Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool. Seems lots of JIRA-haters in the comments but lets get back and look at this event. The folks at Fog Creek brought us FogBugz, Stackoverflow, Trello.<p>We should celebrate their success because its events like this that create the motivation for some of us to go create something that "stands on their shoulders" or competes with them or creates some new paradigm of how tasks can be managed. Fog Creek is almost the ultimate startup - they keep it small, do things right, stick to their craft. What is the result? Regularly bring fantastic products to the world. Anybody contemplating how to get setup and run a software startup should start by reading most/all of joelonsoftware and then the later blogs about SO and Trello.<p>Yes Im huge fan - because i applaud geeks that put heart and soul into their craft as well as running their business and getting great outcomes like this. Would love to see more of it.<p>0.2c
This makes sense. Atlassian is good at making money from its services and it is increasing its overall ecosystem here.<p>Github moves really slow in comparison. I guess Github is more focused, but there are a lot of contrasts between Github and Atlassian, and in terms of making money I think Atlassian is doing a lot better.<p>Has Github acquired anything significant? Github should have acquired Zenhub (which is Trello integrated into Github for the most part) instead of slowing trying to recreate it -- although I guess Github has better code purity if they develop it themselves, but it means they move slower.
This is a great acquistion for both parties.<p>1. Trello was smart in only taking $10M in VC funding [1]. This allows for a 40x return for it's investors. If Trello were like many other startups, they probably would have taken too much VC money and got themselves in a situation where the VC wouldn't sell unless it was $2B+.<p>2. Atlassian now has a product that is loved by many developers and business people alike. It will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.<p>TLDR: Both Trello & Atlassian were smart in this acquisition. Couldn't be happier for them (and as a user).<p>Edit: typos<p>[1] <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity</a>
Open letter to Atlassian:<p>Trello are an amazing team and an amazing product, and what makes the product so amazing is how domain-agnostic it is. They refuse at all costs to add any feature that helps use Trello in one specific way over others (e.g. lists = stages in task lifetime, cards = tasks; lists = assigned people, cards = tasks; lists = dates, cards = events, ...), and that made Trello equally useful as a Kanban board, a CRM, or for a beer microbrewery tracking its different barrels and the stages of brewing they are at. The best thing about Trello is when you start organizing your board one way, then organically drift towards a more natural way to organize them, sometimes without noticing as you do. Trello is for processes that you're not sure yet about the right way to manage.<p>Atlassian is all about development team collaboration. Trello can be used for that, but not anymore than it can be used for brewing beer. Trello shines when you don't know in advance how you will want to manage a project. If Trello became a dev collaboratin tool, I would stop using it for dev collaboration because there are better specialized solutions for that. Keep Trello general. Please.
I'm a big fan of Trello but I dread using Atlassian products. I do not have a good feeling about this.<p>Hopefully Atlassian can learn from what makes Trello so wonderful instead of JIRA-ifying it into oblivion.
There's an open source clone of Trello that you can self-host: <a href="https://wekan.io/" rel="nofollow">https://wekan.io/</a>
This is really bad as Atlassian is like a prize winning show pony -- great marketing and webinars but once you get deeply into the product usage you find all sorts of problems and open issues. BitBucket has been waiting for 2FA for 5 years! Bambo was recently semi-retired going against a lot of users investments. And these are just recent.<p>I would not expect wonderful things for Trello and thankfully it appears they got their money out up front.<p>My words of advice to anyone looking is to stay away from Atlassian at all costs. Once your in too deep you probably are trapped - which is what they count on.
This is depressing. Trello is a beloved software for a lot of people. It's sad that Trello decided to sell off to Atlassian. I can't believe the same company that makes Jira is going to run Trello. SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck.
Trello has apparently about 19 million users. And I would bet that the majority of them are not the typical target audience of Atlassian products (i.e. software development teams).<p>So I wonder if they are mostly aquiring the user base here in order to expand their potential market?
Good night sweet prince.<p>Jira and Confluence are epitomes of corporate red-tape molasses. Not only the process tends to get tangled to death in all the features everyone gets a bright idea to use, but even without them it wants just too much hardware.<p>A measly company of 30 ppl|3 years history and you're scratching your head to blood keeping the basic actions not taking more that 5 seconds while attempting to not pay 10x license cost for the hardware.<p>Too bad there aren't many alternatives.<p>And thank god I'm not using Trello. It's dead, people it's dead.
