Jira vs Trello vs Breeze: A Detailed Comparison [August 2024]

Jira vs Trello vs Breeze: Comparison Summary

Jira	Trello	Breeze
User Interface and Learning Curve
⭐⭐⭐ Complex interface with a steep learning curve. Powerful but overwhelming for new users. Best for teams with technical expertise or dedicated Jira managers. Requires time to master.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Initially disorienting but quickly becomes intuitive. User-friendly board-centric interface. Easy to navigate between frequently used boards. Suitable for most users with minimal training.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Exceptionally user-friendly with a clean, customizable interface. Straightforward navigation and feature set. Allows admins to hide unused features, simplifying the experience for team members.
Core Project Management Features
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly structured, project-centric approach. Excels in task management, extensive workflow customization, and robust Agile support. Ideal for huge teams.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Flexible, board-centric platform. Simple yet effective task management and workflow building. Adaptable for Agile teams. Best for small teams or individuals.	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Balances structure and flexibility. Offers project-centric organization with customizable views. Includes time tracking and Agile-friendly features. Suitable for small to medium teams.
Collaboration and Team Features
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Robust collaboration with extensive communication tools, comprehensive file management, and granular user permissions. Made for large organizations.	⭐⭐⭐ Streamlined collaboration with basic card comments and file attachments. Offers straightforward user roles suitable for smaller businesses.	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Includes built-in messaging and comprehensive file management. Offers customizable user roles, striking a middle ground between simplicity and advanced functionality. Flexible for most business sizes.
Reporting and Visibility
🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers comprehensive reporting with highly customizable widgets and dashboards. Built-in basic time logging features. Ideal for in-depth analysis.	⭐⭐ Basic reporting with limited charts. No native time tracking. Relies mainly on third-party integrations for these features.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers report generation with focused, customizable reports and integrated time tracking. Useful for getting a quick overview and using data in accounting software.
Scalability and Advanced Features
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Handles complex projects across multiple teams. Offers varied views, dependency mapping, and customizable rule-based automations. Made for large-scale operations.	⭐⭐⭐ Provides flexible board-centered approach with card-based automations. Includes calendar view and basic analytics. Best for smaller-scale project visualization.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Combines boards, list views, and project dashboards. Features roadmap planning, multi-project calendar, and practical automations. Integrates with external workflow tools.
Pricing
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Free for up to 10 users. Paid plans start at $8.15 and go up to $16 per user/month for up to 100 users. Enterprise starts at $141,000/year.	⭐⭐⭐⭐ Free plan available. Paid plans range from $6 to $12.5 per user/month. Enterprise starts at $17.5/user/month for 50+ users.	🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ One plan: $10 per user/month with all features included. No tiered pricing or user limits. 10% discount for annual subscriptions.Offers a 14-day free trial.
Best For
Large tech-savvy organizations that manage complex, enterprise-level projects for maximum efficiency.	Individuals and small teams that want an intuitive and flexible board platform for simple project management and collaboration.	Small and mid-sized teams in need of an easy-to-use project and task management tool for various departments.
Free plan(no credit card required)	Free plan(no card required)	Try free for 14 days(no card required)

What is Jira?

"Project management at enterprise scale" 🏢🗄️

In 2002, college friends Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian to create a work environment where they could be who they authentically are. Their first product was Jira 1.0, inspired by the need for better project management tools in software development. In 2021, Jira Work Management was added to the stack.

Today, Jira offers robust project management features tailored for agile software development teams. Its core strengths include customizable workflows, advanced permission controls, and extensive Agile methodology support. Jira excels in issue tracking, sprint planning, and cross-team collaboration. The platform provides detailed analytics and reporting tools, allowing teams to visualize project progress and optimize their processes. Jira's flexibility comes from its wide range of integrations and add-ons available through the Atlassian Marketplace.

Jira is primarily designed for large enterprises and complex software development projects. Its scalability and advanced features make it ideal for organizations managing multiple teams and projects simultaneously.

