Some refer to MeisterTask as a project management app, and although it certainly has an appeal as an online collaboration tool that lets groups of people manage tasks, it's hardly project management software.
MeisterTask better fits the kanban apps category, sharing a lot of similarities with Trello, in particular.
These services help you organize and manage tasks in ongoing processes.
With bright colors, graphics galore, and an interface that isn't overwhelmed with menus and options, MeisterTask adds a bit of charm to task management.
It could use some structural redesigning.
Some features are hard to find and disabled by default, and a few kanban-specific features are completely missing.
Still, MeisterTask is a good product if it fits your organization's needs, and it's fairly priced, but don't mistake the app for true project management software.
MeisterTask Pricing and Plans
MeisterTask offers four tiers of service, including a free Basic plan.
The paid plans are charged on a per-person-per-month basis.
You can pay monthly or annually for those plans.
Basic: The free Basic plan lets you have unlimited projects and project members—that is, people you invite to collaborate with you who must have their own MeisterTask accounts.
With the Basic free account, you don't get all the features found in the paid plans, and you can only attach files that are 200MB or smaller.
Additionally, you're limited to integrating with two of the following apps: iCalendar, Harvest, and Zapier.
Pro: A MeisterTask Pro plan costs $9.99 per person per month or $99 per person per year.
With this plan, you're still limited to uploading files of 200MB, but you can connect with as many tools that integrate with MeisterTask as you like.
You also get an admin account, multiple checklists, statistics and reports, searchable task archives, and a few other perks.
Business: The Business account costs $24.99 per person per month or $249 per person per year.
It includes everything in Pro and removes the limit on the size of files you can upload.
It adds roles and permissions, the ability to add groups to teams, custom fields, weekend support, group sharing, compliance and activity reports, and the ability to restrict some information from your team members.
Enterprise: If you're looking to get a custom-made version of the tool for your team, you can opt for the MeisterTask Enterprise account.
Pricing is custom, too, so you'll have to contact the company for an estimate.
People in education and the nonprofit sector get a 50 percent discount.
If you bundle MeisterTask together with the company's other app, MindMeister, you get a 30 percent discount.
Compared with other collaboration apps, MeisterTask charges a fair price.
It isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, because all collaboration apps include different feature sets.
Trello and Asana are two close competitors, and they both start at $119.88 per person annually, which puts MeisterTask's starting price below theirs.
They both let you create a free account, too.
The MeisterTask Interface
In MeisterTask, you create projects, which house tasks. Projects can be shared or private.
The general setup is that of a kanban board.
People use kanban boards in different ways and for different purposes.
Generally speaking, however, these help teams see what tasks must be done, who is doing them, and what stage they're at.
Kanban boards can be used for project management, but they are more commonly used to manage ongoing work.
What's the difference, you ask?
A project has a start date, end date, and deliverable.
For example, building a website is a project.
At the end of the project, you have a completed and launched website.
Putting content on a website is ongoing work.
Your personal to-do list is ongoing work.
There is no fixed date on which it stops, and there is no single completed deliverable.
In my opinion, MeisterTask is better suited for managing ongoing work than projects, because it lacks some features that are specific to project management.
In MeisterTask, you create vertical columns and name them whatever you want.
A typical setup, however, is for each column to represent some stage in a workflow, such as To Do, Doing, Done.
Then, you create tasks, represented as cards, in the columns and move them from one column to another as appropriate.
MeisterTask gives you a homepage, where you see a list of all your projects on the left, plus two columns to the right summarizing important information.
You can drag and drop the projects to reorder them.
The first column, My Tasks, shows tasks assigned to you that are due today and this week, plus any that are unscheduled.
You can change the filter on this list to show tasks listed alphabetically instead of by day.
This column has a personal checklist at the top where you can jot down anything you want; or you can hide it.
The second column is a list of recent notifications grouped by day.
Similar to Trello, MeisterTask uses a lot of visual cues.
