# Mainstream / Team-Oriented Kanban and Project Boards

This document covers the mainstream, team-oriented kanban and project-board segment: cloud-hosted, account-based, multiplayer-first tools where the board lives on a vendor's server and is accessed through a web or desktop client.
It is the segment Lanework is explicitly not competing head-on with (Lanework's boards are folders and Markdown files on disk, single-tenant, editor/git/agent-friendly), but understanding how this segment wins, monetizes, and where it frustrates users is the baseline for positioning everything else against.
Researched: 2026-08-01

## Trello

- Positioning: the original consumer-friendly, card-based kanban tool; now Atlassian's low-friction on-ramp for individuals and small teams, sitting below Jira in Atlassian's portfolio.
- Pricing: Free, Standard $5/user/mo, Premium $10/user/mo, Enterprise $17.50/user/mo (annual billing shaves ~17% off Standard/Premium); free tier now ships unlimited Power-Ups (up from a 1-Power-Up cap in earlier years).
- Standout features / direction: 2025-2026 added Timeline, Dashboard, and Calendar views on Standard+; AI additions are incremental — AI quick-capture on Standard, AI content generation on Premium — described by reviewers as "help drafting, not project intelligence."
- Signals: still huge — 50M+ global users, ~36,850 paying customers, subscriber base up ~25% YoY, and Trello is credited with contributing 700M+ of Atlassian's annual revenue. A 2025 UI redesign drew user backlash but doesn't appear to have dented growth.
- Common complaints: to match what competitors ship natively (Gantt, time tracking, reporting) users stack 3-4 paid Power-Ups, which can add $20-40/user/mo on top of the subscription — at that point it's pricier than ClickUp or monday.com; no native task dependencies; permission/visibility gaps flagged by teams handling sensitive data; automation (Butler) run limits bite on the free plan.

## Asana

- Positioning: work-management platform for cross-functional teams that need process (goals, portfolios, workflows) more than a raw board; positioned above Trello, competing with monday.com and ClickUp.
- Pricing: Free (Personal), Starter ~$10.99-13.49/user/mo, Advanced ~$24.99/user/mo (annual pricing varies by source/region); AI Studio ships with Starter+ and includes a monthly AI-credit allowance.
- Standout features / direction: multiple views (kanban board, timeline, calendar, Gantt-style); Asana AI adds Smart Status (auto-analyzes project health) and Smart Summaries (AI recap of task/project activity).
- Signals: large enterprise install base, steady public-company revenue growth; frequently named in "vs monday.com" comparison content, suggesting the two are each other's primary consideration set for buyers.
- Common complaints: kanban board has no WIP limits, a real gap for teams trying to run disciplined flow; pricing escalates fast at scale; time tracking and other useful features are gated behind higher tiers; users want AI available below the Starter tier.

## Monday.com

- Positioning: "Work OS" — a highly visual, color-coded board-and-automation platform sold to ops-heavy teams (marketing, CRM, HR) as much as engineering; broad horizontal play.
- Pricing: Basic $9/user/mo, Standard $12/user/mo, Pro $19/user/mo (annual), custom Enterprise; seats are sold in fixed blocks ("seat step"), not exact headcount.
- Standout features / direction: repositioned in May 2026 as an "AI work platform with agents that actually do work"; AI is bundled into paid-plan seat pricing, but included credits cover only trial-level usage before teams must buy add-on credit packs.
- Signals: public company (NASDAQ: MNDY); FY2025 revenue $1.232B (+27% YoY), Q1 2026 revenue $351.3M (+24% YoY), full-year 2026 guidance $1.466-1.474B; >$500K-ARR customer cohort grew 74% YoY; enterprise is now >42% of ARR; 250K+ customers, 2.5M+ paying users; GAAP-profitable with strong operating cash flow. This is the clearest financial-success story in the segment.
- Common complaints: "seat step" billing forces paying for more seats than headcount; Reddit threads report serious customer-support frustration ("avoid this software at all costs" is a recurring sentiment); one analysis found tool-migration-away-from-monday.com activity up 23% YoY, suggesting churn pressure even as revenue grows — a "winning on financials, losing some goodwill" profile.

