OIO vs Trello
Trello organises cards. OIO organises a client business, with the boards included rather than being the whole product.
What Trello is good at
Trello is the easiest of all of them to start using, and for a simple board it is still hard to beat. If you want cards in columns and nothing more, it does that perfectly and free.
Where it stops
- Almost everything beyond a board is a Power-Up, and the useful ones cost extra or need a paid tier.
- No invoicing, no documents, no contracts, no client records.
- No real timeline or calendar without add-ons, so deadlines live in your head or another app.
- It scales badly. A board per client becomes twenty boards and no view across them.
What OIO does instead
OIO is project management for client work. Each client job gets one page with its tickets on a kanban or a timeline, status, budget and hours, deadline, files, team chat and recorded calls. Around it sit the inquiry form that brings the lead in, the prospect pipeline, and the proposal and invoice that come from the same project.
Your client logs into the same place with their own account and sees only their side: their project, their documents, their invoices. You can invite someone who is not on OIO yet, and they see the project once they sign up. Contracts and proposals go out for signature as a link, and the client signs on any device without an account.
One price covers the work and the money. Viewers are free and use no seat; only people who edit your work do, and Studio comes with five.
Feature by feature
| What you actually need | OIO | Trello |
|---|---|---|
| Project boards, kanban and timeline | ||
| A calendar of every deadline | ||
| Team chat inside each project | ||
| Client CRM and a lead form for your site | ||
| Invoices and proposals in any currency | ||
| Contracts and proposals your client signs online | ||
| Whiteboard and file transfer built in | ||
| An assistant that files the work for you | ||
| One login and one price for work and money |
Has it Partly, or a paid add-on Does not
Compared against each product's own published plans in August 2026. The middle mark means it exists only on a higher tier, as a paid add-on, or through a third-party integration. Prices are left out on purpose because they change.
Try it against your own work
Free plan, no card. Set up in under a minute, and you can keep using Trello alongside it while you decide.
Start freeOther comparisons: OIO vs ClickUp, OIO vs Monday, OIO vs Notion, OIO vs Asana, OIO vs HoneyBook, OIO vs Dubsado, OIO vs Bonsai, OIO vs ShotGrid, OIO vs ftrack, OIO vs Kitsu, OIO vs Productive, OIO vs Teamwork. All of them on one page. Or see the full picture of what OIO does.