Favro

Puntos a favor

Favro is friendly, super flexible and yet powerful when going skin deep. The system is built around super-customizable tasks called CARDS. CARDS can be connected to each other, or arranged hierarchically. CARDS can contain checklists like a list of subtasks, a list of languages to translate, whatever.
The CARDS can be grouped in BACKLOGS which are containers that will do for AGILE working styles but also for more traditional project management. They are not a Gantt chart yet I am pleased that I can have a list reflecting when the tasks (CARDS) have to happen, by whom, and grouped under project stages (for which I create a CARD one level up).
The approach is completed with BOARDS, a very Agile approach in which CARDS are placed in columns. Favro beats its competitors in that you can build as many columns as required with whatever labels. In example To-Do/Doing/Completed, or In analysis/Approved/In progress/Under testing/Ready/Closed, you choose. Favro strength is its flexibility, making it suitable for Marketing, a software development team, a Manufacturing company, Sales department, you name it. You can fit in any project.
To round off a CARD can live in more than one BACKLOG and one BOARD. This allows to make very powerful views on the tasks, like concurrently in a Dev team BOARD (To-Do/Doing/Completed) as the manager BOARD (Goals Q1/Goals Q2/Goals Q3) and yet still be one single task (CARD) maintained by all these roles. A BOARD can have more than one LANE i.e. for the

Puntos en contra

The obvious con of so much flexibility is that at first it is not clear what will be the best way to use it, and some users may even feel lost. Actually it could be easy to make a few bad choices in the start and find yourself with a hard to maintain collection of boards and backlogs. Also the flexible categorization can make searching for existing tasks (CARDS) a dark science scrolling through a long list in which you have to hope you found all the relevant CARDS, the alternative being to go to the full featured reporting system. Being a new contender in the category at the moment it lacks the expansive list of integrations that some of their competitors have, yet the frequent updates denote they will catch up quickly.

Puntos a favor

I like how it flows and how cards can be in multiple areas. I like how the cards can be built out and be pretty custom. While we haven't been able to get them 100% for our needs - we've been able to get close. I also like how you can see a full history of everything that has happened. The workflow rules are nice (these seem pretty basic though - would love more options for these).

Puntos en contra

I'll be honest, I don't know the history of Favro or how long it has been around. We've been using it for around 4-5 months and it is replacing some of the other tools we were using. But the impression I am getting from it is that it is still in a beta phase. The main bones are there but it could really use additional features, or improvements made to the ones there. I haven't seen a single update since I've started using it in this time, and when you reach out asking if Favro does something they are helpful to offering other ways you can use the tool if the feature you want isn't available, but if the feature isn't there they just say they will make note but don't offer any other information. As someone who also works for a SAAS company I am not expecting any etas on anything, but having been almost 5 months and no updates to anything have happened it makes me wonder what's going on...

One of my biggest pet peeves is with the custom fields, I wish there was an option to hide them from the card face because on some of our teams we had to stop using them because it made the cards too long. This was disappointing because they were super helpful, but when you have 30-40 cards in one lane - it's a lot to scroll through.

Something else that needs improvement is alerts and knowing what all is assigned to you. I could have 100+ cards at one time and "my feed" is not an easy way for me to see what all I need to do.

Puntos a favor

The ability to have cards live in multiple locations is the #1 reason we switched from Trello to Favro. The Marketing and Product teams have separate boards, but, often work together on tasks. It is great to have a single card or group of cards live in multiple locations, so that when anyone makes an update to the card, it is updated for everyone.

Puntos en contra

Management of cards and boards isn't as easy as I'd like it to be. Every week, we make a new board for tasks that we want to accomplish that week, and we move the cards between columns as we make progress on them. When we complete the task, we move the card all the way over to a 'Done' column that we create. The columns are the same every week, and each week we need to manually create a new board and all of the columns. It would be great if we could have a new board automatically created each week to satisfy this. Or, at the very least, be able to create new boards from a template, to make this process easier.

Additionally, managing tags is a bit of a problem. We migrated our boards over from Trello, so the old Product team boards and Marketing team boards from Trello each had their own tags, but, some of them overlapped. Favro doesn't offer a way to manage these tags and clean them up, so, assigning tags is difficult. For example, there could be 3 distinct tags for Video: "Video", "video", and "Vids". When creating a new card, and assigning a tag to the card, if I type in 'vid', all 3 of these tags are available to assign to the card. I have to know which tag I'm supposed to use and which I'm supposed to ignore. If I choose the incorrect tag, that could make finding a card later on more difficult.

Puntos a favor

The ability to turn features on and off. For example swim lanes are huge. Another example is the Slack integration. The core functionality is there, but I can also add additional pieces per project as needed.

I also love the fact that if you can use Trello. Favro feels like its older, stronger, smarter brother. After a while, some of my client Trello boards turned into 30 column monstrosities. Favro allows me to turn those into clean organized boards.

LOVE swim lanes. Swim lanes are a Kanban staple and allow me to easily organize my boards vertically and horizontally.

Also love the Backlog elements. Helps keep things organized and contained.

Clients and most people in general get overwhelmed with too much information. Favro allows me to strip away the noise for my clients so they know exactly where to look and what they need to do. For example, I can hide the backlogs, I can minimize the boards I don't care about. Less noise = more focus.

Puntos en contra

I wish the card templates were dynamic. In other words, I create a template, and after updating the card template it updates all the other templates moving forward.

Puntos a favor

It's ease of use. It's a better version than a whiteboard and post its (and I don't say that lightly!). It gives our team the same flexibility to structure and re-structure how we organize our work for our current needs as a white board would, but with all the added benefits that delightful software brings. A+!

Puntos en contra

I don't have that many annoyances.

At the top of the list would proper two-way sync with JIRA, simply because of all the workflows associated with JIRA are awesome for so many things, except of doing actual work. I would absolutely love if I could get a synced backlog from JIRA, but keep the process of doing work and resolving tickets via Favro. That would honstely be my killer app because someone of the team has do to double work at the moment.

And please don't try to replicate JIRA:s features, embrace it instead.

Another, much smaller thing I would like is to automagically tag all cards in a backlog with a tag as soon as it's added to it. Would make it much easier to get a glance of what areas my team members are working on in the lanes themselves.

And better markdown support with syntax highlighting and such would be a welcome addition as well.