## Jira (incl. Jira's kanban story)

- Positioning: the engineering/agile default — kanban is a first-class board type alongside Scrum, but Jira's gravity is issue-tracking-for-developers rather than general-purpose kanban; kanban here means WIP-limited flow tightly coupled to sprints, backlogs, and dev tooling (branches, PRs, CI).
- Pricing: Free (up to 10 users, unlimited projects/issues, Scrum+Kanban boards, but capped at 2GB storage, 100 automation runs/mo, 100 emails/day, community support only), Standard ~$6.52-7.91/user/mo, Premium ~$14.54/user/mo, custom Enterprise; Data Center (self-hosted) pricing rose ~15% in Feb 2026.
- Standout features / direction: kanban vs. Scrum boards are differentiated primarily by sprint structure (Scrum = fixed iterations + ceremonies + roles; Kanban = continuous pull-based flow with WIP limits, no forced estimation) — this dual-mode flexibility inside one tool is Jira's core kanban pitch.
- Signals: still the default for software teams; steady Atlassian-wide growth (see Trello section for shared Q3 FY2026 figures: revenue $1.787B, +32% YoY).
- Common complaints: the real cost is the ecosystem, not the seat — no native time tracking or docs (needs Tempo/Confluence, both extra), Marketplace add-ons that can double per-user spend; steep learning curve alienates non-developer teams trying to use it as a general project board; regular price increases on both cloud and self-hosted tiers.

## ClickUp

- Positioning: "one app to replace them all" — maximalist all-in-one (docs, chat, whiteboards, goals, time tracking, kanban and 15+ other views) aimed at teams who want to consolidate tool sprawl.
- Pricing: Free, then per-user paid tiers; pricing has been volatile enough that one Reddit user reported a bill jumping from $150 to nearly $1,200 overnight without warning.
- Standout features / direction: ClickUp Brain (AI) expanded in 2026 with predictive timelines, smart task prioritization, and auto meeting notes; company reports 400% YoY AI sales growth and 800% YoY AI usage growth (Sept 2025).
- Signals: $4B valuation (2021 raise), $537.5M total raised, ~$300M ARR (Sept 2025) with a public $1B ARR target for 2026 — but on May 21, 2026 the company laid off ~22% of its workforce (~290 of ~1,300 employees), explicitly framed as restructuring around AI, while simultaneously offering remaining staff up to $1M salaries. A genuinely mixed signal: strong top-line growth alongside a major structural reset.
- Common complaints: "everything app" breeds feature bloat, confusing roles/permissions, and navigation/performance lag (status-update delays, calendar data loss) that persisted into 2026 per Trustpilot/Reddit reports; AI has gaps (no external file uploads, inconsistent task creation, no AI on custom dashboards); consistent theme across reviews: "great once configured, not plug-and-play."

## Notion (boards/databases)

- Positioning: flexible all-purpose workspace (docs + wiki + database) where kanban is one of several views on top of a database, not a dedicated product; wins teams that want one tool for notes and lightweight project tracking together.
- Pricing: Free, Plus $10/user/mo, Business $20/user/mo, custom Enterprise; the standalone $10/mo AI add-on was eliminated in May 2025 — full AI (AI Agents, Ask Notion) now requires Business ($20/seat), which reviewers call "the floor for meaningful AI."
- Standout features / direction: database "views" (table, kanban, list, calendar, gallery, timeline) over the same underlying records is the core mechanic; 2025 pushed autonomous multi-step AI agents and scheduled automations, aimed at moving upmarket.
- Signals: $11B valuation (Jan 2026 employee tender), $600M ARR in 2025 (up from $300M in 2024), 100M+ users / 4M+ paying customers, headcount ~1,000 (up from 808 in 2024) — strong, sustained growth story with no new funding needed since 2021.
- Common complaints: AI credit system has no rollover and burns fast (a simple daily-summary agent can eat ~3,000 credits/mo, ~$30); Business-tier billing practices draw complaints (guest-to-member auto-conversion charges, a Sept 2024 policy locking teams into unused seats until renewal); as a kanban tool specifically, it's "brilliant for docs, frustrating for automation" — the board is a view, not a purpose-built workflow engine, so things like WIP limits and swimlanes are weak or absent.

## Linear

- Positioning: opinionated, fast, keyboard-first issue tracker for software teams who find Jira too heavy; deliberately narrow scope rather than all-in-one.
- Pricing: Free, Basic ~$10/user/mo (5 teams, unlimited issues, admin roles), Business ~$16/user/mo (unlimited teams, private teams, guests, Linear Insights, Zendesk/Intercom integration), custom Enterprise.
- Standout features / direction: Cycles (lightweight sprint planning without ceremony), extremely fast native-feeling UI; 2025 added AI features — auto-categorization, sprint suggestions, AI-drafted release notes.
- Signals: $52M raised, $400M+ valuation, 50+ employees (based on older figures likely understating current scale); reviewers consistently call it good value at its price points, and it has become the default "Jira alternative" recommendation for product-led dev teams.
- Common complaints: per-seat pricing burdens fast-growing teams; enterprise-grade features locked behind the pricier tier; deliberately narrow scope means teams that need Jira/ClickUp-style breadth (arbitrary custom fields, non-eng workflows) outgrow it.

