Cairn vs. Trellis: why teams switch

Keep project docs, team progress, and every department in a single workspace instead of five half-connected tools.

Trusted by teams that ship

Northsail Halcyon Vellum Batchwork Corvid Labs Plinth

No more trade-offs — Cairn covers every base

Shape the workspace around how your team actually works, and stop paying the tax of jumping between four platforms a day.

Capability	Trellis	Cairn
Project tracking
Company wiki
Assisted drafting
Admin & permissions
Relational databases
Offline editing
Public template library
Integrations
Reusable templates

Cairn is rated highest on Beacon Reviews

Cairn has led the Beacon workspace category for six straight quarters, scored across 2,184 verified customer reviews. Don't take our word for it — read the full Beacon breakdown.

Momentum
Leader

Spring

2025

Leader

Spring

2025

Leader

Enterprise

2025

88%

Ease of use

92%

Ease of admin

89%

Meets requirements

85%

Ease of setup

“Since we moved to Cairn, anyone touching a project can see scope changes and status shifts the day they happen.”

Rasmus Okonjo

Director of Engineering, Northsail

One workspace for the whole company

Bring every department onto one shared home

Cairn gives each team a landing page with instant access to the company wiki, the people directory, project templates, and whatever else they open twice a day.

Warm office lounge with woven seating and stone table — photo by H O M A D on Pexels

Team home

Team

What's new

Mission & values

Quarter goals

People directory

Press mentions

Policies

Time off

Office manual

Leave requests

Benefits

Expenses

Track progress the way your team thinks

Some leads want a checklist, some want a timeline, some want a board by owner. Build the tracker that fits, and let everyone else read the same data in the view they prefer.

Sunlit desk with notebook and plant — photo by Polina on Pexels

Quarterly budget

Track what each squad actually spends

Note	Date	Spent	Category	Left
Design sprint	Mar 3	2,180	Research	2,020
Vendor audit	Mar 9	1,610	Ops	40
Field visits	Mar 14	2,745	Travel	355
Contract dev	Mar 21	7,930	Build	−530

Put a drafting assistant next to the work

Cairn's writing assistant lives inside the page, so briefs, summaries, and release notes start from something real instead of a blank cursor and a Tuesday deadline.

Marketing/Content calendar/Q3 brainstorm

Q3 content brainstorm

Draft ten story angles for the Cairn blog aimed at operations leads at 200-person companies. Focus on what breaks when documentation and tracking live in separate tools. Draft

More work gets finished with Cairn

94%

of teams save time each week

68%

replaced two or more tools

31%

faster project completion

27%

fewer internal emails sent

Templates that skip the blank page

Cairn ships more than 3,400 templates — project plans, meeting agendas, team wikis, lightweight CRMs. Start from one and you are running the same afternoon.

Browse all templates →

Project planning Projects & tasks (weekly review) Task manager for teams

Projects & tasks (weekly review)

“Your head is for having ideas, not holding them.” — team operating principle

LIBRARY

To-do list

Projects

DoingPendingDone

Onboarding revamp

In progress

75
To do: 2 Doing: 1 Done: 1
Estimated / spent 3 : 5

CairnTemplate

Vendor renewals

In progress

40
To do: 1 Doing: 0 Done: 0
Estimated / spent 0 : 2

CairnTemplate

Projects & tasks (weekly review)

“Your head is for having ideas, not holding them.”

LIBRARY

To-do list

Projects

Onboarding revamp

75 · doing 1
est / spent 3 : 5

Vendor renewals

40 · doing 0
est / spent 0 : 2

Timeline · March

See whether Cairn fits the way you work

Start Cairn free

Keep reading

Blog post

Projects

Status	Name	Owner	Meeting notes
Done	Website refresh	Nadia Ferrell	Team weekly
Planning	Consumer trends	Devin Osei	Eng standup
Planning	Launch new plan	Nadia Ferrell	Launch date
In progress	Brand campaign	Lior Mensah	Product weekly
Not started	Publish blog post	Camille Rooke	Retrospective

Don't let action items die: wire meeting notes into project docs

When notes and project pages are connected, both get better. Meetings turn into decisions, and projects stop drifting between check-ins.

Nadia Ferrell

Marketing

Blog post

Task management table

Soft natural linen texture — photo by amanda cavalcante on Pexels

Task management table

Last updated 12 March

Task	Owner	Progress	Due
Demand survey	Aliya	In progress	02/05
Function scoping	Devin	Completed	01/18
Handover notes	Esme	In progress	02/04
Rollout checklist	Tomas	Blocked	02/11

The eight-point project checklist worth stealing

A practical guide to building a project checklist your team will actually keep open, plus the templates we hand to new leads in week one.

Ingrid Kovac

Marketing