What is Trello?

"Flexible visualization boards for better productivity" 🎨⚙️

Trello was born in 2011 from a Fog Creek Software prototype aimed at solving high-level planning issues. Initially called Trellis, it narrowly avoided names like Cardvark and Planatee before launching at TechCrunch Disrupt. By 2014, Trello had spun off as its own company and was acquired by Atlassian in 2017.

At its core, Trello is a flexible work management tool that uses a visual, board-based system for organizing tasks and workflows. Its standout features include customizable boards, lists, and cards that can be enriched with checklists, due dates, attachments, and more. Trello's Power-Ups (add-ons) and automation capabilities allow teams to tailor the platform to their specific needs, from simple to-do lists to project management across multiple teams.

Its intuitive interface and adaptability make it ideal for individuals, small businesses, and startups looking for a straightforward yet powerful project management solution. Its flexibility also allows it to scale, however, it becomes messy and hard to oversee with multiple large teams using it.

What is Breeze?

"Project management for people, not machines" 🗂️✅🧑‍🦰

Breeze started in 2012 because the founders were frustrated with overly complex project management tools. They created a simple, intuitive solution for tracking work progress, team assignments, and time investment, designed to be accessible to both technical and non-technical users.

Breeze offers streamlined project management with essential features like customizable boards, task management with time tracking, and personal task views. It includes integrated messaging and flexible admin controls to hide unused features and simplify the user experience. Breeze also comes with filter-based customizable reporting tools for efficient progress tracking, intuitive resource management across projects or team members, and high-level project planning with roadmaps.

Breeze is the ideal work management platform for small to mid-sized teams without technical expertise. It's invaluable for managers who want to quickly figure out how work is going, where problems are, and whether plans are on track. And it's invaluable to team members who want to personalize and simplify their collaboration and task-tracking experience.

Jira vs Trello vs Breeze: User Interface and Learning Curve

Breeze is simple, customizable, and user-friendly, Jira is complex but powerful, and Trello is somewhere in the middle.

Breeze focuses on simplicity and allows you to customize your experience.

Breeze's user interface is very straightforward and doesn't overwhelm you with menus and options. When you log in, you land on the Home tab and get a quick overview of recent tasks, projects, private notes, and your calendar.

Navigating through Breeze's menus, there are no sidebar menus covering the whole screen, only the main navigation menu on the top and tab-specific options on the page.

Breeze's philosophy is a simple user experience, accessible to all users. That's why it allows admins to hide certain features for the whole team like messages, the calendar view, reports, the activity tab, time tracking in tasks, and more.

Jira's learning curve is steep — some users will probably never fully grasp its features.

Jira's interface is cluttered with menus and overwhelming for new users.

It does include a quickstart guide for every main menu tab you open and helps you set up your first project step-by-step but, since the main workflow for most users revolves around the project view, it's unlikely they will familiarize themselves with all of Jira's features naturally.

None of this will probably be an issue if you have someone on your team who can educate other team members and manage your Jira environment.

Trello is straightforward to use even though it seems complex at first.

Trello's interface can also be disorienting at first but you get used to it quickly and, once you know what's where, it gets very easy to use.

This is mainly because you'll spend most of your time directly hopping between a few of your most used boards in the quick-access menu. Trello would be even more user-friendly if it had the option to hide some less-used menus or options like Breeze does.

Winner: Breeze takes the lead in this round with its straightforward interface and ability to hide certain features to customize and simplify your experience.

Jira vs Trello vs Breeze: Core Project Management Features

Jira offers the best structure for large teams, Trello provides flexibility for small businesses, and Breeze balances both for small to medium-sized teams.

Task Management and Organization: Jira is highly structured and built around projects, Trello is most flexible with its board-centric approach, while Breeze is balanced with a focus on simplicity and customizability.

Jira's task management is project-centric — you spend most of your time inside project views.

Tasks, or "issues" in Jira, are organized within projects and can be viewed in multiple ways, including boards, lists, and calendars. You can enrich each task with metadata such as priority, labels, categories, due dates, custom fields, and more.