When you upload a file to a task, a thumbnail of it shows up on the card in the column view, and there's no option to hide it like there is in Trello.
Tags are color coded and also show up in the card view.
Icons for due date, comments, and other card details appear as well, making the board look busier when there's more activity.
MeisterTask Features
From the homepage, you click on a project to enter it and build it out by adding tasks and team members.
If you're migrating to MeisterTask from Asana or Trello, you can import your task lists from those apps.
Tasks and their attendant details are the meat of the service.
Each task can have notes (similar to a description), a checklist, an assignee, followers, attachments, comments from you and your collaborators, tags, and a due date and time.
Recurring tasks are not available, but a representative said they're in the works.
In MeisterTask's checklist items, you can't drill down to the same level of detail that you can in Asana.
If you find you need to add more detail to a checklist item in MeisterTask, you can convert it to a task.
MeisterTask gives you a good number of features, but they're not all enabled by default.
A time-tracking widget, for example, lets you record time spent on each task, but you have to dive into the Project Properties to enable it.
It's under Power-Ups.
Once you enable time-tracking, a timer appears in the top right of every task, and a number of other places—your homepage, the upper right of the project board, in the column view.
It's all over the place! Plus, it's an active timer, so you can see it ticking away.
Another Power-Up feature is Task Relationships, also known as task dependencies.
Enable it and you can show that one task cannot be completed until a prior one is done.
One feature definitely worth exploring if you use MeisterTask is Automations.
MeisterTask lets you create a rule so that one action automatically triggers another.
The simplest case is to set a rule so that when a task is moved to the Done column, it automatically gets archived.
Other automations you can create involve time tracking, sending an email, updating tags, and updating the status of a task.
Automations are lovely conveniences that take some of the busywork out of task management.
Reports and Deeper Features
MeisterTask comes with reports, which it calls Statistics.
The app graphs the number of tasks completed, the number of new tasks created, and other trends so that you can see how they fluctuate over time.
The reports are clear and easy to access, but they don't give you a wealth of information.
They show how many tasks the team has completed, which individuals completed the most tasks, a calendar of upcoming due dates, and so forth.
What you don't get are rollup reports, resource workload reports, or anything more advanced.
Those are the kinds of reports you might expect in a high-end project management app, but not in simpler kanban apps.
There are a few great concepts from kanban that don't show up as features in MeisterTask, unfortunately.
One is the ability to limit the number of tasks that can be assigned to any single person at a time.
It's especially useful when you have a pool of work to distribute among team members and you want everyone to share the burden evenly.
Some kanban apps come with a work-in-progress limit feature.
You set the maximum number of tasks someone can have and then the app prevents them from taking on any more.
MeisterTask doesn't have this feature.
Two apps that do have it are LeanKit and KanbanFlow.
Another missing feature is swimlanes.
Swimlanes are a horizontal categorization, so in addition to having tasks listed by their vertical column, they're organized horizontally, too.
LeanKit and KanbanFlow both have swimlanes, but MeisterTask does not.
Similar to Others
MeisterTask reminds me a lot of Trello.
They're both kanban board apps that rely on plentiful visual cues and color.
They even use some of the same terminology.
MeisterTask is a good tool that could be better if it added some missing kanban features and made some of its existing features easier to find and enabled by default.
Trello's selling point is that it's supremely friendly tool, making it a wonderful choice when you need to collaborate with a variety of people.
There are better kanban apps, however, with our top picks being Daxdi Editors' Choices, Asana and LeanKit.
Pros
Includes time-tracking functionality.
Can set up rules to automate some tasks.
Priced slightly below competitors.
Cons
No work-in-progress limits or swimlanes.
Some features hard to find and disabled by default.
Can look extremely busy and cluttered.
The Bottom Line
The kanban app MeisterTask shares many characteristics with Trello, but costs a little less.
It's a good option if you're in need of a Trello alternative.
