An operating system for service businesses that live and die by how well they run projects.
Trellis is an operating system for service businesses that live and die by how well they run projects. It brings project delivery, resource planning, timesheets, HR, and CRM functionality into one place, so you're not stitching together a project tracker, a spreadsheet for capacity, another tool for leave, and a CRM that nobody updates.
It's built by a creative agency with a pedigree for design, UX, and software development that spent 20+ years running exactly the kind of business Trellis is designed for: multiple concurrent projects spanning different levels of complexity, delivered by different configurations of people and client stakeholders.
What Trellis brings together
Trellis is organised into distinct feature areas. Which ones are active in your workspace is set by your Owner or Admin in Settings → General → Features.
- Project management — projects, deliverables, tasks, sprints, board, roadmap, timelines, quotes, packages, rate cards, and workflows. The core delivery toolkit.
- Workload — timesheets, resourcing, and your personal leave view (Enterprise, part of HR). Where the "who's doing what and when" story lives.
- HR (Enterprise) — leave requests, absence overview, allocations, and absence types. Time-off in one place, with data that feeds back into resourcing.
- CRM (Enterprise) — contacts and organisations. Keep your client relationships tracked alongside the work you're doing for them.
How your workspace is organised
A workspace is your organisation's home in Trellis. Everyone who works with you sits inside it under one of six roles (Owner, Admin, Editor, Member, Contributor, Viewer), which control what they can see and change.
Inside the workspace you have projects — the containers for actual client or internal work. Each project has its own team, its own budget, its own tasks and deliverables, and its own resourcing calendar. Members can be added to a project independently of their workspace role, so someone can be an Editor at the workspace level but only work on the two projects they've been added to.
Around the projects sit the workspace-wide surfaces: the dashboard for your daily read of what needs attention, the timesheet for logging your hours, resourcing for cross-project capacity, and HR for the leave that affects everything else.
Why Trellis is different
Trellis began as a passion project long before we saw a potential opportunity to disrupt an already crowded marketplace, but our list of frustrations with the myriad options we tried was so long that we felt we could create something more bespoke that would fit our needs better. There are several tenets central to our mission and philosophy:
- Focus. Every aspect of admin that goes on around the work we do should be as simple, efficient, and effortless as possible, so our clients get the maximum bang for buck when they spend with us.
- Value. SaaS should support businesses to grow, not punish them for success.
- Harnessing AI. There's so much to expand on about AI during the current revolution, but we wanted a way to support our customers with safe, guardrailed AI assistance at each stage of the delivery process. By pulling together data sources from across the Trellis features we believe we can deliver our enterprise customers truly valuable agentic experiences the more they use Trellis. Organisational experience and acquired information constitutes a huge part of perceived and actual value. That value is continually impacted by staff churn, the sheer volume of knowledge acquired, and the ability and capacity of a retained few to pass it on effectively. Every organisation reaches plateaus where knowledge is acquired and buried in equal measure over time. Unlocking that value is inherent in the solution we're building.
- Capacity to grow. Business is more unpredictable now than ever before — as the pace of change increases, Trellis is a response to the requirement for flexibility. As the name suggests, it is designed to help you grow in ways you might not be able to predict yet. A set of core modules all businesses will benefit from, and for our enterprise customers the opportunity to build bespoke functionality to suit their own vision and requirements. Whether that means integrations to third-party or proprietary APIs, automations to reduce admin overheads, or simply a bespoke RAG implementation on a specific body of company knowledge, we're here to provide structure for growing businesses.
Where to go next
- Quickstart if you've just signed up and want to get your workspace ready in one sitting.
- PM philosophy if you want to understand the thinking behind how Trellis expects a project to be run, from proposal through delivery.
Everyone else can jump straight to the feature they need from the sidebar. Trellis works no matter which door you come through.