Jira also offers advanced planning options with “Plans” on the Premium plan.

This is a separate toolset from projects, meant to help you manage projects much like you manage tasks inside the project view but across multiple projects, teams, and goals.

Trello, on the other hand, is board-centric and takes a more straightforward approach to task management.

It's built around boards where you organize tasks (cards) into lists, like Jira's Board View inside Projects. While simpler than Jira at the high level, Trello offers the same task features including checklists, due dates, labels, and attachments to manage tasks.

This simple, unstructured approach makes it naturally fit for managing workflows at any level, as opposed to projects.

For example, you could have personal to-dos, a project overview board, and department-specific workflows in the same workspace — you can easily manage your entire business with it. The downside is that, once you have multiple departments working on multiple projects, its complexity balloons exponentially because you have to keep adding more boards.

Breeze is somewhere between Jira's structure and Trello's flexibility.

Like Jira, it's also built around projects, each with a board, and also supports a list view, dashboard, and activity overview to help you get the insights you need and customize your experience.

But that's where the two platforms diverge.

Unlike Jira, Breeze is built from the ground up with simplicity and clarity for non-techy end users.

That's why all the tasks a user is assigned also appear on their personal Task board, accessible in the top menu from anywhere in the app. To be frank, if you're only a project contributor, you could only work with the Task view to do all your work and only switch to the Home or Projects tabs occasionally to get a broader picture.

You can also customize this view to fit your own style with filters and by showing or hiding task details.

If you open a task, Breeze's task customization options are pretty much the same as Jira and Trello's.

A unique Breeze feature is the task-integrated timer — particularly useful for teams that monitor time investment. This can be disabled if you don't need it.

Workflow Building: Jira offers the most extensive workflow-building tools but is the least flexible, Trello keeps it simple yet effective, and Breeze provides a middle ground with easy-to-use customization options.

Jira Workflows are like roadmaps for your tasks. They show the different stages (statuses) a task goes through from start to finish.

The main parts are:

• Statuses: Where a task is at (e.g., "To Do," "In Progress")
• Transitions: How tasks move between statuses
• Resolutions: The final state when a task is closed

You can customize workflows to match how your team actually works. Simple projects might just need "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done", while more complex ones can have more steps like drafting, writing, ready to review, reviewing, and publishing.

Workflows connect to Jira's boards, turning statuses into columns for easy visual tracking and you can also set rules about who can move tasks to certain statuses.

Trello's workflow customization is aligned with its philosophy: Make it yourself from a Trello board.

You can create a board specifically for workflow management and set up the steps as lists. Its Power-Ups (add-ons) and automation also give you additional customization options like creating dependencies between boards.

Breeze lets you build workflows using boards in the Project view, much like Trello.

But Breeze goes a step further by offering a high-level view of all your projects in the Roadmap tab — something you won't find in Trello. Breeze also supports task dependencies; you can set up conditions that have to be met before you can work on other tasks. Jira also supports dependencies natively, while Trello doesn't.

Then there are Breeze's automations.

Trello has the edge over Breeze in automations and extensions, but Breeze also lets you automate task management. You can set up project-specific (1) and list-specific (2) automations, as well as automate repeating tasks (3).

Agile and Other Methodology Support: Jira is built with Agile in mind, Trello can be adapted for Agile workflows, and Breeze offers Agile-friendly features without being Agile-centric.

Jira is renowned for its robust support of Agile methodologies.

It offers dedicated features such as Scrum boards and Kanban boards, sprint planning (shown in the image below), backlog management, burndown charts, and velocity tracking. Its extensive reporting capabilities also support Agile-specific reports for continuous process improvement.

Most of these features are available on the Premium plan and above though.

While not explicitly designed for Agile, Trello's flexibility allows it to be adapted for Agile workflows.

Its boards can easily represent Agile sprints or product backlogs and, with the help of Power-Ups, you can add more Agile-specific features like sprint planning or burndown charts. It even comes with Agile workflow templates to help you get started.