Some refer to MeisterTask as a project management app, and although it certainly has an appeal as an online collaboration tool that lets groups of people manage tasks, it's hardly project management software.
MeisterTask better fits the kanban apps category, sharing a lot of similarities with Trello, in particular.
These services help you organize and manage tasks in ongoing processes.
With bright colors, graphics galore, and an interface that isn't overwhelmed with menus and options, MeisterTask adds a bit of charm to task management.
It could use some structural redesigning.
Some features are hard to find and disabled by default, and a few kanban-specific features are completely missing.
Still, MeisterTask is a good product if it fits your organization's needs, and it's fairly priced, but don't mistake the app for true project management software.
MeisterTask Pricing and Plans
MeisterTask offers four tiers of service, including a free Basic plan.
The paid plans are charged on a per-person-per-month basis.
You can pay monthly or annually for those plans.
Basic: The free Basic plan lets you have unlimited projects and project members—that is, people you invite to collaborate with you who must have their own MeisterTask accounts.
With the Basic free account, you don't get all the features found in the paid plans, and you can only attach files that are 200MB or smaller.
Additionally, you're limited to integrating with two of the following apps: iCalendar, Harvest, and Zapier.
Pro: A MeisterTask Pro plan costs $9.99 per person per month or $99 per person per year.
With this plan, you're still limited to uploading files of 200MB, but you can connect with as many tools that integrate with MeisterTask as you like.
You also get an admin account, multiple checklists, statistics and reports, searchable task archives, and a few other perks.
Business: The Business account costs $24.99 per person per month or $249 per person per year.
It includes everything in Pro and removes the limit on the size of files you can upload.
It adds roles and permissions, the ability to add groups to teams, custom fields, weekend support, group sharing, compliance and activity reports, and the ability to restrict some information from your team members.
Enterprise: If you're looking to get a custom-made version of the tool for your team, you can opt for the MeisterTask Enterprise account.
Pricing is custom, too, so you'll have to contact the company for an estimate.
People in education and the nonprofit sector get a 50 percent discount.
If you bundle MeisterTask together with the company's other app, MindMeister, you get a 30 percent discount.
Compared with other collaboration apps, MeisterTask charges a fair price.
It isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, because all collaboration apps include different feature sets.
Trello and Asana are two close competitors, and they both start at $119.88 per person annually, which puts MeisterTask's starting price below theirs.
They both let you create a free account, too.
The MeisterTask Interface
In MeisterTask, you create projects, which house tasks. Projects can be shared or private.
The general setup is that of a kanban board.
People use kanban boards in different ways and for different purposes.
Generally speaking, however, these help teams see what tasks must be done, who is doing them, and what stage they're at.
Kanban boards can be used for project management, but they are more commonly used to manage ongoing work.
What's the difference, you ask?
A project has a start date, end date, and deliverable.
For example, building a website is a project.
At the end of the project, you have a completed and launched website.
Putting content on a website is ongoing work.
Your personal to-do list is ongoing work.
There is no fixed date on which it stops, and there is no single completed deliverable.
In my opinion, MeisterTask is better suited for managing ongoing work than projects, because it lacks some features that are specific to project management.
In MeisterTask, you create vertical columns and name them whatever you want.
A typical setup, however, is for each column to represent some stage in a workflow, such as To Do, Doing, Done.
Then, you create tasks, represented as cards, in the columns and move them from one column to another as appropriate.
MeisterTask gives you a homepage, where you see a list of all your projects on the left, plus two columns to the right summarizing important information.
You can drag and drop the projects to reorder them.
The first column, My Tasks, shows tasks assigned to you that are due today and this week, plus any that are unscheduled.
You can change the filter on this list to show tasks listed alphabetically instead of by day.
This column has a personal checklist at the top where you can jot down anything you want; or you can hide it.
The second column is a list of recent notifications grouped by day.
Similar to Trello, MeisterTask uses a lot of visual cues.
