Ulysses III vs Trello

A few themes are baked in and a big selection of user-contributed styles to choose from are available on the Ulysses Style Exchange.

Ulysses has a clean, unobtrusive, easy to overview interface that allows focusing on writing. By default it's split up in 3 panes with sidebar, sheet pane and content pane from left to right. Unnecessary panes can be hidden.

Markdown formatting can be applied from the right-click menu, with keyboard shortcuts or from an optional markup bar. Necessary elemants to links, images, and footnotes are added by filling in a popover.

Pasted rich text and imported Word documents keep their formatting when converted to Markdown.

Attachments such as images, text notes, keywords and writing goals can be added to content. And to organize them keywords can be added.

Ulysses saves everything in the app so there's no file management outside of the editor involved. It organizes content in groups (folders) and sheets (files), has a powerful, easy to use search and allows adding keywords to attachments to help them be organized and found quickly.

Groups can have an unlimited amount of subgroups and the title of subgroup shows up in the pane view. Sheets can be split up, merged, glued together and easily moved around in the sheet pane by dragging and dropping. Great for splitting up larger documents into manageable chunks while still keeping an overview of the whole project and having the ability to move sections around quickly.

Contents of a group can be filtered by text, keywords or change date within headings, code blocks, images or any other marked up text. Filters can contain a combination of conditions and be saved to make a new group. Saved filters can be moved around to different groups and will return filtered results for that group. Selecting multiple groups will show the combined sheets of those groups.

You can operate Ulysses via keyboard only. No need for mouse.

The editor can export to Plain Text, RTF, Word, HTML, ePub and PDF with customizable styles for each option. It can also preview HTML directly in the browser.

There's no live-preview pane or an external previewer necessary. Ulysses displays styling inline.

Ulysses has options for highlighting current line, showing line numbers and enabling typewriter mode. Typewriter mode defines a place on the screen where the cursor should be so eyes are kept focusing in one place on the screen.

Content can be synchronised across devices via Apple's iCloud.

Ulysses comes with an excellently written documentation that covers everything there is to know about the software, including an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts as well as short and sweet introduction to Markdown and its benefits.

Ulysses is available for both macOS and iOS. This, combined with the cloud syncing allows users to work on their projects using any Apple device they have at the time.

The editor tracks statistics that shows how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages a document contains and estimated reading time for slow, average, and fast readers. The statistics display in a popover that can be torn-off so it's constantly visible.

Goals such as how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines or pages should be written can be set to help get motivated.

Groups, tagging, and notes for each document.

Staff is helpful in answering questions on how to use the app.

A time (10hrs) and usage limited demo for Ulysses III is available.

There are two primary columns: the board is shown on the left and all the other controls on the right. The main means of interaction is dragging and dropping to-do cards into the various lists.

The board structure is very customizable, and includes a variety of features that help along the way: color-coding, due dates, card images, checklists with a graphics bar that allows following progress easily, and card aging for cards that haven’t been touched in a long time.

Trello has permissions at the board level as well as the ability to assign multiple people to each card. There are a lot of sharing options available and boards can be made visible for the public. It's also possible to subscribe to a card to be notified of its progress. The simplicity of the UI makes collaboration easy because it’s very simple to see the progress of each card and who is responsible for it. It also updates constantly to reflect real-time changes in progress.

The simplicity of the UI makes collaboration easy as it’s very simple to see the progress of each card and who is responsible for it. It also reflect changes on boards in real-time.

Trello calls items used in the workflow “cards.” Cards are double-sided and can contain subtasks as well as notes and other details.

Card columns can be used to simulate a workflow by moving cards from left to right as they are completed, or as a way of indicating task priority.

The workflow is highly flexible as the columns are completely customizable to suit the task flow. For example, tasks can be put through a workflow "idea > approved > in-progress > pending review > released" or simply "ideas > released" depending on the granularity level needed.

This makes Trello a great solution to feature management as it's possible to set up boards to handle everything from agile sprints to a more generic to-do list, all with status management.

Trello offers a very generous free version that has no ads, no restrictions on the number of users, and very little restriction on how the program can be used. The paid features are generally cosmetic, such as the ability to change the background, add stickers or integration with other tools.

The UI is based around Kanban, so you can see all your tasks and their status clearly.

Voting, view, and calendar plug-ins further increase the functionality.

Trello supports Markdown, meaning that HTML input is represented appropriately. Cards with attachments are also rendered well. For example, images are shown correctly on the card, bug links are detected etc.

Each card can have one or even multiple task lists.

Trello works on all modern devices through the web application and has native apps for iOS, Android and Windows 8/10 devices.

Keep all of your files (images, documents, etc.) organized on their relevant cards.

The responsiveness and layers of customization make it easy for team members of various disciplines to collaborate on the same task board.

Can set different priorities to various tasks, set appropriate due dates and Story points - timing allotted to each task.

Trello offers support for features to add voting on cards, often referred to as 'power-ups'.

Works like a charm.

There is a global history system which allows to rapidly follow changes. There is also a notification system if another user updates the board while you're watching it.