Hygger.io has enough advantages to be the best Trello alternative. Here we explain the difference between Hygger and Trello in details.
Trello supports only Kanban style boards with a limited feature set. Hygger has several board types: Kanban, Backlog, Sprint and Roadmap.
Learn more about how to do Kanban and Scrum projects in our Kanban tutorial and Scrum tutorial.
The key points that make Hygger preferable are:
Time Tracking and Timesheet report
Swimlanes, WIP Limits and Sub-columns
Product Backlog, Ideas Scoring and Priority Chart
Story Points, Sprint Boards and Burndown Chart
Release & Versions Management
Roadmap boards
Developing with Kanban Methodology
Trello offers a basic Kanban support based on a board as a visual representation of tasks. Hygger offers a fully featured Kanban with advanced opportunities: time tracking & reports, swimlanes, sub-columns and WIP limits.
1. Time Tracking
You can log spent time directly in the task without any additional extensions in Hygger.
Log time through a task’s menu: Add.. > Log Work
Or you can simply click a clock sign on the task tabs.
2. Timesheet report
Timesheet report collects the worklogs across all the projects for the whole team and allows you to track the hours spent on tasks and projects. You can also export the report to CSV file.
To open Timesheet Report click the clock sign near your profile icon.
3. Swimlanes
Swimlanes are used to group the tasks from all the columns throughout the board. For example, you can sort all your tasks based on their priority and create Swimlanes Blockers, Medium Priority, Later, etc. By doing this, you will visually define which tasks are more important and which ones can be done later.
To create a Swimlane open a board menu on the right part of the webpage > choose Create Swimlane from More section.
4. Sub-columns
In Hygger you have an option of creating sub-columns. They aim to help you better track the progress of the tasks by dividing the processes represented by the columns into two parts: In Progress and Done. Let’s say, you have a queue of tasks for development. You set up a composite column Development, and your developers take a task from the queue and place it to the In Progress sub-column as they start working on it. As soon as the task is complete, they can move it to the Done sub-column, and a QA engineer can take a task from it to start testing the feature.
To create sub-columns you need to Add Column > choose In Progress type > Composite Kind
5. WIP Limits
Setting up Work In Progress (WIP) limit allows you to reduce switching between the tasks and multitasking and concentrate on task completion and quality of work. WIP is the number of task items are actively being worked on at any given time. Once the WIP limit is set, you will be notified each time it’s violated (either the minimum or the maximum value). By analyzing the breaches of WIP limit you will be able to adjust your workflow and improve team performance.
You can add WIP limits for In Progress column by clicking three dots menu icon.
Maintaining Backlog
Product Backlog is a storage for your ideas, requests from your customers and requirements for your product. Backlog board is used to prioritize and order the ideas and plan iterations. In Hygger we have a separate board for managing Backlog. You can structure, rank ideas and plan a product iterations there. Backlog is a storage for your suggestions, requests from your customers and requirements for your product. More detailed description of Backlog board you can find in the article How to maintain product backlog when it rapidly grows?
1. Ideas Scoring
On Hygger Backlog board you can set up Value and Efforts parameter for each idea. Comparing Value and Efforts combination of each task helps you prioritize the tasks better and easier and choose the most important tasks for development.
2. Priority Chart
Backlog Priority Chart is a visual representation of a backlog board. Using the chart you can easily define important and less important tasks and thus optimize product priorities. There are four segments on a chart, each of them representing a priority block: Time Sinks, Maybes, Big Bets and Quick Wins. Already scored tasks are distributed on a chart based on their Value and Efforts score:
Time Sinks – tasks with a low value and a high effort score. Basically, those are useless tasks not worth working on at the moment.
Maybes – tasks with both low value & efforts scores. Tasks that do not bring a lot of value but are easy to implement, can be fulfilled later.
Big Bets – tasks with both high value & efforts scores. These are the tasks that can bring a lot of value but are as well hard to implement.
Quick Wins – tasks with a high value and a low effort score. These tasks are valuable and easy to implement.
As soon as you are ready with a feature set for the next iteration, you can instantly push them to development. In Hygger, you can do it quickly by using the Push All Tasks option that will allow you to send the tasks directly to your development board.
To open this chart click Priority Chart near the backlog board name.
3. Push and track progress
There’s one useful feature on Backlog board that will help you track a development stage of your idea. It’s a Push option. It allows you to send a task from a Backlog board to Sprint/Kanban board for its implementation with a help of task link. The pushed task is linked to the original one from a Backlog board which shows you its development status.
With a help of tasks link pushed items will be automatically synchronized. Once a pushed task is completed and moved to the Done column, its parent task will be automatically moved to Done column on a Backlog board.
This connection also work backwards. You can link a task from development board to a task on Backlog.
You can push several tasks to different boards at the same time. For example, you gathered all the requirements and created an Epic or a Story and splitted it to 10 tasks for a realization. Some of them can be pushed to a Sprint board, the rest - to a Kanban board. After the push, you can see the cross links in a parent and copied tasks. This helps you to track the status of the epic/story and their subtasks.
Usually you should have 3 sprints planned ahead so you can create 3 columns for each of them. I.e, the columns on your Backlog represent future iterations. Once you are ready to launch a new sprint, just Push All Tasks from a certain column to a board where your development is happening, with no need to manually add those tasks. These items will be automatically linked between each other.
