planning, and volunteer projects, Trello stays out of the way and works on every device you own. Onboarding a new teammate takes minutes, not training sessions.

Pricing and self-hosting

Trello offers a free plan with limits on boards and power-ups, then Standard and Premium tiers billed per user per month, with all data stored in Atlassian’s cloud. OpenProject is open source: the community edition is free to self-host, and the company sells enterprise subscriptions that add support and advanced features. If the server work sounds like the dealbreaker, OpenSysLab runs hosted OpenProject on a private virtual machine with automatic installation and a Vibe-code agent to help manage it. Migration between the two is easy at small scale and painful at large scale, so decide before your board count grows. See the OpenProject product page for plans and regions.

Which should you choose?

Choose Trello when simplicity itself is the requirement and your work fits comfortably on a board. Choose OpenProject when projects carry budgets, dependencies, and reporting obligations, or when company policy keeps project data on infrastructure you own. The short version: Trello is easier to start, OpenProject is deeper to live with, and hosted OpenProject removes most of the setup cost of choosing depth.