Breeze, while not primarily marketed as an Agile tool, aligns well with Agile principles — like Trello.

You can use its boards and customizable views to implement Agile workflows, while the built-in time tracking and estimation features are useful for sprint planning and monitoring. It doesn't offer the depth of Agile-specific features like Jira but provides a good balance for small teams that use Agile practices.

Verdict: Choose Jira if you need a comprehensive solution to manage large teams over many projects. On the other hand, Breeze is the best choice if your team needs a simple, customizable platform that everyone can use and that's scalable from simple to-dos to multiple business teams working on multiple projects. Trello is a good choice if you're a small team and want to set up your own business workflows with boards.

Jira vs Trello vs Breeze: Collaboration and Team Features

Trello offers basic card comments, Jira expands with forms and pages, while Breeze comes with integrated messaging — each progressively enhancing team communication.

Communication Tools: Trello allows you to comment inside cards, Jira allows the same and adds pages and forms, while Breeze matches them in tasks and takes it to the next level with built-in messaging.

Trello's approach to communication is very streamlined.

It allows you to comment on cards and mention team members using '@' notifications. It also allows customizable notifications, allowing you to update members or stakeholders on board and card activities via email or mobile push notifications.

Jira's approach is the same as Trello's but slightly expanded.

Each "issue" in Jira serves as a collaboration hub where team members can leave comments, mention colleagues using '@' notifications, and engage in task-specific discussions. It also includes:

• Forms to collect information and capture work from other teams or stakeholders in your organization.
• Team pages to share knowledge and key resources.
• Custom notifications to keep team members in the loop.

Breeze, like Jira and Trello, allows you to collaborate with comments inside task cards and comes with customizable notifications.

But Breeze stands out with the “Messages” tab — a built-in internal messaging portal where admins can create groups around topics and invite members to participate. It's not as feature-rich as dedicated messaging apps like Slack but offers a seamless, integrated communication experience especially useful if you don't want to pay for separate apps.

File Sharing and Attachments: Jira and Breeze provide convenient file management for each project, while Trello's file sharing is simplistic.

Jira offers robust file-sharing and attachment capabilities.

You can attach files to issues and comments, and even create dedicated pages for documentation by integrating with Confluence. Each project has an attachment tab where you can see, search, and filter all attachments added across all tasks, making it easy to locate and manage files within large projects.

Breeze offers the same functionality; tasks, comments, and all, the only difference being that the Files menu isn't a separate tab like in Jira's projects but a popup library in the Project view.

In Trello, you can attach files to cards like in Jira and Breeze but it doesn't offer any other file-sharing features.

User Management and Permissions: Jira offers the most granular control over user permissions, Trello has basic role management, while Breeze is somewhere in the middle.

Jira offers the most comprehensive user management and permission system of the three. To give you a good overview, we first need to clarify a few concepts:

At Jira's foundation are users (individual accounts that can log into Jira) and groups (collections of users sharing the same global permissions).

Then there are Permission Schemes, which are combinations of permissions granted to groups, project roles, and users, applied on a per-project basis. They can be associated with multiple projects to ensure consistent access rights across the organization.

Finally, we get to Jira's three permission levels:

• Global permissions apply system-wide and are granted to user groups, controlling actions like system administration and user browsing.
• Project permissions are created within permission schemes and assigned to projects (they include three roles: Administrators, Developers, and Users). These govern what users can do within projects (like administering projects or managing sprints).
• Issue permissions, organized into security schemes, determine actions users can perform on individual issues (tasks within projects), like assigning, creating, or editing them.

As you can see, Jira's permission management system is made for large organizations.

Then there's Trello. Even though it's also an Atlassian product, you can't manage user access in the Atlassian Admin panel.

In free Workspaces, all members have admin status for easy collaboration. The Standard plan offers more granular control, allowing Workspace admins to manage member roles, board visibility, and guest access. Premium gives admins even more options, allowing them to manage board creation and multi-board guest access. For enterprises, Trello offers a Systems Admin role for high-level management across multiple Workspaces, including enforcing security and privacy settings.

