A Trello alternative with Gantt chart, dependencies and capacity planning
Need a Trello alternative with Gantt chart? Trello is a Kanban board; its timeline view sits on paid plans and there's no capacity planning. shadow-planner is a desktop planner with Gantt, dependencies, resource utilisation and scenarios — €4,99 once.
Trello is the board everyone understands in thirty seconds: lists, cards, drag to the next column. For a small team tracking work in flight, that simplicity is the whole point, and it's why Trello has outlived a generation of more ambitious tools. The trouble starts when someone asks "when will this be done?" or "can Chloé take another project in March?" A board has no dates along the bottom and no notion of how many hours a person has.
shadow-planner answers exactly those questions. It's a desktop project planner with a Gantt chart at its centre: day and month views, drag to reschedule, finish-to-start dependencies with a cascade preview before anything is written. Around the Gantt sit weekly resource utilisation, a portfolio roll-up, what-if scenarios and an AI assistant connected to your data. Data stays on your machine, the free tier has every feature, and going unlimited is a €4,99 one-time purchase.
Side by side
| shadow-planner | Trello | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Planning and controlling: timelines, capacity, scenarios | Kanban board for tracking work in progress |
| Pricing | Free tier; €4,99 one-time, no per-seat fee | Free basic plan; paid plans per user per month for timeline, calendar and other views |
| Where data lives | Locally on your machine (SQLite) | Atlassian's cloud |
| Collaboration | Single-user desktop app; share via export (XLSX / CSV / JSON) | Real-time multi-user boards, comments, notifications |
| Gantt / timeline | Core feature, with finish-to-start dependencies and cascade preview | Timeline view on paid plans; no dependencies |
| Resource utilisation | Weekly capacity vs. allocation, cost roll-ups from daily rates | Not a concept |
| What-if scenarios | Isolated scenarios, snapshots, templates | Copy the board |
| AI | Chat assistant over your data + planning agent; bring your own model (local Ollama or cloud key) | Atlassian Intelligence features on paid plans |
| Offline | Fully | Limited |
Who should switch
- Boards that have quietly become schedules. If your lists are named "Week 34", "Week 35", "Week 36", you're already using Trello as a timeline — without dependencies, without durations, and without a way to see the whole year. A Gantt chart is the honest version of that board.
- Anyone responsible for people, not just cards. shadow-planner tracks each employee's weekly capacity and daily rate, shows allocation against it, highlights over-capacity weeks and rolls cost up per project and portfolio. Trello has an assignee field and nothing else. See resource utilisation planning.
- Planners who need structure. Projects contain epics; epics contain tasks, stories, bugs and milestones; tasks contain sub-tasks. Trello's card-and-checklist model flattens all of that.
- People who do what-if planning. "What if the launch moves to Q2?" is a scenario in shadow-planner: copy the baseline, drag the dates, watch the cascade, compare. In Trello it's a second board you'll forget to keep in sync.
- Anyone who'd rather not pay per seat for a timeline. €4,99 once, no account, no subscription — and the free tier already includes the Gantt.
Who should stay
- Your team lives in the board. Real-time drag-and-drop, comments and notifications are what Trello does best, and shadow-planner is single-user by design.
- You rely on Trello's Power-Ups, automations and Atlassian integrations as part of your workflow.
- Your work genuinely is a flow of independent cards — support queues, content pipelines, personal to-dos — and nobody needs a timeline.
The common arrangement is both: plan the schedule and the capacity in shadow-planner, run day-to-day execution on the Trello board. Export the scenario to Excel or CSV for the hand-off, snapshot it for the record. If you want help building the plan in the first place, the planning agent drafts epics, tasks and assignments from a Markdown brief — see AI-assisted Gantt planning. And because everything is local, it all works offline.
Install shadow-planner for free — the Gantt, utilisation and AI assistant are all in the free tier.