When you upload a file to a task, a thumbnail of it shows up on the card in the column view, and there's no option to hide it like there is in Trello.
Tags are color coded and also show up in the card view.
Icons for due date, comments, and other card details appear as well, making the board look busier when there's more activity.
MeisterTask Features
From the homepage, you click on a project to enter it and build it out by adding tasks and team members.
If you're migrating to MeisterTask from Asana or Trello, you can import your task lists from those apps.
Tasks and their attendant details are the meat of the service.
Each task can have notes (similar to a description), a checklist, an assignee, followers, attachments, comments from you and your collaborators, tags, and a due date and time.
Recurring tasks are not available, but a representative said they're in the works.
In MeisterTask's checklist items, you can't drill down to the same level of detail that you can in Asana.
If you find you need to add more detail to a checklist item in MeisterTask, you can convert it to a task.
MeisterTask gives you a good number of features, but they're not all enabled by default.
A time-tracking widget, for example, lets you record time spent on each task, but you have to dive into the Project Properties to enable it.
It's under Power-Ups.
Once you enable time-tracking, a timer appears in the top right of every task, and a number of other places—your homepage, the upper right of the project board, in the column view.
It's all over the place! Plus, it's an active timer, so you can see it ticking away.
Another Power-Up feature is Task Relationships, also known as task dependencies.
Enable it and you can show that one task cannot be completed until a prior one is done.
One feature definitely worth exploring if you use MeisterTask is Automations.
MeisterTask lets you create a rule so that one action automatically triggers another.
The simplest case is to set a rule so that when a task is moved to the Done column, it automatically gets archived.
Other automations you can create involve time tracking, sending an email, updating tags, and updating the status of a task.
Automations are lovely conveniences that take some of the busywork out of task management.
Reports and Deeper Features
MeisterTask comes with reports, which it calls Statistics.
The app graphs the number of tasks completed, the number of new tasks created, and other trends so that you can see how they fluctuate over time.
The reports are clear and easy to access, but they don't give you a wealth of information.
They show how many tasks the team has completed, which individuals completed the most tasks, a calendar of upcoming due dates, and so forth.
What you don't get are rollup reports, resource workload reports, or anything more advanced.
Those are the kinds of reports you might expect in a high-end project management app, but not in simpler kanban apps.
There are a few great concepts from kanban that don't show up as features in MeisterTask, unfortunately.
One is the ability to limit the number of tasks that can be assigned to any single person at a time.
It's especially useful when you have a pool of work to distribute among team members and you want everyone to share the burden evenly.
Some kanban apps come with a work-in-progress limit feature.
You set the maximum number of tasks someone can have and then the app prevents them from taking on any more.
MeisterTask doesn't have this feature.
Two apps that do have it are LeanKit and KanbanFlow.
Another missing feature is swimlanes.
Swimlanes are a horizontal categorization, so in addition to having tasks listed by their vertical column, they're organized horizontally, too.
LeanKit and KanbanFlow both have swimlanes, but MeisterTask does not.
Similar to Others
MeisterTask reminds me a lot of Trello.
They're both kanban board apps that rely on plentiful visual cues and color.
They even use some of the same terminology.
MeisterTask is a good tool that could be better if it added some missing kanban features and made some of its existing features easier to find and enabled by default.
Trello's selling point is that it's supremely friendly tool, making it a wonderful choice when you need to collaborate with a variety of people.
There are better kanban apps, however, with our top picks being Daxdi Editors' Choices, Asana and LeanKit.
Pros
Includes time-tracking functionality.
Can set up rules to automate some tasks.
Priced slightly below competitors.
Cons
No work-in-progress limits or swimlanes.
Some features hard to find and disabled by default.
Can look extremely busy and cluttered.
The Bottom Line
The kanban app MeisterTask shares many characteristics with Trello, but costs a little less.
It's a good option if you're in need of a Trello alternative.
