Get started with Trellis
Set up your workspace, understand the navigation, and create your first project and task.
Trellis organizes client delivery into a small number of nested levels. Once the structure makes sense, everything else in the product follows from it.
Know the workspace structure
Your account sits at the top and holds everything. Inside it you create workspaces, which most teams use as one per client. Each workspace holds groups, which act as folders, and each group holds projects. A project is where the actual work lives, and inside a project you get stages that work moves across, timeframes that batch work into periods such as this month or backlog, and columns for the fields your process needs. Tasks are the individual owned actions inside a project.
Create your first task
Open a project and add a task to a stage. Give it an owner and a due date straight away, because both feed the views and the notifications that follow. Add context in the description rather than in chat, so the next person to open the task can act without asking anyone what was meant.
Use My Work and Inbox
My Work collects everything assigned to you across every project, so you do not have to remember which board a task lives on. Inbox collects what changed: assignments, mentions, and approvals waiting on you. Checking those two views is usually enough to start a day.
Invite the right people early
Add teammates with the role they actually need rather than making everyone an Admin to avoid friction. Clients come in as guests, attached to specific projects, and they never consume a paid seat. Doing this at setup avoids the common problem of a workspace where nobody remembers why a person has the access they have.
Know where a decision gets recorded
When work needs sign-off, request an approval on the task rather than asking in a message. The decision, the person who made it, the time, and any note are all stored against the task and written to the audit log, which is what makes the record worth having later.
Worth remembering
- Use one workspace per client to keep engagements cleanly separated.
- Name stages after what is actually happening, such as In production or Client review, not after a status word.
- Assign an owner at creation. An unowned task is a task nobody is doing.
Common questions
A group is a folder inside a workspace used to organize related work. A project sits inside a group and is where stages, timeframes, columns, and tasks live.
It depends on your plan. Free includes one, Studio three, Agency ten, and Scale is unlimited.
Related guides
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Bring a real project into Trellis with guided onboarding, or ask us anything about your setup.