A card per order, lists for the stages, custom fields for the deposit and the delivery date: this is the most common working system in a small workshop, and it is genuinely good at the thing it is for — seeing where every job stands. What it cannot do is arithmetic. The balance is a number you typed, so it is right until the day it quietly is not, and nothing on a board can tell you what you are owed across everything open or what the piece earned. Including the cases where the board should stay.
Trello · checked 10 September 2026
We make Ordamo, so we are an interested party. What we can be is checkable: written by the people who built it for their own furniture studio in Buenos Aires, every price taken from the other side’s own page with the date we read it, and their wins listed above ours.
| Trello | Ordamo | |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | Cards you move between lists | Orders, deposits and production batches |
| Deposit and balance on one order | Custom fields you type into; nothing checks them against each other | Both, with dates, on the order itself |
| What is owed across everything open | Not a question a board can answer | The orders screen, sorted that way by default |
| What a production run cost per piece | A number in a comment, if anyone wrote it down | A received batch writes what the run really cost onto its products |
| Margin per order | No | Per order, after the real cost lands |
| A page the customer can open | A shared board — which shows them every other order too | One link per order, no login, updates itself |
| Orders from a store export | No | A Shopify, Etsy or WooCommerce export imports as orders |
| Seeing the stages at a glance | Yes — this is what it is for | A status per order, not a wall |
| Entry price | Free, then $5/user/mo billed annually | $29/mo, one plan, however many of you |
| Who maintains the model | You | Nobody |
Built for orders that take weeks to deliver, start in a message and get paid in parts.
Add a customer and their order
Deposit taken, balance still owed, and the date you promised.
Send your customer their order page
One link that updates itself, instead of twenty messages.
Record what the batch cost
What a run really cost, over the pieces it produced. One button puts that on the products it made.
See what you actually made
Revenue, cost and margin per order. Money in, money out, cash on hand.
Custom fields will hold $1,900 taken and $1,900 still due, and they will hold them after you agree an extra drawer and forget to change one of them. Nothing recalculates, nothing objects, and the error is invisible because the card looks exactly as it did. The number you cannot check is worse than no number: it is the reason a total gets rebuilt from bank statements twice a year.
What a workshop needs weekly is one figure — what is owed across every open order — and one list, the ones that are late. On a board that means opening cards and keeping a running total in your head. This is not a limitation of how you set Trello up; a board is a picture of work in progress, and money is a sum.
The obvious way to keep a customer informed is to share the board or the card, and then they can see the other customers, your notes to the workshop, and what you paid for the timber. So people stop sharing and answer messages by hand instead — twenty per order on a build that takes three months.
Above the free plan Trello is $5 a seat a month billed annually, and the people who need to see an order are the ones you would rather not buy seats for: a partner, an assistant two days a week, the bookkeeper in January. Ordamo is priced per business, so that question never comes up.
$0, then $5/user/mo
The Free plan holds up to 10 boards and 10 collaborators per Workspace, files up to 10MB and 250 Workspace command runs a month. Standard is $5 per user a month billed annually, $6 monthly, and lifts boards and automation; Premium is $10 or $12.50 and adds the Calendar, Timeline, Table and Dashboard views; Enterprise is $17.50 per user a month billed annually. Premium can be trialled free.
$29/mo
One plan, per business, everything included — however many of you there are. $0 today, first charge after 7 days, cancel in one click. 14-day money-back on the first month. Nothing is metered.
What is in the planWe are not the only answer, and pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon.
The other incumbent: free, endlessly flexible, and the arithmetic is yours to keep right.
NotionA workspace where the orders sit beside the notes. Free to start, then $10 a seat a month.
monday.comThe board that configures further and charges for the tier that calculates. Free for 2 seats, then $9 a seat a month billed annually.
The whole categorySix families of tool, what each one answers, and the three questions that pick between them.
Yes, and thousands of workshops run exactly that: a card per order, lists for the stages, custom fields for the deposit, the balance and the promised date. It works while the numbers are few and you are the only person touching them. What it never becomes is a record you can question — no field is derived from another, so nothing tells you when two of them stopped agreeing.
The Free plan allows up to 10 boards and 10 collaborators per Workspace with 250 automation runs a month. Standard is $5 per user a month billed annually or $6 monthly, Premium $10 or $12.50, Enterprise $17.50 billed annually. Ordamo is $29 a month for the business, whoever needs to log in. Confirm the current position on trello.com before deciding on the strength of a number here.
For the order process, yes. For Trello, no. There is no board here, nothing to drag, and no place for the rest of your week — if what you value is the wall, moving will feel like a downgrade even when the money side gets better.
You can share a card or a board, and that is the problem: the board shows every other customer, and the card shows your comments to the workshop. Ordamo gives one link per order with what was ordered, what is paid, what is owed and when it will be ready — nothing else on it, and no login.
A board is better at where things stand, a sheet is better at what things cost, and neither is good at both. That split is why people end up running the two side by side and reconciling them on a Sunday — which is the actual problem this category exists to remove.
For commissions with a deposit, an order tool built around the deposit and the batch, which is this at $29 a month. If you want to keep building it yourself, Airtable is the stronger database and Notion the better place to write. For stocked products, Craftybase starts at $20 a month and Inventora at $19.
Trello's own free plan is the best free option there is for a board, and a spreadsheet is the best free option for the money. Nothing purpose-built in this category has a free tier worth planning around: Zoho Inventory allows 50 orders a month free, and Inventora refers to a free Hobby plan without publishing its limits. Ordamo has a sample workspace you can open with no card.
No, and it is the honest cost of moving. Orders are a list with a status, sorted by what is unpaid and what is due, because that is the question the tool is built to answer. If you want to see a wall of work in progress, keep the board and let this hold the money.
Export the board as CSV if you are on Premium, or simply retype the open orders — there are rarely more than a dozen and each needs what was agreed, what has been paid and the readiness date. Then add the batches currently in production. New orders start here; the open cards can finish where they are.
Plan prices in both billing states, the Free plan's board, collaborator, file-size and automation limits, what Standard and Premium add and the Premium trial read from trello.com/pricing on 10 September 2026. Software pricing moves; confirm with the vendor before deciding on the strength of a figure here.
$0 today · first charge after 7 days · cancel in one click
Built for orders that take weeks to deliver