Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M (opens in new tab)

Not just JIRA; I think a lot of people were burnt by Atlassian's management of Hipchat or Bitbucket too.

Historically there's something of a track record where Atlassian is the place where interesting, innovative products go to stagnate. Bug fixes happen glacially (a 1 year turnaround seems to be standard), and new feature development doesn't happen at all. Running Hipchat is like looking through a window back at 2012.

> Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool.

Great outcome for a great team? Perhaps. But I don't really see how this benefits the tool, nor the people who use the tool, because I (and a lot of other people here) are assuming, with reason, that this deal heralds the end of further development of Trello.

Logging in from multiple places has always been terrible. I'll be logged in on Mac and available but randomly get emails as if I'm offline. I'll be online on my phone and get e-mails. I wan't emails of messages when I'm actually offline and not logged in but HipChat doesn't seem to care and emails me anyways sometimes. The option to turn off email notifications isn't very configurable either. Its off or on.

Look at the release notes for windows and mac and search for reconnection. Just about every release has a fix for reconnecting going back to 2014.

https://www.hipchat.com/release_notes/mac https://www.hipchat.com/release_notes/windows

edit: Yes right now there might not be an exact competitor but in a few years it could easily match everything Jira does.

I feel like about 30% of all Github features have been released since the last major point release of Jira and Confluence, which themselves were buggy, poorly tested, crud as well.

How does Atlassian move "fast"? Has Atlassian done.... anything worth noting in the past 3 years?

In addition, Atlassian's services are spread out across many products, which can increase mobility. GitHub has only one product, so while they probably have many teams working on many features, there is still one product they can push releases to.

Trello wasn't "smart" for only taking $10M in funding (and only in one, late, round, which means it only gave away probably 20-30% equity.)

Trello happened to be spun off from an established company, which took care of financing initial product development and growth. This is equivalent to the founders financing maybe a $1.5M round and a $4M round from their own pocket.

Don't try to beat Trello's benchmark in funding strategy, unless you happen to be able to finance the first few rounds from your own pocket.

> 2. Atlassian now has a product that [.] will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.

Atlassian would be wise to keep this integration from being too tight. Trello shines as the most general project management tool out there (except maybe a spreadsheet, although that is the one thing I can't bear to do with a spreadsheet), and if it became a developer-centric collaboration tool I for one would probably stop using it, even for collaboration among developers.

Will it? i use both Bitbucket and Jira at work, and i'm constantly finding myself wondering how two products from the same org can work so poorly together. They use their products to market their other products, but as far as actually integrating things into a seamless experience it doesn't seem like that's atlassian's strength.

In many ways that will be a good thing though, trello will likely remain trello instead of becoming something else to fit atlassian's ecosystem.

I promise you Atlassian understands why Trello is so successful. You described Trello's core strength perfectly - and this one of the reasons they are committed to keeping it as a standalone service.

(disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Trello)

Why, you ask? As a recently public company Atlassian knows it'll need to grow beyond developers if they want to continue growing at a healthy rate, and Trello offers that exactly. I believe that's why they paid such a hefty price for it.

It just wouldn't make sense to throw away all those users...

On the bright side, this might pave the way for a new product in this space, or some open-source tools which replicate the same basic funtionality.

Why would they JIRA-ify it? They would lose their audience who sought a JIRA alternative in the first place. From their blog post on the subject https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/ they seem to acknowledge this

I happen to use, and like, both products. JIRA at work (where I want a lot of the features) and Trello for personal/small group projects and even family/household stuff where I just need _simple_

https://trello.com/pricing

https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/

We've have been exposed to JIRA through external suppliers and that has been enough to make him on his edges now.

Personally I don't think much will change, at least in the first year or so until the contracts of the original developers lapse and they can move on to new things.

Response: what a silly notion, no

Or another one I found recently: we'd like to comment on code that isn't within 10 lines of a changed file. You know, because one line change in file a can impact stuff elsewhere. Or even in another project but the chances of that happening are more slim than a tachyon hitting an atom as it passes through earth.

Response: Good idea, here's stuff we did this year, and here's other stuff we do. (aka the non committal middle finger)

It sucks because atlassian products are 80% of the way there, but the final 20% polish never seems to arrive. And its been years.