Atlassian's blog post on it: <a href="https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/</a>
I can only imagine it went something like this... <a href="http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J</a>
Here is a snapshot of what Bitbucket has launched over the last year:
Server/Data Center: <a href="http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/12/bitbucket-server-year-review/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/12/bitbucket-server-year-rev...</a><p>Cloud: <a href="https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/09/07/bitbucket-cloud-5-million-developers-900000-teams/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/09/07/bitbucket-cloud-5-mill...</a><p>- Merge checks
- Bitbucket Pipelines (Continuous delivery service in Bitbucket Cloud)
- 2FA
- Universal Second Factor (U2F)
- Improved SSH
- Support for multiple SSH keys
- Build status API
- Smart Mirroring
- Git LFS (including the embedded media viewer only in Bitbucket Cloud which allows for better large file uploads)
- Smart Commits (allow repository committers to process JIRA issues using commands in your commit messages)
- reviewer status on pull requests
- Code search (Server only currently)
- 0 downtime backups
- code review at commit level
- default review in pull requests
- pull request merge strategies
- Deploy Bitbucket Data center with AWS
- iterative reviews for pull requests
- pull request focused dashboard
- Bitbucket Connect add-ons (deploy from Bitbucket with AWS, Azure or Digital Ocean)
Can we all start using Trello clones as the tutorial substance? So in case Atlassian screws it up, we have 100s of developers that know how to re-create it? :D
Some of Atlassian's previous acquisitions have turned into products mostly shunned by the developer community (Hipchat, Bitbucket) - I hope they've learned what went wrong since then, but my gut says Atlassian isn't very good at integrating external teams and supporting their products. Hopefully Trello won't go down the same path.
<i>"In July 2014, Trello spins off from Fog Creek and becomes Trello, Inc. naming Fog Creek co-founder Michael Pryor as its CEO. The company raises $10.3 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital and Index Ventures."</i><p>Spark Calital and Index Ventures must have gotten a nice huge return, Trello only raised $10 million.
I wonder how much revenue was Trello generating? It seems it was 10MM middle of last year <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/05/23/trello-get-serious-about-big-businesses-as-it-passes-1-1-million-daily-users-and-triples-sales/#7b75d1376ce2" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/05/23/trello-get...</a>
What we really need from Atlassian is yet another syntax or markup to learn for a product in their suite that is different from all of the other products.<p>I'm glad that now they've acquired another company, we have the opportunity to soon look forward to this.
From <a href="http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian" rel="nofollow">http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian</a><p>>> We will continue operating as a standalone service, and we will continue to integrate deeply with all of the tools available out there that help people collaborate (and you can look forward to some great integrations with HipChat, Confluence and JIRA).
Great acquisition for Atlassian and I'm super pumped for the Trello team. The people here who are concerned that the culture will change are ill informed and likely haven't gone through an acquisition themselves. This makes perfect sense and look forward to seeing what's next for both companies.
Looks like too many customers decided they JUST MIGHT HAVE TO GO OVER TO THE AUSTRALIANS! So many that "the Australians" bought the team. This is poetic and this is why I'm glad blogs often stick around.<p><a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/07/20/fruity-treats-customization-and-supersonics-fogbugz-7-is-here/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/07/20/fruity-treats-cust...</a>
Why did Fog Creek approved this acquisition? With products like Stack Overflow, Trello and GoMix I thought they want to become a big player on the market of software development. Why sell our own assets?
I'm a big fan of Trello and Atlassian both. Personally speaking, if all they do is take away the crippling "add on" restrictions in Trello for solo users, this will be a huge win.
Sounds like a move to capture the lower bound of the market. Right now, lots of teams leave Trello to something more robust like JIRA after crossing somewhere between 5-10 people, but with this, they're on Atlassian from the beginning. I also think the JIRA team could use some UX help from Trello :P
Not related at all but I interviewed for Trello in 2016, the meeting was super cool (video call in the browser, nice RH girl apparently very excited about my profile), the job was full remote, they needed help to move from Backbone to React and they have millions of users (!) so I was quite hyped. Then I received an email of refusal from another guy containing only a quote from the CEO. I asked for feedback (probably my spoken english was not good enough but I wanted a confirmation) and the guy replied me that he couldn't say anything for legal reasons... and the same quote from the CEO. Cold shower experience.<p>About the topic: we used JIRA in my last job and it was not that bad. Curious to see what they are going to do with Trello.