## Airtable (kanban view)

- Positioning: database-first, spreadsheet-flexible platform where kanban is one of 8+ views on a table of records; pitched at ops/marketing teams building custom internal tools as much as at project managers.
- Pricing: Free, Team $20/user/mo, Business $45/user/mo, custom Enterprise Scale; a 40-seat Business deployment runs roughly $21,600/yr.
- Standout features / direction: multiple views per table (kanban, grid, calendar, gallery, dashboard, form) with independent filters/sorts per view — powerful for teams where different roles need different lenses on the same underlying data.
- Signals: mature, well-established in the ops/no-code space; frequently recommended as the go-to when kanban needs to be backed by relational data rather than freeform cards.
- Common complaints: billing is asymmetric (mid-cycle seat additions charge immediately, removals don't refund the current invoice); performance degrades well below the platform's published record limits; steep learning curve ("incredibly powerful but will make you question your life choices"); uncontrolled Editor-seat sprawl is a real budget risk at scale.

## Height — DEFUNCT (signal worth flagging)

- Positioning (historical): venture-backed "autonomous project collaboration tool," an AI-native alternative to Linear/Jira aimed at product teams, founded 2018 by ex-Stripe engineer Michael Villar.
- Funding: raised ~$18.3M total, including a $14M Series A (Redpoint Ventures, 2021).
- Trajectory: launched "Height 2.0" in October 2024, marketed as the first fully autonomous PM tool with an embedded AI reasoning engine (auto bug triage, backlog pruning, self-updating specs) — then just five months later, on March 20, 2025, announced a full shutdown, going offline September 24, 2025.
- Signal: the CEO gave no substantive public reason for the shutdown, and the timing (right after an ambitious, heavily-marketed AI pivot) strongly suggests the AI-autonomy bet didn't convert to sustainable revenue. This is the segment's clearest cautionary tale in 2024-2026: a well-funded, well-reviewed tool that bet everything on "AI does the project management for you" and folded anyway. Worth remembering when evaluating how much AI-agent framing to lead with versus treating it as one integration among several.

## GitHub Projects

- Positioning: free, built-in kanban/board layer over GitHub Issues and PRs, for teams whose work already lives in GitHub; not a standalone product.
- Pricing: free with no meaningful limits for public repos; included with GitHub plans otherwise.
- Standout features / direction: board view, roadmap view, and custom fields have matured well; genuinely good when a team's unit of work is already a GitHub issue.
- Signals: default choice for open-source and GitHub-native dev teams; adoption is a function of GitHub's own dominance rather than independent PM-market share.
- Common complaints: every card must be a GitHub issue — no concept of a freeform card, and creating items programmatically means going through GitHub's full auth model; large boards (50+ active cards) get slow and hard to scan; WIP-limit enforcement and cumulative-flow/cycle-time analytics vary by plan and are missing in several tiers; "too narrow for a general list" if work doesn't already live in GitHub.

## Basecamp (Card Table)

- Positioning: deliberately simple, bundled project-management-plus-communication suite from 37signals; Card Table is Basecamp's kanban-equivalent, one tool among Message Boards, Campfire chat, Check-ins, etc. Self-funded, no VC — a notably different company-structure signal than everything else in this list.
- Pricing: Plus $15/user/mo (unlimited projects, guest invites, 500GB storage); Pro Unlimited $299-349/mo flat (no per-seat pricing at all) — the flat tier is the better deal for teams of ~20+.
- Standout features / direction: Card Table defaults to columns like Triage / Figuring It Out / In Progress / Done, fully renamable/reorderable; cards carry title, assignee, due date, description, attachments, comments — intentionally shallow compared to competitors.
- Signals: stable, profitable, long-lived (5+ years of reliability cited approvingly by users); no growth-at-all-costs narrative — 37signals is famously anti-VC and anti-feature-bloat by philosophy.
- Common complaints: task management is "too simple" for complex workflows versus Asana/Jira; minor bugs (e.g., copied cards/to-dos retaining original creation dates); reviewers frame the value proposition bluntly: "worked in 2010, hard to justify in 2026 unless you specifically value simplicity over capability" — flat pricing is the main thing keeping it competitive.

