Ask a small studio what they use and the two most common answers, after a spreadsheet, are Trello and Notion. Both are excellent products. Both get adopted for the same honest reason: they are simple, cheap to start, and do not force a way of working on you.
They also fail in two different and quite specific ways once a studio grows past a few concurrent projects.
How to read this
Every tool here is good at the job it was designed for, and all of them ship changes constantly. Check current features and pricing with each vendor before you decide — this compares what each product is built to do, not a snapshot of a feature list.
Trello: perfect until there are three projects
Trello is a Kanban board done very well. Cards move across columns, everyone understands it in a minute, and it needs no training. For a single project with a small team it is genuinely hard to beat.
The strain appears when a studio runs several projects at once. Each becomes its own board, and there is no longer a single place that answers what is everyone doing this week. A person working across three projects has to check three boards and hold the priority in their head — which is exactly the decision that stalls people between tasks.
Notion: the system you have to maintain
Notion is a different proposition: documents and databases you assemble into whatever system you want. Studios build genuinely impressive workspaces in it — project trackers, meeting notes, drawing registers, all linked.
The cost is that someone has to build and maintain that, and it is never finished. Notion workspaces tend to decay quietly: a database stops being updated, two pages disagree, and nobody is sure which is current. What you built is only as reliable as the discipline of the least-diligent person using it.
| Spreadbox | Trello | Notion | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best at | Running an architecture studio | A single, simple board | Documents and custom databases |
| Time to start | Opens ready | Minutes | You design it first |
| Several live projects | One view across all | A board each, no single view | Whatever you built |
| Architecture concepts | Phases, drawings, reviews | Lists you name yourself | Fields you define yourself |
| Time tracking | Built in | Via power-ups | You build it |
| Ongoing maintenance | None | Very little | Continuous |
| Writing and notes | Basic | Basic | Outstanding |
The shared gap: nobody is told what is next
For all their differences, Trello and Notion share one thing. Both present a space of possibilities — cards you could pick up, a database you could filter — and leave the sequencing to the reader. That is the right design for a general tool and the wrong one for a studio where the actual problem is people losing the thread between tasks.
The question that matters
Open your current tool as if you were the newest person in the studio. Can you tell, in five seconds and without asking anyone, what you should be doing right now? That is the whole test.
Keep Trello if
- You are one or two people on one project at a time and the board is genuinely enough.
- You value simplicity above all and would rather have a tool everyone understands instantly.
Keep Notion if
- Your real need is writing — briefs, notes, a studio wiki — more than moving work along.
- Someone genuinely enjoys owning the workspace and will keep it honest.
Move to Spreadbox if
- You have several live projects and no single place that shows the studio's week.
- You want a structure that already knows what a phase and a review are.
- You want people to be handed an ordered next step instead of a space to choose from.
- You want hours captured without anyone maintaining a tracker to capture them.
Where Spreadbox is weaker
Spreadbox is in public beta and younger than everything it is compared with here. It has fewer integrations, no accounting module, and a shorter track record. If you need mature, audited financials today, the established tools are the safer answer — and we would rather you knew that up front.