I run my entire business on the free version of this tool!

THIS WEEK: We have covered Trello, Notion, and ClickUp before on their own merits. This week we narrow it down specifically for teams of under 5 people and pick a clear winner, including why I personally run my business on the free version of it.

Choosing project management software for a small team is one of those decisions that should take twenty minutes and instead takes weeks. The reason is that most comparison guides are written for a general audience, covering every use case from solo freelancers to five-hundred-person departments, and small business owners end up trying to map their two or three-person operation onto advice designed for a completely different scale of business.

For a team of under 5 people, the calculation is genuinely simpler than the general advice suggests. You do not need custom fields, advanced reporting, resource management, or multiple views of the same data. You need somewhere everyone can see what needs doing, who is doing it, and what stage it is at. That is it. Anything beyond that is a feature you will look at once, decide is interesting, and never open again.

This issue narrows down the three tools we have covered before to a specific recommendation for small teams, with the reasoning behind it and an honest account of where the free plan starts to strain.

The Three Options

Trello gives you boards, lists, and cards. You move a card from To Do to In Progress to Done. That is the entire mental model and it takes about ninety seconds to explain to a new team member. The free plan allows up to 10 boards per Workspace, unlimited cards, unlimited Power-Ups, up to 10 collaborators, 250 automation runs per month, and a 10MB file attachment limit. For a team of under 5, the 10-collaborator limit is not a constraint you will ever hit, and the 10-board limit is more than enough for a small business running a handful of active projects. There is no time limit on the free plan. Link: https://trello.com

Notion gives you a flexible workspace that can become a project tracker, but requires you to build the structure yourself using databases and templates. The free plan includes unlimited pages and blocks, unlimited page and database creation, and up to 10 guests who can view and comment but not edit. For a small team this is genuinely powerful once set up, but the setup itself is the barrier. Notion does not tell you how to organise your work. It gives you the building blocks and expects you to construct the system. For a team of under 5 who has the patience to build it properly, it can become more than a project tracker: a shared knowledge base, a client record system, and a task tracker in one place. Link: https://notion.so

ClickUp gives you the most features of the three on its free plan: unlimited users, unlimited tasks, Kanban boards, calendar view, time tracking, and docs, with the main limits being 100MB total storage and a lifetime cap of 100 uses on Gantt view and dashboards. For a team of under 5 this is more capability than you are likely to use. The breadth of features that makes ClickUp appealing on paper is also what makes it overwhelming in practice for a very small team: there are more settings, more views, and more configuration decisions than a team of two or three people managing straightforward work actually needs. Link: https://clickup.com

The Winner for Teams Under 5: Trello

For a team of under 5, Trello is the clear pick, and it is not close.

The reasoning is simple. A small team does not need the depth of Notion's flexibility or the breadth of ClickUp's feature set. What a small team needs is a tool that everyone opens and updates without friction, because the moment a tool requires effort to maintain, a small team with no dedicated project manager stops maintaining it. Trello's entire value proposition is that there is nothing to learn. You see a board, you see cards, you move the cards. Nobody needs training. Nobody needs a wiki page explaining how the workspace is organised. It just works the way it looks like it should work.

The 10-board and 10-collaborator limits on Trello's free plan, which are real constraints for a larger business, are almost irrelevant for a team of under 5. You are extremely unlikely to run more than 10 active projects simultaneously as a small team, and you will never hit a 10-collaborator cap with 5 people. The free plan genuinely covers everything a small team needs indefinitely, with no forced upgrade path lurking around the corner the way there is with some of the tools we have covered in other issues.

I run my business on the free version of Trello. Every active project, every client, every ongoing piece of work has a board. It is genuinely like a second brain to me at this point. I do not remember what needs doing next because I do not need to; I open the board and it is right there, exactly where I left it. I could not run my business without it. That is not a hypothetical endorsement. It is the actual tool I use every day, on the free plan, with no plans to change it.

Open Trello and create one board for your business. Set up three lists: To Do, In Progress, Done. If your work has a distinct handover stage, such as waiting on a client, add a fourth list for that.

Add a card for every active task or project. Do not try to add your entire history. Start with what is live right now. Assign cards to whoever on your team is responsible for them.

That is your system. Update it as you go: move cards as work progresses, add new cards as new work comes in, archive cards when they are done. The habit of opening it daily and keeping it current is what makes it useful, not any feature you have not used yet.

If your team is genuinely under 5 people, resist the urge to add complexity. No custom fields, no elaborate automation, no six different boards for six different aspects of the business. One board, three or four lists, cards that move. That is the whole system and it is enough.

NEED HELP? In over your head? Wearing too many hats already? No idea where to start? I can help you. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!

Trello Power-Ups (unlimited on the free plan) are worth exploring once you have the basic system running. The Calendar Power-Up adds a calendar view of your cards. The Custom Fields Power-Up lets you add structured data like due dates and priority levels to cards without upgrading. Both are free and let you extend Trello's basic model without needing a more complex tool.

Slack (slack.com) is worth mentioning alongside Trello because the combination of the two covers most of what a small team needs: Trello for what needs doing, Slack for talking about it. The free Slack plan includes unlimited direct messages and a 90-day searchable history, which is enough for most small teams.

The temptation with project management tools is to pick the one with the most features on the assumption that more capability means more value. For a small team this is backwards. More features mean more decisions, more configuration, and more opportunities for the tool to become something that requires maintenance rather than something that simply works.

Trello wins for teams under 5 specifically because it asks nothing of you. There is no onboarding curve, no structure to design, no features to ignore. You open it, you see what needs doing, you do it, you move the card. That simplicity is not a limitation. For a small team without a dedicated project manager, it is the entire point.

Need someone to do this properly rather than doing it yourself? I have been doing this for 17 years. Get in touch.

Got a tool you want me to review? Reply to this email. Need actual help with your business's systems or digital setup? I have been doing this for 17 years. Get in touch. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!