fenbs vs Trello: a simpler kanban board that your AI assistant can work too
Trello is the kanban 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 kanban 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 kanban 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 kanban 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 kanban board holds a role, and the role says what they can do: see the kanban 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 kanban board roles are fewer and broader: an admin, a normal member who can edit or add to the kanban board without restrictions, and, on Premium, a read-only observer.
- 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 the assistant’s own name in the history, so you can tell its work from yours. Trello now has an official MCP server (opens in a new tab) too, with OAuth sign-in and access only to the Workspaces you approve; Atlassian describes it as acting on your behalf with your existing Trello permissions.
- Three kinds, not labels. Every task is a Feature, an Enhancement or a Bug — which is what the name fenbs stands for — so a kanban board full of red reads as “a lot of bugs” and never as “a lot of urgency”.
- Numbers that never change. FET-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 kanban 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 kanban board with Add many, connect the AI assistant you already use over MCP, and work from it for a few days. If the kanban 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.