The powerful French alternative to Trello

Thursday September 17, 2026

Trello has played a major role in popularizing visual boards. One card, one task, one column, one move: the principle is effective and instantly understandable.

But as activity grows, the board can start to look like a wall of digital sticky notes. And when 127 cards are marked “urgent”, nothing really feels urgent anymore.

A much more logical organization

In a traditional Kanban system, the board often represents a project and the cards represent the tasks to be completed. This organization works until the company needs to track several dozen projects at the same time.

Otilus reverses this logic to better reflect how the company actually operates:

Trello and Otilus: the essential differences

To complete this overview, you can read our previous comparison of Otilus and Trello.

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One price, with all the muscle included

Professional software sometimes likes to turn its pricing table into a maths exam. One feature in the Standard plan, another in the Premium plan, followed by an extra option to obtain what the team needed in the first place.

Otilus takes a clearer approach. It offers a limited free plan and a Team plan that provides access to all features, allowing you to:

At the time of writing, the Team plan is available for €7.99 including VAT per user per month when billed annually, or €9.99 including VAT when billed monthly.

View the price of the Otilus Team plan

For a comparable range of features, Otilus is priced below Trello Premium while including scenarios, the Gantt chart, archives and planning in a single plan. The finance manager can therefore close the spreadsheet without calling emergency services.

Truly integrated scenarios

In Otilus, a scenario, or workflow, is directly associated with a project type and a work phase. When a project moves to another column, Otilus can automatically:

• create the expected tasks;
• assign actions to the right team members;
• open the required tabs;
• change urgency and importance levels;
• move the project to another department.

The scenario is defined once and then applied to every relevant project. The team no longer needs to recreate the same list of actions or rely on the memory of the person who “knows the project inside out” and who, naturally, happens to be on holiday this week.

These automations are included in the Team plan and do not require an external module. Discover how Otilus’s automated scenarios work.

All activity visible on a single screen

Using multiple boards can help organize work, but it also forces users to keep navigating between them to understand what is happening.

Otilus provides two complementary levels of visibility:

• the main board displays projects, their current phase and their progress;
• the “My Tasks” screen automatically brings together every action assigned to a user, regardless of its project or department of origin.

Each team member therefore finds their priorities, deadlines and tasks in one single view. There is no longer any need to open fifteen cards to find the action requested during Monday’s meeting. Or was it Tuesday’s? Nobody really remembers, which rather proves the usefulness of the tool.

This centralized view is presented on the My Tasks: manage your priorities page.

More natural collaboration

Otilus clarifies responsibilities without turning the manager into a full-time supervisor. Tasks can be assigned, prioritized and tracked, while each team member retains a clear view of what they need to do.

The organization nevertheless remains flexible. A team member can step in on an action assigned to someone else when the situation requires it. The software supports the way the team works instead of blocking progress because an administrative rule failed to anticipate Paul’s absence.

Notifications are also targeted to keep users informed without triggering an avalanche of alerts. The goal is to improve coordination, not turn every smartphone into a school bell.

♿ Accessibility considered from the outset

Accessibility was not added to Otilus as an afterthought. Its visual organization, information hierarchy and interface stability have been designed around different ways of perceiving and organizing work.

This approach notably benefits:

• people with ADHD, who may be sensitive to distractions and an accumulation of micro-decisions;
• people with ASD, who may benefit from a stable, consistent and predictable organization;
• people with color vision deficiency, thanks to carefully designed contrasts and luminance differences;
• people with dyslexia, thanks to adapted fonts;
• more broadly, anyone dealing with a high cognitive load.

Scenarios also provide consistent reference points: the expected steps appear at the right time and the project follows an understandable path. This approach is explained on the page dedicated to ADHD, ASD and disabilities in Otilus.

🛡️ Sovereignty that goes beyond the flag

Otilus is developed by a French company and its data is hosted in France. This choice directly concerns the projects, files, customer information, responsibilities and internal discussions stored on the platform.

Digital sovereignty is not solely about where a server is located. It also depends on the publisher, the subcontracting chain, the legal environment and the company’s ability to retain control over its information.

The CNIL points out that data transfers outside the European Union must be regulated to guarantee an appropriate level of protection.

Otilus presents its commitments on the page dedicated to sovereign project management.

📊 Existing indicators, with more to come

Otilus already provides visibility into team activity: completed tasks, ongoing projects, remaining actions, urgent or important tasks, assigned workload and recent activity.

This data provides an overall view without forcing the manager to ask every two hours, “So, where are we?” A perfectly reasonable question, but rarely appreciated when it comes back before every coffee break.

Planned developments will further strengthen this management capability with:

• time tracking to monitor the time spent on tasks and projects;
• enhanced dashboards for more detailed analysis of deadlines, workloads, activity and progress;
• new indicators to better understand how the team actually operates.

This will not be about monitoring every minute from a control room. The goal will be to compare estimated time with actual time, improve future estimates and distribute the workload more effectively.

The management features currently available are presented on the page dedicated to team metrics and performance.

So, a French Trello or a different category altogether?

Otilus retains what made Kanban boards successful: visual organization, intuitive movements and an immediate understanding of progress.

But it also adds project-focused logic, a single Team price, included updates, unlimited scenarios, a Gantt chart, a centralized personal view, consideration for disabilities, French hosting and management tools designed to become even more powerful.

Otilus can therefore be presented as a French alternative to Trello, but stopping there would be reductive. Trello organizes cards. Otilus organizes the company working behind those cards.

And that is why we call it a French alternative to Trello on steroids. Functional steroids, of course, included in the subscription and perfectly legal.

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