Trello reaches 50 million users, introduces new automation and template features
Atlassian-owned Trello, a Kanban-inspired project management app organized around the idea of boards containing cards with to-do items, today announced that it’s reached a major milestone: 50 million active users. That’s up from just over 35 million users as of March and 25 million in September 2017, when Trello claimed that over 80% of the Fortune 500 was using its productivity suite.
To commemorate the occasion, the company says it’ll introduce enhancements in the coming days aimed at automating and streamlining typical workflows. “From small businesses to the Fortune 500, from planning weddings to planning getaways, people around the world rely on Trello to get work done and achieve their goals,” wrote the company in a blog post. “As we look towards the next 50 million milestones, we are investing in making Trello an even more indispensable part of … [teams’] day.”
Business class and enterprise customers will see a public template feature roll out to their Trello boards, which will allow team members to make templates for basic use cases like hiring or product planning. As for the rest of Trello’s users, they’ll gain access to card templates enabling the standardization of cards on board and a new community template gallery with contributions from Zoho, Litmus, Unicef, United Nations, Grand Hyatt, Salesforce Essentials, 3M, Invision, Wired, Skyscanner, Dropbox, Indeed, Survey Monkey, and others.
To complement the new template features, Trello says that it’ll begin to integrate Butler (the automation tool it acquired last year) into boards both paid and free starting this week. Trello says the interface and recommendations have been redesigned for “clarity” and “ease-of-use,” and that the full range of Butler’s rules, buttons, and commands will be present and accounted for.
In a related development, Trello is launching what it calls Suggested Actions, which leverage machine learning to understand frequent actions on a board and surface those actions in the appropriate context. It might suggest assigning members who are often assigned to cards or adding labels commonly used across workflows, for instance, or it might recommend moving cards to specific lists. Trello says it’ll improve the AI underlying Suggested Actions over time to make it “smarter” and more “relevant” to tasks.
“Sometimes products make things overly complicated, piling you up with tons of features until you can no longer tap into that oh-so-productive zone,” wrote Trello. “Trello has always been the easiest way to organize projects and work more collaboratively.”
Trello has come a long way in the seven years since Fog Creek Software debuted it publicly and Atlassian acquired it for $425 million. Today, it boasts a robust ecosystem of third-party Chrome extensions and native apps called Power-Ups, not to mention integrations with services like Bitbucket, Google Drive, Dropbox, Salesforce, Slack, and other apps via its API.
March saw the launch of a slew of new features for Trello Enterprise, including improved admin controls, new visibility settings, and compliance certifications. And in October, Trello teamed up with 3M’s Post-It brand for an integration that lets users turn as many as 200 paper sticky notes at a time into individual cards within a Trello board.