Boards can be set to one of three visibility levels:

• Workspace visible: accessible to all members of the Workspace, allowing them to view, join, and edit cards.
• Private: restrict access to invited members only.
• Public: viewable by anyone with the link and indexed by search engines, but only board members can edit cards.

Premium users can also restrict who can create or delete boards of different visibility levels, and manage guest access to boards.

Unlike Trello or Jira, Breeze's access controls aren't as complicated. It has four types of users:

1. Account owner: can create new projects, add/remove all people, grant permissions, and manage account billing.
2. Admin: can create new projects, add/remove all people, and grant permissions.
3. User: can create new projects, and add/remove people from their projects.
4. Client: can add comments to tasks, upload files to comments, and optionally move tasks around.

All users only have access to the projects they are invited to and only the account owner can see all projects.

Winner: Trello collaboration features are simple — great for small teams but not suited for big companies, while its access controls are very flexible. Jira has comprehensive permission management and better communication tools than Trello; perfect for large enterprises. Breeze offers the best built-in collaboration features and straightforward user management; best suited for small or medium-sized businesses.

Jira vs Trello vs Breeze: Reporting and Visibility

Trello offers basic reporting with limited customization, Jira provides extensive reporting tools with high customization, and Breeze strikes a balance with focused, customizable reports.

Built-in Reports and Analytics: Jira offers the most comprehensive reporting options, Breeze provides focused and customizable reports, while Trello's reporting capabilities are limited.

Jira's reporting capabilities are extensive and highly customizable.

Each project has a Reports tab with widgets to create custom reports and visualize every aspect of your project. The widgets include pie charts (2), bar charts with weighted averages, time reports, and more to analyze tasks, forecast outcomes, and manage workloads (1).

Jira also has a dedicated Dashboards tab where you can create custom dashboards with even more in-depth analytics across projects and your entire organization.

Breeze takes a more focused approach to reporting.

All report generation and analytics happen in its single Reports tab. You can create reports by using filters such as project, user, list, tag, swimlane, and status, based on a set time frame. It's not as in-depth as Jira but it's easy to use and flexible; you can get a good overview across projects, in one specific project, or for one user — all in one tool.

Breeze also allows you to export report data into accounting software for billing and invoicing. Its reporting features are especially useful if you use the built-in time tracking tool or one of its time tracking integrations.

Meanwhile, Trello's built-in analytics are the most basic of the three.

Each board has a Dashboard view that provides three simple charts: bar, pie, and line. These help you visualize four different types of information: cards per list, cards per label, cards per member, and cards per due date. This is it.

You can use these views for a quick overview but I found that it's finicky to set up properly and it forces you to use boards in a certain way, which defeats the main purpose of Trello — its flexibility.

If analytics and visualization are a must for you, it's better to just go with one of the other tools.

Time Tracking: Breeze offers built-in time tracking, Jira offers time tracking with extensive reporting, while Trello relies on third-party integrations.

Breeze offers integrated, task-specific time tracking.

You can estimate the required time for each task and also track actual time spent directly within the task view. In case you already use a time tracking app (or just want to), it also integrates with all major time tracking tools like Toggl Track, Clockify, Harvest, TimeCamp, and Hubstaff.

It's worth noting that most time tracking apps don't allow distinguishing between billable/non-billable tracking on their free plans, while Breeze includes this by default.

Jira also offers built-in time tracking capabilities but they aren't as easy to use as with Breeze. You can log work done on tasks manually but it doesn't offer a timer that you can toggle on and off.

Trello doesn't have native time tracking. However, it can be extended with various Power-Ups (Trello's term for add-ons).

Verdict: It's a tie between Breeze and Jira. For robust reporting and time tracking, Jira leads with comprehensive, customizable analytics and built-in time logging. On the other hand, Breeze offers a balance of focused reporting and user-friendly time tracking, ideal for teams that need straightforward analytics and functional time tracking in one project management tool.

