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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

Mmm, Trello. It's the ONLY software Kanban implementation I've used that's worth a crap. All the rest either feel like broken toys, or suffer from feeping creaturitis, or both.

Note to other Kanban software developers... features suck. "Features" are the antithesis of Kanban.

That said, though, even Trello isn't as good as a board with Post-It notes attached. Its only real advantage is that Trello is portable.

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A big part of Kanban is Work-In-Progress (WIP) limits on columns - something that most tools leave out.

It is a pain in the butt when a column is at the WIP limit - but that is kind of the point. It forces you to help move blockages before overloading a column.

Blossom.io does this and is similar in functionality to trello. I was using it for a few weeks on their early adopter $9/mo plan but got tired of having to reload the app a dozen times a day when they pushed new versions.

Thanks a lot for the mention (Blossom co-founder here). We care a lot about keeping things simple while encouraging a great Kanban experience (including WIP limits, cycle time, …). I think of Blossom as the minimum viable Kanban experience with emphasis on the philosophy, not the 'features'.

Too many people building project management tools don't realize that features often just support anti-patterns and having more of them doesn't help.

I believe people building software tools should internalize that a huge part of providing a good solution is helping people get better at their craft & day to day on top of providing the software itself :)

Have you ever used http://www.kanbanpad.com ?

Nothing wrong with features themselves, it's just the human propensity to develop new workflows around those features. Keeping the features away won't keep the new workflows away... I've seen an Excel spreadsheet used for "extra tracking" of Trello cards.

tl;dr - Jira

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