Planyway alternative: Xello vs Planyway

Trello does not ship a real calendar on its own. The built-in Calendar Power-Up shows the cards from one board on a month grid, and that is where most people start. The moment you have more than one board, you hit the wall: Trello makes you open each board's calendar separately.

That is the gap both Xello and Planyway fill. Planyway adds a calendar power-up to a board with weekly, monthly, and timeline views plus time tracking on top. Xello connects to your whole Trello account and pulls cards from every board you pick into one calendar. You enable it once, choose which boards count, and your week is a single screen. If your question is really "can you see multiple Trello boards in one calendar," the answer is yes with either tool, but Xello is built for the case where there are a lot of them.

Yes, and this is the main reason people look past the native Trello calendar. Planyway has a multi-board view, available on its paid plans (the free plan is limited to one board at a time), that lets you connect several boards into one timeline or calendar collection. It works well for a handful of boards, but the product is built around planning and time tracking inside a board rather than running a large portfolio of them.

Xello was designed around this exact problem. It merges up to 100-plus boards into one drag-and-drop calendar, each card tinted by its board so a busy week still reads cleanly. There is no per-board setup ritual: you tick the boards you want included and they all land on the same grid. If you are an agency or freelancer with a board per client, this is the difference between ten tabs and one view. See it in action on the Trello calendar view page.

Trello can feed your Google Calendar, but not through a button inside Trello itself. The standard route is an iCalendar (ICS) feed: you copy a private calendar URL and subscribe to it from Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook. Your Trello due dates then show up next to your meetings, and the calendar app refreshes the feed on its own.

Xello gives every view its own ICS feed, so you subscribe once and your scheduled cards appear in Google, Apple, or Outlook automatically. This is a one-way sync: cards flow out to your calendar as read-only events. Planyway goes further here with two-way Google Calendar sync, meaning events can move in both directions between Planyway and Google. If having Google events flow back into your Trello planning matters to you, that is a real point in Planyway's favour. If you mainly want your Trello deadlines to appear alongside your meetings, the ICS feed handles it cleanly. To answer "how do I sync my calendar with Trello" specifically: the practical, reliable path today is the ICS subscription connecting the two.

Planyway has a free tier, a Pro plan around 6 USD per month, and an Enterprise tier with custom pricing. For Trello teams it moves to per-member pricing once the group is larger than ten members. There is a 14-day free trial of the premium features, and all plans work with a free Trello subscription, so you do not need a paid Trello account to use it.

Is Planyway free with Trello? Partly. You can keep using a free version after the trial, but premium features (time tracking, larger multi-board setups, reports) sit behind the paid plans, and on shared boards only the people in your subscription get the premium features while everyone else stays on the limited free version. Check Planyway's pricing page for the current numbers before you commit, since vendor pricing changes.

Xello keeps it simple: a 14-day trial, then Solo at a flat 3.99 EUR per month. It also works with Trello Free, so neither tool forces you onto a paid Trello plan.

Two features set Xello apart from a Planyway-style power-up. The first is the Smart Inbox: you can capture a task from email or your phone, it lands in an inbox, and you triage and schedule it onto the calendar when you are ready. That turns the calendar into a place where work arrives, not just where it is displayed. The second is natural-language search across every board at once, so you type a sentence instead of remembering which board a card lives on.

Planyway does not do email or phone capture or cross-board natural-language search; its energy goes into time tracking, Gantt timelines, and workload. So the honest framing is not "better tool," it is "different shape." Xello is a fast multi-board calendar with capture and search. Planyway is a project-planning layer with time and resource tracking. If you want a wider look at the category, the roundup of the best Trello calendar power-ups compares the main options side by side.