## MeisterTask

- Positioning: design-forward kanban tool from the MindMeister family (mind-mapping heritage), aimed at small-to-mid teams who want an attractive, easy board plus light time tracking.
- Pricing: Free (Basic), Pro ~€13.5/user/mo (~$4.99 annual), Business ~€24/user/mo (~$12.99 annual), custom Enterprise.
- Standout features / direction: built-in time tracking and MindMeister mind-map integration are the differentiators; 2026 added "Meister AI" (note search + writing assistant) on tiered AI credits.
- Signals: positioned as a budget-friendly, well-liked small-team tool; strong design/UX praise is the consistent throughline in reviews.
- Common complaints: bugs and slow customer support recur in reviews; admin visibility and viewer-permission limitations; mobile app lags the web app; and — notably — pricing has crept up to Asana-territory levels "without offering anywhere near the tools or polish," per one reviewer, i.e. the segment's classic small-vendor risk of pricing outrunning perceived value.

## Kanbanize / Businessmap

- Positioning: enterprise-grade, analytics-heavy kanban for teams practicing formal Kanban method / Lean flow management, rebranded from Kanbanize to Businessmap to reflect a broader "align strategy to daily work" (OKRs, portfolio, whiteboards) pitch.
- Pricing: from ~$149/yr for 15 users up to ~$10/user/mo tiers depending on plan; no free tier for individuals.
- Standout features / direction: deep analytics module — cumulative flow, cycle time, task distribution, block-resolution time, created-vs-finished charts, task hierarchy — is the clear differentiator versus lighter kanban tools; strong automation and integration support.
- Signals: well-regarded in Gartner Peer Insights for Kanban/PPM use cases specifically; positioned as the choice when a team is serious about flow metrics rather than just a visual board.
- Common complaints: steep setup/learning curve given the feature depth; no free tier limits trial-ability for individuals; occasional friction in the advanced-analytics and card-management UI.

## Zenkit

- Positioning: flexible, view-agnostic work-management suite (part of a small European "Zenkit family" of apps including Zenkit To Do and Zenkit Hypernotes) aimed at small teams wanting Trello-like simplicity with more view options.
- Pricing: Free (Personal), Plus ~$9/user/mo (~€8 annual, up to 10 users), Team ~€12/user/mo annual (unlimited users, advanced Gantt), Business ~$25/user/mo (~€21 annual, API/SCIM/SSO), custom Enterprise.
- Standout features / direction: kanban, table, mind map, calendar, and list views over shared data; reporting flexibility (700+ report combinations cited); real-time collaboration.
- Signals: smaller player, praised for a generous free tier and fair small-team pricing rather than for scale or growth headlines.
- Common complaints: limited offline functionality (notable gap versus a filesystem-first tool); mobile app lacks features present on desktop/web; reminder system seen as weaker than dedicated task-reminder apps; support seen as improved but still occasionally slow.

## Miro (kanban)

- Positioning: infinite-canvas visual whiteboard where kanban is one structured layout among many (alongside diagrams, sticky-note brainstorms, retros); wins teams that want workshop/ideation and board tracking in the same tool.
- Pricing: subscription tiers by feature/team size, monthly or annual; notably charges for every viewer, not just editors, which is a frequent point of user friction.
- Standout features / direction: Miro AI can generate a kanban board directly from document notes or a prompt, and AI is being woven into Tables/Timelines as well — leaning into "AI drafts the board structure for you."
- Signals: broad enterprise adoption as the default whiteboard tool, with kanban as a secondary but growing use case; strong G2/Gartner presence.
- Common complaints: pricing is "pricey" and per-viewer billing is unpopular; free-tier board resolution/access is restricted; performance slows on large or complex boards; boards become hard to manage once they grow past initial planning-stage scope — i.e., Miro's kanban is good for lightweight/visual use but doesn't hold up as a long-running system of record for ongoing work.

## Wrike / Teamwork (brief)

- Wrike: positioning as a capable, "polarizing" enterprise work-management platform; pricing from $9.80/user/mo up to $25/user/mo (Business); Board/kanban view is intuitive early but cards get cramped once subtasks pile up; advanced reporting, budgeting, and key integrations are gated to Business+ — reviewers call it powerful but excessive for small teams with simple workflows.
- Teamwork.com: pricing from $10/user/mo up to Grow at $24.99/user/mo; positioned similarly to Wrike for client-services/agency work; kanban is a core but not differentiating feature; both tools compete primarily on "can it also do budgeting/client-billing," not on kanban quality specifically.

