Out of the box, Trello gives you and your team everything you need to organize and complete work. But what about adding more functionality or integrating with your favorite apps? Enter the wonderful world of Power-Ups. Put simply, Power-Ups are integrations and features that can be added to your core Trello board experience. They add incredible new powers to your boards by making them easier to use, giving more features and functionality, or surfacing more information about your workflow. You may have heard of some of the more popular ones, like Google Drive, Card Repeater, and Slack. But did you know there are over 150 total Power-Ups? So there’s a lot that can go unnoticed! To start using Power-Ups, just find them in the directory, and enable them on your board! Often the way to use Power-Ups is either via buttons in the Power-Up menu, or by interacting with them inside of cards. Let’s dive into 9 underrated and lesser known Trello Power-Ups that will totally transform your boards for the better. Have you ever wished you could send someone a form and have their answers populate automatically in Trello? Consider Forms by Blue Cat your fairy godmother then, because it makes creating a new card from form fills easy as can be. This is really useful for anyone who wants to collect input and get it sent straight to your Trello board. For example, surveys, requests from other teams, contact info from leads, help tickets, job applications, or just about anything else! Setting it up is extremely easy: you create a form directly from your Trello board and map the fields to the parts of a card you want those answers to go to, like attachments, custom fields, dates, or even labels! After saving, then just share a link to the form that anyone can access (whether they use Trello or not). Once they fill it out, each response turns into a card! Forms By Blue Cat is free for up to 25 form submissions a month, and then you pay for more as needed! Sometimes, you find yourself wanting to apply updates to many specific cards simultaneously. Bulk Actions lets you quickly change data on many cards at once without the tedium of visiting each card individually. Anything from the labels, to due dates, to archiving, and more!.png?width=1200&name=X_Underrated_Trello_Power-Ups_You_Didn_t_Know_You_Needed%20(1).png "9 Underrated Trello Power-Ups You Didn't Know You Needed (1)")
Forms By Blue Cat
Bulk Actions
This is useful for just about any Trello board. Whether you want to refresh your labeling system, update project deadlines on many cards, or change up assignees on cards, this Power-Up allows you to do it all quickly and easily.
Bulk Actions creates an overlay on your board, giving you many new ways to select the cards you need to update. You can manually select cards or use criteria (like members, labels, etc.) to filter down into a set of cards. Then apply the change you want and boom! Now all your cards are ready to go after a couple of clicks.
Pricing: totally free!
2-Way Board Sync And Mirroring
Sometimes it’s impossible to keep all your cards on just one board, but you still want them to be related and mirror each other. In some cases, you can create Trello automation rules that will sync cards, but it’s not recommended for mirroring (two-way syncing). If you want something that works out of the box, this 2-Way Board Sync and Mirroring Power-Up by Unito is specifically designed to keep cards across boards in sync!
Unito also offers additional Power-Ups to sync your Trello cards with data from other tools, minimizing context switching while keeping everything aligned. It’s great to use when your team needs to collaborate across multiple boards or tools (for example, if you have a client using another tool and you want to keep everything organized between the two without tedious copying and pasting).
All you need to do is connect your tools in the Unito dashboard and map the relationship between each card and tool. Then it will automatically mirror!
The Unito Power-Up starts at $10/mo (paid annually) and includes 3 users!
Threaded Comments For Trello
While every Trello card comes with the ability to add comments, they’re all stacked on top of each other. This is perfectly fine for a lot of use cases, but some particularly active conversations can start to get messy.
Threaded Comments for Trello helps organize the comment section by allowing you to reply to a specific comment and thread conversations below it for easy management. This makes it easy to keep conversations organized and helps you quickly find what you’re looking for.
Important note: this is essentially an iframe component added to your Trello card and does not replace the default comments section of your cards.
This is a relatively new (at the time of this writing) Power-Up and still in beta, so it’s free to use (until May 31st, 2022!)
Backups For Trello
Ever had a Trell-uh-oh? Backups for Trello by Rewind is the Power-Up that keeps your board data extra safe and allows you to ‘rewind’ your board back to a previous state. It will back up your boards, lists, cards, custom fields, checklists, labels, and attachments for easy restoration later if you need.
