fenbs vs Trello: a simpler board that your AI assistant can work too
Trello is the board most people learned on. fenbs keeps the part that works, four lanes and cards, and adds the two things Trello does not have: roles for people, and a seat for an AI assistant.
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The short answer
Pick Trello if you want a free-form board you can bend into anything: any number of lists, any card layout, power-ups for whatever you bolt on. Pick fenbs if you want a board that stays the same shape, that says who is allowed to do what, and that an AI assistant can read and update as a member rather than through a copy-and-paste. Both are boards. They disagree about how much you should be able to change.
Where Trello is better
- Freedom. Trello lets you make as many lists as you like and name them anything. fenbs has four lanes, fixed: To Do, Next Up, In Progress, Completed.
- Ecosystem. Trello has years of power-ups, templates and integrations. fenbs has one integration surface, MCP, which is what AI assistants speak.
- Familiarity. Most people have used a Trello board. Nobody needs a tour.
Where fenbs is better
- Roles. A person on a fenbs board holds a role, and the role says what they can do: see the board, add and edit tasks, move tasks, comment, manage people. A client can be given a role that only lets them report bugs. Trello’s sharing is closer to “on the board or not”.
- AI assistants as members. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Claude Code connect over MCP with a browser sign-in, hold your role, and every change they make is signed with their name in the history. Trello has no equivalent; an assistant gets there through an API key that acts as you, invisibly.
- Three kinds, not labels. Every task is a Feature, an Enhancement or a Bug — which is what the name fenbs stands for — so a board full of red reads as “a lot of bugs” and never as “a lot of urgency”.
- Numbers that never change. FE-014 means the same task forever, even after it is deleted. Trello cards have URLs; they do not have short, stable references you can put in a commit message.
- Less to configure. There is nothing to set up. Open fenbs and your board is there.
What they have in common
Cards that move left to right, comments on a card, files on a card, a history of what happened, and a board that works on your phone. If that is all you use Trello for, the switch takes an afternoon: paste your lists in, one task per line, and carry on.
How to decide in ten minutes
Paste this week's real list into a fenbs board with Add many, connect the AI assistant you already use over MCP, and work from it for a few days. If the board is still true at the end of the week, it is doing the job. If you kept reaching for a field Trello has and fenbs does not, that is your answer too, and it is a good one.