A card board is excellent for organising what has already been decided. The question is where the cards come from, and what proves they were dealt with.
A Kanban board is filled by hand, and that is where the work leaks away. Someone runs a visit, notes six snags, then creates six cards the next day — or creates four, because two were forgotten in between. Re-keying is the real cost, and it is invisible: it appears on no invoice, and it is paid in untreated snags and corrective actions that come back at the next audit. So the question is not which board is nicer, but whether the card is born on its own from the observation that prompted it.
The questions to ask any tool, ours included. The answer given here is Thingsform's.
From a form submission: each scored finding creates its task, with its owner, its deadline and the photo of the observation. Nobody re-keys, so nothing is lost between the visit and the board — the one place where an organisation genuinely saves time here.
The observation photo stays attached to the task, and closing can require an after photo. A case therefore closes on two dated images rather than a ticked box, which changes everything the day a client disputes that the repair happened.
The report fills your own template and goes to the recipients, and alerts warn before the deadline rather than after. Follow-up stops being a manual Friday chase and becomes a consequence of the dates the team set itself.
Dashboards track the share of actions closed on time, by site and by period — the only indicator that says whether the effort has an effect. Counting moved cards measures activity; counting on-time closures measures outcome.
The Tasks module is included from the Essential plan. The free plan already covers Forms, and so the collection step: Tasks is the logical next stage, when answers must become tracked actions rather than archived rows.
Often, no. Here are both cases, in the honest order.
Yes, Kanban and calendar, with priorities and owners. The difference is where the cards come from rather than how they are displayed: the view will feel familiar, what feeds it is what changes how you work.
Open cards can be imported from an export. Bringing across full history rarely pays off: what matters is moving the open cases, then letting the new flow feed the board from the forms. A bulk import mostly reproduces the old mess.
Two visit cycles are enough. The first serves to adjust the form and the task-creation rules; it is at the second that you see whether actions close on time. Claiming a result in the first week undermines the effort with the teams.
We describe neither the features nor the pricing of another vendor, which change without notice to us. This page sets out the criteria to examine and Thingsform's answers. For the other tool, its current terms are authoritative.
Trello is a trademark of its publisher, cited here for reference. This page does not describe its features or pricing, which change over time: refer to its current terms.
The right way to decide
Rebuild your hardest form on the free plan, and have it filled in the field. Half a day is enough, and the answer stops being a matter of opinion.