It’s a great Power-Up to add if you have anything on your board that would be catastrophic if you lost, or if you have a lot of new folks on your board that are still getting their Trello sea legs.
The way it works is easy: just add backups for Trello to your board, authorize the app, and then if something happens, you’ll be able to select the time you want to revert it back to. You’ll also be able to access their human support team to help you in the midst of any crisis!
Pricing is only $1 per board per month (with a minimum of 5 boards), so it’s easy to protect as many boards as you want!
Number Stats
While Trello can’t always replace a spreadsheet, in many cases you can achieve what you need with a Power-Up like Number Stats. The premise is simple: it will aggregate data for each custom number field on your board. So if you need to see the total count across cards that are using a specific number field, or if you want to see a sum (or average) of all the values in that custom number field, you can quickly get it with a click.
This is helpful if you have any boards where you need to keep track of numbers, like budgets or inventory. A sales team can use this Power-Up to track their pipeline.
The Power-Up itself is free to use, but you’ll need to be on Trello’s Standard Plan or higher to enable Custom Fields on your board. If your board already has number fields, just enable the Power-Up and you will start seeing data right away!
Approvals For Trello
The Approvals for Trello Power-Up creates a workflow in your Trello board that visualizes an approval process and lets specific members “stamp” their approval on a card. Designate specific individuals or teams that need to sign off a project before it can actually be completed, then quickly see if a card has been approved, rejected, or still pending.
This is ideal for marketing, design, or sales teams especially, but any other team that has approvals as an integral part of their workflow will find this useful..
To use it, simply enable it on your board and then go to cards that you need approval for. Click the “Approvals” button and add any individuals you need approval from. They’ll be able to approve or reject the card when they see it!
It also shows the status on the front of the card so you don’t have to go inside of a card to tell if it’s been approved or not.
The basic version is free, but the Pro version is only $5 per board per month and it gives you some advanced options. For example, you can create approval teams (like a set of managers where only one person on that team has to approve), automatically move items to another list once they’re approved, and add multiple approval workflows to cards.
Email For Trello
You can manage your inbox from Trello with the Email for Trello Power-Up! By enabling this Power-Up, your emails can become cards in your Trello board. Each card represents an email that lets members reply to emails straight from Trello. Join a card (or assign someone) to take responsibility for it and create a checklist with tasks, then there’s no more wondering who is going to do what on an incoming email. Admins can create custom email templates that include personalized fields with info from cards.
This is perfect for any teams that share an email address like sales, finance, recruiting, or support teams. It’s also helpful for individuals who want to create action items from emails.
This Power-Up is free on one board with limited features for up to 50 emails a month. The paid plan enables additional features, like sending emails from your domain, creating custom signatures and auto-replies, merging cards, creating custom variables, saving replies, and more!
Crmble: The Easy Peasy CRM For Trello
If you manage contacts in your Trello boards, you may not realize it, but you’re using Trello as a CRM (customer—or contact—relationship management). I wrote about how to build a CRM in Trello years ago, but since then the Crmble Power-Up came along to do all that work for you. There’s no need to build anything, just add Crmble to your board, and immediately, you’ll have everything you need to keep up with your contacts.
Each Crmble card is set with custom contact fields that help you store useful information about your leads, including their source so you can track which sources are driving the most sales. Lists are automatically set to a default layout for the workflows you take with each contact (but you can customize these to be whatever you want). You’ll also have reports ready to go showing you how your contacts are progressing through your pipeline.
Crmble is great for sales teams, support teams, recruiting teams, educators, and teams that manage orders. It also works well for organizing workflows with influencers, leads, and any other contact you can think of.
Crmble pricing starts at 0.99€ a month, giving you the Crmble fields and Crmble Teams (which lets you sync data between boards). To get more robust features, like dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll want to use the Crmble Monster plan, at 4.99€ a month.
Start Supercharging Your Trello Boards
Ready to take your boards to the next level? Head over to the Power-Up Directory and search for the ones you want. You can also access Power-Ups right from your board by clicking the Power-Up button at the top of the board.
Good luck as you Power-Up your boards, and if you have any other underrated Power-Ups that you think are cool, feel free to share them in the Atlassian Community!
Good or bad, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Find us on Twitter (@trello)!
