Trello organizes work as cards moving across lists on a board, in the style of a Kanban board. It launched in 2011 inside the software company Fog Creek and spun out on its own in 2014. Atlassian bought it in 2017, when it already had more than 19 million registered users.
Its plans run from Free, for up to ten collaborators per workspace, through Standard and Premium to Enterprise for organizations with 50 seats or more.
More than a board
Premium adds other views of the same cards, including Timeline, Calendar, Table, Dashboard and Map. Trello’s Inbox captures tasks from email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and a phone, and Planner lines cards up against a Google or Outlook calendar.
AI features, on Standard and above, can summarize card content and generate whole boards. Trello also has an MCP server, on every plan, that lets AI assistants read and update boards.
Automation and Power-Ups
Trello’s built-in automation runs rules when something happens on a board and adds buttons to cards and boards. It also runs scheduled and due-date commands. Every workspace gets it: Free includes 250 runs a month and Standard 1,000, while Premium and Enterprise have no cap.
More than 200 Power-Ups add features and connections inside Trello, from Google Drive and GitHub to Salesforce and Zendesk.
The Trello API
Trello’s REST API reads and writes boards, lists, cards, checklists, custom fields and actions. Access starts from an API key created in the Power-Up admin portal, with tokens that can be limited to reading or writing and set to expire. Since September 2026, apps can also connect through OAuth 2.0 with finer-grained permissions.
The rate limits are 300 requests every ten seconds per API key, and 100 per token.
Webhooks and custom Power-Ups
A webhook can watch a whole board, or a single card on it, and report every change. Trello checks the receiving address when the webhook is set up and signs each delivery. Failed deliveries are retried.
For something that lives inside Trello itself, a business can build its own Power-Up for its workspace, adding buttons or whole card sections that pull from another system.
Turning customer emails into cards
Every board has its own email address for each member. Anything sent to it becomes a card created as that member, with the original email attached. Trello’s Inbox has an address of its own, separate from any board’s.
A reply that includes the board’s address is added to the original card as a comment for 7 days, and after that it starts a new card. Each card has an address too, so a later email can go straight onto it as a comment.
From an open email in Gmail, the Trello for Google Workspace add-on lets someone pick a board and list, and turns the subject into the card name and the body into its description.
Cards from forms and orders
A Google Form can create a card through the API, set off by an Apps Script form-submit trigger, with the answers mapped into the description and Custom Fields.
Orders arrive the same way, and the harder part comes later. When the order ships, the integration has to find its card again, so it records the card’s ID against the order number at the moment it creates the card. A dropdown Custom Field stores the ID of the chosen option, which means looking up the option list before setting one.
Reporting on boards in Google Sheets
Any board member can export a board as JSON. CSV, which opens straight into a spreadsheet, needs a Premium workspace and leaves comments out.
A sheet that stays current needs a feed instead of an export. A webhook on the board reports each card as it moves, and the integration updates that card’s row, found by the card’s ID.
Cards from the systems that hold the work
Boards often track work that starts somewhere else, which is where Trello’s API and webhooks earn their keep. An order or a support ticket can create its own card, the card can move as the work moves in the other system, and a sheet can report on every board without anyone exporting it.
Before adding another tool for that, take a census of the stack. Automations a team relies on every day need a named person in charge of them, and measuring the copying they replace shows whether they’re worth building.