Jira vs Trello vs Breeze: Pricing

Trello offers the best free plan for small teams. Jira suits larger teams with complex needs. Breeze provides all features at a flat rate, ideal for budget-conscious teams of any size.

Free vs Paid Plans

Jira, Trello, and Breeze offer different pricing structures to cater to various team sizes and needs.

For small teams and startups, Trello's free plan offers the most value with 10 boards and unlimited users. However, if your team is lean and won't get bigger for a while, Jira's free plan is better with unlimited projects and key features unlocked for up to 10 users.

Switching from free to paid plans, Trello's Standard plan is cheap but very limited: as soon as you need more than a board view (like a timeline, calendar, or workspace-level views), you need to switch to Premium. So, realistically, any serious business will need Trello premium, which means Breeze immediately becomes the most cost-effective option if you want a simple-to-use project management software.

Jira's Standard plan is also a cost-effective solution if you and your team are fine with a complex user experience — until you need more high-level management features like capacity management or cross-project task dependencies. Breeze also includes those features on its single plan.

Enterprise Options

For large enterprises, both Jira and Trello offer tailored solutions:

Jira Enterprise is better suited for very large organizations needing extensive customization and cross-team planning. It's particularly strong for software development teams.

While Trello offers an enterprise plan, it's probably better to just go with Jira at this point, since Trello's feature set isn't really made to manage huge teams across many complex and interdependent projects.

Jira vs Trello vs Breeze: Pros & Cons

Jira suits large, complex projects and software teams, Trello excels for small teams needing flexibility, while Breeze balances user-friendliness and features for small to medium teams.

Jira Pros	Jira Cons
✅ Extensive workflow customization	❌ Complex interface with a steep learning curve
✅ Robust Agile methodology support	❌ Higher pricing for advanced features
✅ Comprehensive reporting and analytics tools	❌ Complex for small teams or simple projects
✅ Granular user permissions and access controls	❌ Cluttered interface with many menus
✅ Scalable for large organizations
✅ Made for software developers

Trello Pros	Trello Cons
✅ Intuitive, board-centric interface	❌ Limited built-in reporting and analytics
✅ Flexible and adaptable for various workflows	❌ Less suitable for large-scale operations
✅ Customizable with various Power-Ups	❌ Basic collaboration features
✅ Great free plan for small teams (up to 10 boards)	❌ Can become complex with multiple boards for large projects

Breeze Pros	Breeze Cons
✅ Very intuitive interface	❌ No free plan available
✅ Highly customizable experience	❌ Fewer integrations and add-ons compared to Jira and Trello
✅ Built-in time tracking and estimation	❌ Not made for enterprise-level amounts of users
✅ Single, all-inclusive pricing plan
✅ Cost-effective for teams of various sizes
✅ Integrated messaging for team communication

Final Verdict: Jira vs Trello vs Breeze

Large enterprises will thrive with Jira, small teams will love Trello, and growing businesses will find balance with Breeze

These three tools cater to different organizational needs and stages of growth: Trello is ideal for startups and small teams, Breeze serves growing businesses effectively, and Jira is the go-to solution for large enterprises with complex project management needs.

Use Jira if:

• You're a large organization managing multiple complex projects.
• You require extensive customization and detailed reporting.
• You have dedicated personnel to manage the platform.
• You need robust Agile methodology support.

Click here to get started with Jira!

Use Trello if:

• You prefer a highly visual, board-based approach to project management.
• You need a flexible system that can adapt to various workflows.
• You're a small team or individual looking for an intuitive tool.
• You want a great free option to get started.

Click here to get started with Trello!

Use Breeze if:

• You need built-in time tracking and estimation capabilities.
• You want all features included in a single, cost-effective pricing plan.
• You're a small to medium-sized team seeking a balance of features and simplicity.
• You prefer a clean, customizable interface that's easy for all team members to use.

Click here to get started with Breeze!