## Notable newcomers, 2024-2026

- **Sprout** (sproutformac.com, Product Hunt Dec 2025) — a native macOS kanban board built by an independent developer (Elio Raineri), explicitly positioned against feature bloat: no accounts, no notifications, offline-first, $0.99/mo or $9.99/yr with a free tier. Storage is CoreData + iCloud sync, not plain files on disk, and boards export to JSON rather than living as an editable folder — so it validates the demand for "simple native Mac kanban" but does not occupy Lanework's filesystem-as-source-of-truth niche. Closest thing found in this pass to a direct stylistic precedent; worth a fuller look in the native/indie segment doc (03) rather than here.
- **Kanban Kanban** (Product Hunt Nov 2025) — a novelty/recursive concept where every card opens into its own nested board ("Kanban within Kanbans"); still in validation phase, more a design experiment than a competitor.
- Broader pattern: most genuinely new entrants in 2024-2026 are AI-agent-framed (per the market-trends search, "AI in Project Management" is projected to grow from $5.32B in 2025 to $14.14B by 2030 at ~22% CAGR) — but Height's collapse right after its own AI-autonomy relaunch is a strong counter-signal that "AI does your PM for you" alone isn't yet a durable product, even well-funded.

## Patterns across this segment

- **Monetization is almost universally per-seat SaaS**, usually 3-4 tiers (Free / Starter / Business / Enterprise) with the real feature ceiling (advanced automation, SSO, analytics, unlimited AI) reserved for the top two tiers; Basecamp's flat-fee Pro Unlimited tier is the one deliberate outlier, and reviewers consistently flag it as refreshing precisely because it's an outlier.
- **AI is now default table stakes, but monetized separately from the base seat** — nearly every vendor above added AI credits, add-on tiers, or AI-gated top plans in 2025-2026, and nearly every vendor's user complaints include some version of "the credits run out fast" or "AI should be included, not upsold." This is a live, unresolved tension across the whole segment, not a solved problem — an opportunity for any tool that doesn't need to meter AI because it isn't running the AI's compute.
- **Feature breadth is the main axis of both differentiation and complaint.** The all-in-one players (ClickUp, monday.com, Notion, Airtable) win deals by consolidating tool sprawl but consistently draw "bloat," "complexity," and "confusing pricing" complaints; the narrow players (Linear, Basecamp, GitHub Projects) draw praise for focus and speed but "outgrow it" complaints once teams need more. Nobody has cracked staying simple while also being complete.
- **Kanban itself is rarely the product — it's a view.** Notion, Airtable, Miro, and Basecamp all treat the board as one lens over some other underlying primitive (a database, a canvas, a to-do list). Only Trello, Jira, and the dedicated Kanban-method vendors (Businessmap, Zenkit, MeisterTask) treat kanban as the primary mental model — this maps onto Lanework's own bet that a dedicated, opinionated kanban tool has room next to the generalists.
- **Offline/local-first is a near-universal gap.** Every reviewed tool that mentions offline support treats it as a degraded fallback mode (cached view, sync-on-reconnect), never as the primary architecture; the one tool built local-first from day one (Sprout) is a solo-indie Mac app, not a team tool, and even it uses CoreData+iCloud rather than plain files. No mainstream team-kanban product treats "the board is just files you can point git or an editor at" as a feature — this remains open ground.
- **Signals of health are decoupled from user sentiment.** monday.com and Notion are financially thriving (strong ARR growth, profitability, high valuations) while simultaneously generating real churn/complaint signal on Reddit (support quality, seat-step billing, AI credit exhaustion); ClickUp is growing ARR fast and cutting 22% of staff in the same year. Financial success in this segment does not require having resolved the UX/pricing complaints — there's a wide gap between "big and growing" and "loved," and that gap is where smaller, opinionated tools find room.
- **AI-native repositioning is high-risk when it replaces rather than augments the core product.** Height's shutdown five months after going all-in on "autonomous PM" is the sharpest cautionary data point in this pass: a funded, well-reviewed tool bet the company on AI doing the PM work, and it didn't save them. The safer pattern among survivors (Notion, ClickUp, Trello, Linear) is AI as an added capability layered onto an already-working core product, not a replacement for it.
- **Where the segment is heading:** continued AI-agent framing (autonomous status updates, auto-triage, AI-drafted boards) as the primary marketing surface for 2026; continued per-seat pricing with AI carved out as a separate metered layer; consolidation pressure (all-in-one suites absorbing point-solution features) balanced against a steady trickle of focused, fast, opinionated alternatives (Linear-style) winning specific technical audiences; and early, still-marginal interest in data sovereignty / local-first as a reaction to cloud-dependency fatigue, which is the crack in this segment's armor that a filesystem-native tool like Lanework can credibly target.
