5 Great Kanban Board Tools for Business Team Works

If you have or manage an organization (it doesn’t matter if it is profit or non-profit based) and if you want to control the whole process from just one platform, kanban tools are great solutions for you.

There are actually dozens of kanban board tools you can find. And almost every kanban tool works based-on a principle comes from the traditional kanban method. So, most of them are similar to each other but few unique features, and also price differences. Let’s take a look at what exactly kanban is and some great kanban tools for your business/organization.

About Kanban System

According to Wikipedia, kanban is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing (JIT). It was invented by Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota.

But what is the underlying reason for the invention of kanban? Let’s simulate a scenario based-on car manufacturing: When a vehicle part is needed (let’s say a gear for a transmission), the crew sends a demand card back to the gear part of the factory. The card includes the steps of production (first a piece of metal, then a roughly machined part, and finally a finished gear ready to be installed into a car’s transmission) with the details. So, the single to-do of “Make a gear” becomes a process, one that enables both just-in-time manufacturing and higher quality control; with the help of kanban system.

Kanban Boards

After all, kanban is built around three main functions:

• Kanban Board: It is the dashboard you manage tasks. It can be a real-physical environment or virtual platform where you track what needs to be done.
• Kanban List: A workflow inside the kanban board. Lists can be simple as “To do, Doing, Done” columns, or more detailed workflows.
• Kanban Card: Represents main tasks in your kanban lists. Cards can be physical cards as at Toyota or a virtual card in a digital platform tool. Either way, they list the final product needed and track when the card passed each step in the workflow.

As you see, kanban boards can be used on both physical-real environment and digital platforms. But today, our focus will be on the digital kanban tools. Digital kanban boards have been modernized to help teams visualize workflow, analyze processes and achieve greater task management efficiencies.

Now, it is time to introduce the 5 effective kanban tools to use for business processes.

Trello

If you’ve used a kanban board over the past few years, you are probably familiar with Trello because it is one of the most popular kanban board tools and it is actually the app that helped popularize the kanban system.

Trello offers great overviews of card information and detail of attachments, activity stream, and checklists. Cards inside of the tool might represent a feature, which is moved across a board to represent its flow through development, review, testing, and deployment. Digital tools often allow attachments to these cards: images, links, additional lists, a person assigned to the task, etc.

Trello Pricing: Free for unlimited boards and users with 1 Power-up per board; from $9.99/month per user (paid annually) Business Class plan for unlimited Power-ups and customized board backgrounds.

KanbanFlow

KanbanFlow is probably the easiest mediator to use kanban system for your business. You can create boards, add cards to boards, and move things around in a simple drag-and-drop interface. I can say that it’s the most intuitive kanban app amongst their rivals.

KanbanFlow also adds one other popular productivity technique called “Pomodoro”. This is all about working in short, focused bursts so your concentration levels remain high. For more, visit here.

• KanbanFlow Pricing: Free for unlimited boards and users with core features; $5/month per user Premium plan for attachments, swimlanes, integrations, and export.

Kanban Tool

Kanban Tool was developed with extensive board templates, even a sales pipeline. The Dashboard is a workspace for notes and status to team members. It is a great tool, especially for customization. You can add custom fields to your cards, name each card color from its settings, or enable Power-ups for a calendar view, checklist templates, emojis, and more.

Standard analytic tools quickly accessed from the navigation. It means that, a click away from your board, you can see a breakdown of your cards by type, a time report on how much work was logged each day, a cumulative flow to see how your work progressed towards completion, and a detailed changelog with everything your team has done on your project.

• Kanban Tool Pricing: Free for 2 boards and users; from $5/month per user Team plan for unlimited boards and attachments.

Wekan

Wekan was formerly known as Libreboard, although the project has evolved significantly from this previous version. They have a free hosted demo that you can try out, or you can download and install it yourself.

That tool is actually very similar to Trello. Moreover, its landing page calls it as “the open-source Trello-like kanban.”

Add cards and lists quickly and drag them around as you need, moving whole lists or individual cards around in a click.

Need to only see certain cards? Click the Filter button to select only cards with a specific label. Or, click Multi-Selection to select the cards you want and edit them all in bulk.

• Wekan Pricing: Free self-hosted open source; hosted version from $9/month per user with Sandstorm.

MeisterTask

MeisterTask is as feature packed as it is visually pleasing. It includes offering task relationships, lots of integrations, and instant messaging among team members. Each card can be its own mini project with checklists, attachments, and more. Uniquely, each card includes a Complete button as you’d expect in a normal to-do list; this archives the card and shows how long it took you to finish the task.

Each list in your boards can include actions to do something automatically (add tags, assign the task to someone else, send an email or other notification, track time, or change due date) when you move a card into that list.

• MeisterTask Pricing: Free for unlimited boards and users with 2 integrations; from $8.33/month per user (paid annually) Pro plan for unlimited integrations and section actions for automation.