Planning and Running Sprints
In comparison to Trello, Hygger offers a complete functionality to successfully run a sprint, from a Sprint board to a Burndown Chart. Choose tasks on the Product Backlog board that you want to accomplish in the oncoming sprint. Predict how many stories you can complete during the sprint by setting capacity on the backlog board. Then you can quickly push all tasks planned for a certain sprint to a Sprint board.
1. Story Points
Story points are a unit of measure for estimating the difficulty of implementation. It is a measure of relative bigness used by Scrum. In Trello you are not able to gauge the efforts needed for developing an item. Hygger provides a solution with Story Points. When estimating a task remember to take into consideration such factors as the amount of work to do; the complexity of the work or any risk in doing the work.
You can also make an estimation with Hours. Or you can choose both Story Points and Hours for your sprint.
2. Progress Tracker
Progress tracker helps you control sprint progress. It displays the ratio percentage completed / task completed / hours completed towards the sprint timeframe.
3. Burndown Chart
Burndown Chart shows the ratio of the amount of work remaining to complete the sprint and the time remaining to complete the sprint. To make tasks visible on your Burndown Chart, make sure they are estimated. Burndown Chart helps you predict whether sprint will be completed in time. All the changes (new tasks, end date change, estimate change, etc.) are immediately displayed on the chart. This lets you prevent risks and quickly react to difficult situations.
To open this chart click Burndown Chart near the sprint board’s name.
4. Release & Versions Management
As you complete the sprint, you release it. Upon release the following actions happen:
A new version within a project is created;
You have the opportunity to choose what you do with uncompleted tasks, whether to release them or to leave them on a board.
All the tasks from the board that you choose to release are assigned a new version and are released;
Note: A board doesn’t close after sprints were released since the board is not attached to any of them.
Also, you can create a new version outside of the sprint, assign it to the tasks that belong to a certain release and once all the tasks are complete, you can release a new version.
To create a new version open project’s settings
which is located near a project’s name on a dashboard> Versions > Add Version.
Roadmap boards for Project Planning & Scheduling
One of the easiest way for a better project scheduling is organizing the tasks on a Roadmap board. Roadmap board is a visual representation of a project schedule. It helps you to see the list of your tasks on a Calendar, define and edit start and end dates and plan your team workload at a glance.
Roadmap board gives you a possibility to add single tasks and group of tasks. You can also add links to the tasks from other boards in case you need to show some task dependencies or to consider their fulfillment within your project schedule.
When you link a task from a Kanban board to a Roadmap, and its’ status changes, you will see the change directly on a Roadmap due to the auto sync option.
If you have some changes in your schedule, you can edit start and due dates of the task right on the calendar. Besides, you can add statuses to the tasks: To Do, In Progress and Done, and control project progress.
General Options
1. Projects and Collections
With Hygger you can set up different projects for your Company, grouping boards related to a certain projects. You can also create Collections to store boards that might not be necessarily related to a project or can be grouped by a certain parameter.
For example, all boards, related to development, can be grouped into Development collection. HR boards, such as Onboarding & Adaptation, Recruitment and others, can be stored in a Human Resources collection.
2. Task Link
With a help of Task Link you can:
Indicate which tasks are linked to each other
See types of dependencies between tasks
There are the following preset task links types which you can find in the company settings by opening General tab:
You can modify connection types or add new ones that will work for you.
3. Live Activity Stream
In Trello you cannot track what’s happening across different boards. Hygger Activity Feed keeps you informed about the changes happening across your projects and boards: tasks’ moves, tasks’ completion, work logs.
With the help of Activity widget and advanced filters you can track the following:
Which tasks have been completed recently for a certain project?
What is In Progress for a certain member across all projects?
Which tasks are Overdue for a certain board / project?
Which tasks have have been completed by a certain Group (e.g. Front-end devs)?
Which tasks are Overdue for a certain member?
Please note that the following widget is now available on mobile apps, and is coming soon for the web version.
4. Two-Level Comments
How do you discuss a task in Trello? You leave a comment to a task. While you are posting yours, your team member is writing another comment concerning another topic. In the end, the comments get mixed up and you lose the thread of the conversation. In Hygger, you can reply to a comment directly, so you keep a conversation within one thread.
5. Inbox
While Trello shows notifications for a board, Hygger’s Inbox is used to store the notifications across all your boards and projects that might require your attention:
Comments and mentions;
Activities on the tasks of which you are a member or have subscribed to;
Board and project activities (you were added / removed from a board / a project).
As soon as you are done with a notification, you can send it to Archive, where it is stored for 30 days.
6. Smart Links
If you need to refer to another task, use a Smart Link. Smart Links are not simple links. As you paste a URL of the task to description field, you actually see not a link, but the name of the task, its position (a board and a column) and a status, so there is no need to actually follow the link to check the task.
7. Default Board Filters
There is a set of default filters for Hygger boards that help you quickly find the necessary tasks on boards. You can filter the tasks by:
My Tasks – only the tasks assigned to you;
Notifications – the tasks with unread notifications;
Overdue Tasks;
Members – tasks assigned to a certain board member;
Labels – tasks marked with a certain label.
Besides, there are some quick filters that are specific to a certain board type, for example, No Value and No Efforts filter for a Backlog board to filter unscored tasks.
You can also create custom quick filters by opening board’s menu (the right part of a webpage) and choosing Quick Filters
You can easily import your boards, tasks and members from Trello to Hygger within a few clicks. Our Trello Migration Guide will help you understand how your Trello elements are converted into Hygger elements.
Helpful links