I suspect this is as much about getting a dev center in New York, away from a tapped-out Sydney startup scene that is hostile to bringing in overseas talent, and having a brand with a reputation as a good employer; as it is about acquiring the IP or user-base.
<a href="http://wekan.io" rel="nofollow">http://wekan.io</a><p>Libre open source alternative.<p>Can be self hosted or self hosted from within Sandstorm
If I was the Atlassian CEO reading this thread, I'd be really worried. There are a <i>lot</i> of comments from developers with zero faith in Atlassian's ability to create (or even preserve) a great product.
So, pardon my ignorance, but I wasn't aware FogCreek spun it off into its own entity...<p>But, what was the $10mil of VC money used for?<p>Has Trello evolved since taking the money (features)?<p>Over $300mil in cash for kanban cards? Nice exit.
What Trello has needed since day-1 was a self-hosting option. Many companies won't allow their customers to use it since there's no formal agreement on data protection.
I have a hard time understanding how Trello is worth that much money. Does it really cost 1/2 billion to get 19 million users and a Trello like app built? Is the Trello team really worth that much? Was Trello that threatening to Atlassian? There are a lot of there other successful collaboration SaaS out there as well (e.g. Asana). This is not like social/content services where there can only be one (or very few e.g. instagram, github, whatsapp).
Not the biggest fan of Atlassian (but an admin for 10 years). I am trying to figure out what product to use for project management, and what path Atlassian will take.<p>They started with Jira Agile, which became Jira Software where you could plan agile sprints. Assuming this was the future i was a bit surprised to see Portfolio pop up, but i am assuming this project will be shut down at some point in favor of a new Trello for Jira? Or?<p>We currently bought Softwareplants BigPicture & BigPicture Enterprise, but also played with TempoTeam Planner.<p>I see both Trello and Atlassian's CEO being here, please let you loyal customers know what your intentions are so we can plan for our futures.<p>To clarify:
My largest fear is not that they screw up Trello, but that once more developing resources we pay ever doubling license-fees for will be reallocated to making sure Trello works well with the rest of the stack, and becomes a big seller.<p>It's all about new bells and whistles with Atlassian, while we the end-users are begging for bugfixes or feature-requests for decades. This is clearly reflected in not patching bugs in current version but instead force users to upgrade, while sometimes losing functionality we loved just to keep the application safe.<p>Jonas
Atlassian follows MBA 101[1]: if you're selling an elastic inferior product, you can always buy out the competition.<p>[1] As portrayed on The Wire
Atlassian has supported me with educational tools and discounts. Their git services and customer support has been the best for me and I became a paying customer.<p>Glad they bought trello. I'm hoping they integrate it to the existing issue workflow and make it a better product than it is. And there is a good chance of that happening.
Jira is by far the worst and most convoluted application that I have used. It's slow a d very horribly designed that I even wonder if they did tgat on purpose. Heck you have to shell out $3000 for your team just to learn how to use it.<p>Hopefully they'll leave Trello as it is.
I hope they can learn from Trello to improve JIRA Agile. JIRA seems much better for software projects with organised sprints and large numbers of tickets, but front end performance is terrible and the overall UX feels like it could be improved significantly.
Microsoft Planner was released as a free add-on to Office 365 at the backend of last year, which seems to be a direct "good enough" competitor to Trello's business & enterprise plans. Wonder if that was a factor in the sale?
Don't sweat it. There are other services to migrate to. In my startup[1] we've added a quick Trello Migration in just a day.<p>There is now a new market share to fight for<p>[1]<a href="http://www.getswip.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.getswip.com</a>
I just hope they leave the design alone and don't try enforcing their hideous design philosophy upon it. (Why do big tech companies think that making all their software look the same helps anyone or makes them more money?)
Can anyone point me to any acquisition that resulted in a net benefit to the customers of either company/product?<p>Or maybe I should not consider the users of a product the primary customers?
Confluence is starting to move in on SharePoint's turf, I've witnessed it first hand. The two products really don't compare, but for Digital teams who just want to get something going Confluence is way easier.<p>I think this acquisition will add to the Confluence vs SharePoint story and make Atlassian more attractice.<p>IF (it's a big if) Atlassian are planning to move into the intranet/productivity tools space this acquisition is really sensible.
Trello is one of the best SaaS I've used.<p>Atlassian used to be loved before prior to its IPO.<p>I'm not too happy with Atlassian acquiring Trello. How much of Fog Creek will still be part of Trello?
