Trello is a

web-based A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

kanban Kanban ( Japanese: カンバン and Chinese: 看板, meaning signboard or billboard) is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing (also called just-in-time manufacturing, abbreviated JIT). Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, deve ...

-style, list-making application and is developed by Trello Enterprise, a subsidiary of

Atlassian Atlassian Corporation () is an Australian software company that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. The company is domiciled in Delaware, with global headquarters in Sydney, Austr ...

. Created in 2011 by

Glitch A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system, such as a transient fault that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, in circuit bending, as well as amon ...

, it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

in 2014 and sold to

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 TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximat ...

event by Fog Creek founder

Joel Spolsky Avram Joel Spolsky (born 1965) is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of ''Joel on Software'', a blog on software development, and the creator of the project management software Trello. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel ...

. In September 2011 ''

Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fran ...

'' magazine named the application one of "The 7 Coolest Startups You Haven't Heard of Yet".

Lifehacker ''Lifehacker'' is a weblog about life hacks and software that launched on January 31, 2005. The site was originally launched by Gawker Media and is currently owned by G/O Media. The blog posts cover a wide range of topics including: Microsoft ...

said "it makes project collaboration simple and kind of enjoyable". In 2014, it raised US$10.3 million in funding from

Index Ventures Index Ventures is a Europe, European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Sinc ...

and

Spark Capital Spark Capital is a venture capital firm in the United States, responsible for early-stage funding startups of consumer, commerce, FinTech, software, frontier, and media sectors. It has branches in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City. Hi ...

. 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. In 2016 Trell
launched the Power-Up platform
allowing 3rd party developers to build and distribute extensions known as Power-Ups to Trello. Initial integrations included

Zendesk Zendesk is an American company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides software-as-a-service products related to customer support, sales, and other customer communications. The company was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2007. ...

SurveyMonkey Momentive Inc. (formerly SurveyMonkey Inc.) is an experience management company that offers cloud-based software in brand insights, market insights, product experience, employee experience, customer experience, online survey development, and a ...

and

Giphy Giphy ( ), styled as GIPHY, is an American online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share short looping videos with no sound that resemble animated GIF files. History Beginnings and early history Giphy was founded ...

. By January 2022 there were a total o
247 power-ups
listed in th
power-up directory
On January 9, 2017,

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 leading 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 Glitch blog post in January 2012, the client was a thin web layer which downloads the main app, written in

CoffeeScript CoffeeScript is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript. It adds syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby, Python, and Haskell in an effort to enhance JavaScript's brevity and readability. Specific additional features include list comprehen ...

and compiled to

minified Minification (also minimisation or minimization) is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from the source code of interpreted programming languages or markup languages without changing its functionality. These unnecessary characters ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, using

Backbone.js Backbone.js is a JavaScript rich-client web app framework based on the model–view–controller design paradigm, intended to connect to an API over a RESTful JSON interface. Backbone is known for being lightweight, as its only hard dependency i ...

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HT ...

.pushState(), and the

Mustache A moustache (; en-US, mustache, ) is a strip of facial hair grown above the upper lip. Moustaches have been worn in various styles throughout history. Etymology The word "moustache" is French, and is derived from the Italian ''mustaccio'' ...

templating language A template processor (also known as a template engine or template parser) is software designed to combine templates with a data model to produce result documents. The language that the templates are written in is known as a template language ...

. The server was built on top of

MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Ser ...

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code ou ...

and a modified version of

Socket.io Socket.IO is an event-driven library for real-time web applications. It enables real-time, bi-directional communication between web clients and servers. It consists of two parts: a client-side library that runs in the browser, and a server-si ...

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."

References

External links