xTiles vs Trello: Why a Project Manager Is Moving Her Boards to a Visual Workspace

Why Trello users end up looking at xTiles

Trello's board-and-card model is built to answer one question well: what stage is this in? Cards move from To Do to Doing to Done, and that status view is genuinely useful. What it is not built for is holding the reference material, notes, and context that sit around a project — the research, the saved links, the write-up of why a decision was made.

That is the common trigger for looking elsewhere: a board tells you where something stands, but not the thinking behind it. xTiles' pitch is a visual canvas where a project is a full page rather than a stack of cards — tasks sitting alongside notes, saved links, and AI-generated content in the same space, laid out however the actual work looks rather than forced into fixed columns.

My Planner: a different way to see 'what's due' than one big board

Instead of scanning a single Trello board for cards with due dates, xTiles' My Planner pulls due-dated tasks in from every project automatically — day and week views, recently redesigned to cut down on jumping between tabs. Any task with a due date, in any project, simply appears in the Planner without extra setup.

The Planner also surfaces a tile for whatever project you were last working in — so returning to a page you visited earlier shows up on today's view without manually linking anything. Rosemary's reaction to that was the clearest signal in the whole call: "Do you have to hook them up together, or is it just automatically doing it?" It's automatic — no setup step connects a project to the Planner, it just reflects what you have due and where you have been.

Web Clipper: a capture layer Trello cards don't have

A Trello card can hold a description and a checklist. It is not built to double as your reading list or a reference archive across every source you touch during a project. That gap is what the Web Clipper browser extension addresses.

From any open page or email, the extension can create a project, a task, or a note. The task path turns an email into something you will not forget — click the extension, it names the task automatically, attaches a short summary and a link back to the source, and lets you save it into today, tomorrow, or a specific project, without opening your inbox again to find it.

The note path works the same way for articles and reference material: clip a page, get an automatic summary, and save it. Everything captured this way lands in the Library — a dedicated place inside the Planner that collects saved content across every source by date, browsable like a table rather than scattered across old boards or bookmarks.

Built-in AI: templates and document summaries on demand

Beyond capture, xTiles' internal AI can build structure directly. Ask it to create a template — a weekly planner, for example — and it generates the layout rather than requiring you to build it from a blank page. Upload a PDF or another file and it produces an automatic summary; paste a link with no extra prompt and it turns the source into a visual summary page, laying out the key points so you are not reading the whole document to extract what matters.

Connecting Claude or ChatGPT for a daily brief across your other tools

For a broader view across tools — email, Telegram, Google Calendar, and others — xTiles supports connecting Claude or ChatGPT via MCP. One example from the call: asking Claude to review an inbox and create a tile in the Planner summarizing what needs attention, including messages that might otherwise get missed.

A second pattern handles newsletters specifically — asking Claude to go through an inbox, summarize newsletters from specific senders into their own tiles, and archive the originals, so a cluttered inbox does not need to be reviewed one email at a time. This integration is newer than the rest of the toolset, with fewer users having tested it so far — worth trying with modest expectations rather than assuming full reliability on day one.