Trello is great until you need real permissions, real approvals, and real audit trails. Workhouse is a project management tool built around the visibility flag — your team sees everything, your clients see only the cards you choose to share.
Free during beta · Migration help included · 30-second setup
Trello's strength is its simplicity — cards on a board, drag-and-drop. That works for a team of three running a single project. It runs out of road fast for an agency. Boards are flat; there's no notion of internal vs. client-facing cards on the same board, so you maintain two: one with the real conversation, one for the client. Power-Ups add features but not the structural separation agencies need.
Approvals are manual. Audit history is missing or thin. Status reports are still a Friday writeup from scratch. And bringing clients onto your board means either sharing your whole workspace or building yet another board.
The board metaphor is wonderful for one team. For an agency running 5+ clients with mixed internal and client conversations, you need a tool that knows the difference.
The dimensions that matter when an agency is the audience.
| Trello | Workhouse | |
|---|---|---|
| Per-card visibility | No — share whole boards, not individual cards | Yes — flag on every task and comment, enforced in SQL |
| Client portal | Share a board with the client (they see everything on it) | Scoped per-client, branded as yours |
| Approvals workflow | Add a list, drag cards manually | Native — on the deliverable, tracked in the activity feed |
| Audit log | Card-level activity only; nothing immutable | Immutable, included on every workspace |
| Weekly status reports | Manual writeup | AI-drafted from the week's actual activity |
| Internal vs. client cards | Two boards, manual sync | One task, one visibility flag |
| Setup time (one client) | 15 min to make a board, ongoing maintenance | 30 seconds |
| Pricing model | Per-user, plus Power-Ups for missing features | Free during beta — client contacts are not seats |
We're built for agencies. Trello is excellent for everything else.
Beta migration is hands-on. We do the first one for you.
Trello exports each board as JSON. The data covers cards, lists, members, due dates, labels, and comments.
Send to migrate@workhouse.app. We'll review which boards are internal vs. client-facing and write the mapping.
Internal boards and their paired client-facing boards collapse into one Workhouse project per client, with visibility flags set per task. Labels become tags. Members become workspace members.
Each client gets a portal invite. The cards they used to see on the shared Trello board are still there — just better filtered.
“We ran Conversion Factory in Notion for years. Two databases, hundreds of dollars a month in Zapier glue, copy-pasting client comments into Slack to discuss them. At some point we realized we were building a whole new app on top of Notion — badly, with duct tape. So we built the app instead.”
Trello shares boards; Workhouse shares tasks. The unit of visibility on Trello is the whole board — you invite a client and they see every card on it. Workhouse's unit is the task and the comment, and the visibility is enforced one layer down in the database. Internal stays internal automatically.
Yes. Export your boards as JSON, email us the file, and we'll do the migration for you during beta. We typically collapse paired internal/client-facing boards into one Workhouse project per client.
Workhouse handles the core needs (approvals, status reports, audit log, client portal) natively — those don't need Power-Ups. For integrations beyond that, the API + webhooks are how most agencies wire to Slack, Loom, Figma, etc.
Workhouse has a Kanban view. It's not the only view — you also get list, calendar, and per-project views — but if Kanban is how you think about work, it's there.
No. The visibility model is the foundation; everything else (approvals, status reports, audit log, client portal) assumes it exists. Bolting these onto Trello via Power-Ups gets you 30% of the way and never closes the visibility gap.
Each client gets a portal scoped to their own work. They see tasks marked client-visible, comment on them, approve deliverables, and submit requests. They never see your other clients, your internal chatter, or anything marked internal — by SQL filter, not by hidden UI.