Trello

Trello is a web-based, Kanban-style, list-making application and is developed by Trello Enterprise, a subsidiary of Atlassian. Created in 2011 by Fog Creek Software (now Glitch), it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in New York City in 2014 and sold to Atlassian in January 2017.

History

The name Trello is derived from the word "trellis" which had been a code name for the project at its early stages. Trello was released at a TechCrunch event by Fog Creek founder Joel Spolsky. In September 2011 Wired magazine named the application one of "The 7 Coolest Startups You Haven't Heard of Yet". Lifehacker said "it makes project collaboration simple and kind of enjoyable".

In 2014, it raised US$10.3 million in funding from Index Ventures and Spark Capital. Prior to its acquisition, Trello had sold 22% of its shares to investors, with the remaining shares held by founders Michael Pryor and Joel Spolsky. In May 2016, Trello claimed it had more than 1.1 million daily active users and 14 million total signups.

On January 9, 2017, Atlassian announced its intent to acquire Trello for $425 million. The transaction was made with $360 million in cash and $65 million in shares and options.

In December 2018, Trello Enterprise announced its acquisition of Butler, a company that developed a "Power-Up" for automating tasks within a Trello board.

Trello announced 35 million users in March 2019 and 50 million users in October 2019.

Uses

Users can create their task boards with different columns and move the tasks between them. Typically columns include task statuses such as To Do, In Progress, Done. The tool can be used for personal and business purposes including real estate management, software project management, school bulletin boards, lesson planning, accounting, web design, gaming, and law office case management.

Architecture

According to a Fog Creek blog post in January 2012, the client was a thin web layer which downloads the main app, written in CoffeeScript and compiled to minified JavaScript, using Backbone.js, HTML5 .pushState(), and the Mustache templating language. The server was built on top of MongoDB, Node.js and a modified version of Socket.io.

Reception

On January 26, 2017, PC Magazine gave Trello a 3.5 / 5 rating, calling it "flexible" and saying that "you can get rather creative", while noting that "it may require some experimentation to figure out how to best use it for your team and the workload you manage.