I love Trello!<p>At one of my internships (Elec Engineering) with a mining company they used Trello to organize the majority of their work.<p>After that experience I started using Trello to organize all my daily stuff.<p>I had it to organise my book reading list, book purchase list, Quarterly and Yearly goals, Job application status, plan and execute on my thesis, assignments and side projects.<p>I can't believe how much value it has provided me for free!<p>It's good to see them get rewarded with a nice buyout.
one of the largest players in the project management game acquires another tool and it's a-okay because there's loads of competition; but realistically, trello was one of the competitors to JIRA that actually could hold its own when being reviewed for use by non-developers. JIRA has been the default choice of many companies and while not a monopoly I'd say it's approaching that status.
Well, since Atlassian is in the mood of acquiring, I have made an analytics and data processing system that plugs into JIRA to create custom reports in ways that are not possible currently by JIRA.<p>It also integrates externally to JIRA regardless of whether it's a cloud or on-premise version.<p>We have been using it internally successfully since a few months, first in my team and then in others in our company.<p>Would you guys be interested at Atlassian?
Makes a lot of sense although I expect at least one of my former co-workers is really is really irritated because they hate Jira and were feeling "forced" to use it. Perhaps with this acquisition there will be a 'local server' option which is something some companies really look for.
I kinda see Jira and Trello as separate target markets. Jira = Enterprise (for me) and Trello = Small-to-mid-sized companies and personal use.<p>My company uses Jira (correctly) and it is great - for software. I keep all of my personal lists in Trello.<p>Also - VersionOne <<<<<<<<< Jira
wow! I had recently decided to go all in on Trello for my personal use and I was in the process of making a Trello-Gitlab powerup (just like Trello Github powerup).<p>I wonder what the future of Trello is - both as a customer and as a software dev (I loved their remote work policy).
Such a shame, I wonder how long it will take Trello to turn into heavy 'enterprise' bloatware like the rest of said companies products. There are a few good open source alternatives out there now so I'll personally move to one of those.
Congrats to Trello and Fog Creek Software!<p>I've moved on to Zenhub instead of Trello, but it's indeed a really nice product that can be used by many, and not just people in software development
If they kill the free tier, it will help our desktop card-based planner: <a href="http://www.hyperplan.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.hyperplan.com</a>
;0)
Trello is about to become an add-on for Jira that won't work 95% of the time and be jammed down your throat by a scrum master as the only tool for the job.
When I hear Atlassian, I hear Jira and we all 'love' Jira. I don't know, I see how this is good for Atlassian, not really how it is good for me.
I am really glad I never started using Trello for my task organization. It lacked the basic act of marking tasks as Done. I needed to manually drag the done tasks to a 'Done' board.<p>On that note, my hunt for good task organization app led me to Todoist! It's awesome! It has great web and Android apps and great API which I intend to hack at some point to create an emacs interface for it.<p>So glad that Todoist wasn't bought by Atlassian. My biggest gripe with Atlassian is that it natively doesn't support Markdown in Jira. It uses its funky own markup that's really bad.
They bought 19M users for $425M, it's $22 per user, I don't know how many users pay for the service?<p>PS: their pricing page says $10 / year and user
my experience with Atlassian products tells me that this will likely become a "third project type" to JIRA: Scrum, Kanban, Trello (or whatever generalized name is given). They feel like different products.<p>Or Atlassian is using this to go after competitors like A-Ha! which it doesn't currently serve (i.e. non software development projects)
Is it just me or the acquisition amounts decreasing?<p>Soundcloud - $500M potential buyout<p>Trello - $425M<p>I'm not aware of any other. All those 10,000 startups world wide and only a couple gets bought out few IPO. The chances of a payout doing a VC funded startup is marginally slim despite what PG wrote in his articles nearly 10+ years ago.<p>Coupled with rising interest rates, it seems like the ride is coming to a slow crawl but this is just my gut feeling.<p>There's no better time to bootstrap than ever. Control your own company with no outside influences. You don't need billions of dollars. If you can double your day job salary with a SaaS then I think that's a huge success.<p>Here's to a happy & successful 2017 for the rest of us bootstrappers on HN.
Kinda makes me happy for trello's founders. Have been using it as a reference site for HTML and CSS development. I really liked those buttons! :D I hope atlassin doesn't make it bloated and shitty. Hope it stays good for the small teams as it has ever been!