How to Migrate from Trello Without Losing Your Work

The reason most teams stay on a tool they've outgrown isn't loyalty — it's the migration. Nobody wants to retype two hundred cards. This guide shows how to migrate from Trelloin a few minutes, and is honest about the parts that don't come along for the ride.

Step 1: export your Trello board as JSON

Open the board in Trello and go to Board menu → Print, export and share → Export as JSON. Trello downloads a single .json file containing the whole board: lists, cards, descriptions, labels, checklists and the activity feed. Do this once per board you want to move.

Step 2: import it into Decknote

On your dashboard, click Import from Trello, pick the file, and press Import. The board is recreated in one pass — nothing is written until the whole import succeeds, so you never end up with half a board.

What carries over

• Lists, in their original order.
• Cards with their titles and descriptions. The description becomes a rich card page you can extend with headings, checklists and images.
• Start and due dates, mapped to the right calendar day (a detail that trips up a lot of importers — Trello stores dates as UTC instants, which is how you end up with everything a day early).
• Labels, with Trello's palette mapped to ours. Colour-only labels get a readable name instead of disappearing.
• Checklists, including which items were already checked.
• Comments and link attachments.

What doesn't — and why

After importing you get a short report of everything that was skipped, instead of it quietly vanishing:

• Archived lists and cards. A migration is a good moment for a clean slate; if you need something archived, restore it in Trello first and re-export.
• Members. People need accounts on the new tool, so invite them from the Share menu once the board is in. On Decknote that costs nothing extra — pricing is flat, not per seat.
• Uploaded files.Trello's attachment URLs require authentication and expire, so importing them would just create dead links. Re-upload the few that matter.

Step 3: rebuild the habits, not just the board

A migration is the cheapest moment to fix what wasn't working. Two things worth setting up on day one:

• Automation rules for the moves you were doing by hand — see automating your kanban board.
• Work-in-progress limits on the column where things pile up, covered in our WIP limits guide.

Is it worth moving?

That depends on why you're looking. If you're hitting Trello's free limits, paying per seat for a growing team, or wishing cards could hold real documents, the honest comparison lives in our roundup of Trello alternatives and the cost breakdown in Trello pricing explained. If Trello is working for you, stay — it's a good tool.

Create your free Decknote account and try all of this on your own board — no credit card required.