Trello, amazing because of it's small size and limited, elegant feature set. Atlassian, awful because they won't implement everything that their customers ask for. Oh and the only feature that you've pointed out that's missing, 2fa, it's not missing. It's been in place for literally years.

The open issue tracker that Atlassian maintains is there so that you can see things that they've said no to. You can actually dig in and find out if someone else has asked for a feature that you want. You can see, completely transparently, whether or not they might implement it. The things that Trello has been asked to build but has quietly and privately said no to? No where to be found (and reasonably so given comments like this one).

Using a companies transparency against them is gross. It shows a lack of empathy for the people who build these systems, the trade offs that they have to make and the responsible decisions they make to not implement every single feature request. JIRA is enterprise software, it's incredibly extensible and configurable. The fact that some people configure it poorly isn't entirely their fault (though sane defaults can solve for some of this problem). Trello is for small teams. It's compact and simple in ways that JIRA was never intended to be. The $425MM? That means Atlassian understands that Trello has captured a part of they didn't.

BitBucket has had 2FA since Sep 2015: https://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/10/two-step-verification-...

Do some research, unless your goal was to slander.

Read this article that Jordan Novet wrote. I know seeing is believing and you will have to wait and see, but I agree with everything Jay Simons says in this interview.

"During the interview, Simons took time to assure me that Atlassian wouldn’t ruin Trello." http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-bel...

(disclaimer: I'm the Trello ceo)

You can get a better wysiwyg wiki just by sharing a folder in Google Docs and having them link to each other. And I'd take Trello over "greenhopper" any day.

All these negative comments and hand wringing about Trello being ruined sounds like whining entitlement.

Atlassian is a fabulously successful independently run company that you should be happy bought Trello.

For goodness sake all you haters in this thread make it sound like Trello was acquired by Trump Corporation or The Empire or something.

After that, SourceTree has been slowly starting to suck. It has a bunch of annoying new bugs that don't get fixed, now requires logging into Atlassian to use it on every machine you use, and has had almost no useful or compelling feature additions in recent years. It is basically a good indie app from several years ago, with the Atlassian taint slowly being applied to it.

I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.

If you compare SourceTree to other halfway modern git clients (like Tower or GitX-dev), oh boy does it suck! The layout is completely disorganized, the diffing is super lousy. It's slow. It sucks up lots of memory. It's literally the last GUI client I'd use before just going to the command line.

Yes, I often long back to the days when you could just put software on a floppy disk and be sure that it would never change. That this isn't practically possible anymore is one of the biggest downsides of the cloud.

At most, this is welcome news if they manage to integrate Trello with Jira somehow.

I have yet to use another ticket system for software development that is as decent to use as JIRA. I'm not saying I love it, but I've done my time with all the usual suspects and I CHOSE JIRA for my company. I found most people who have really hated JIRA for a good reason actually hated the borked workflow that their administrators put them into.

BitBucket has been a great private hosted Git repository for us, we have at least 150+ repositories- the addition of 'Projects' has adequately solved my biggest complaint.

Confluence is fine as far as intranet wikis go, the fact that it's somewhat integrated with JIRA and BitBucket makes it work fine. We tried using Google Pages- never again. Our documentation is easily discoverable and content authoring is easy. We don't try and run anything publicly so our use case is dead simple.

I am far from expert when it comes to startups, their evaluations and acquisitions, but isn't >1million daily active users [1] not enough to make Trello a billion dollar unicorn? What Trello lacked to reach this? Is it all about the user count and it does not matter they pay or not or you have monetisation strategy or not?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trello#History

We also used and liked Crucible (their code review tool), but it didn't yet offer some features of Gerrit that were very important to us, so we moved to Gerrit.

Luckily there are free software alternatives to trello you can self host that are not going to sell out such as wekan[1], taskboard[2], taiga[3], kanboard[4], ...

[1]: https://wekan.io/

[2]: https://taskboard.matthewross.me/

[3]: http://taiga.pm/

[4]: https://kanboard.net/

I've yet to see a project manager or anyone outside hardcore development get anything positive out of at Asian products.

Their tools typically complicates everything to the point of slowing production by as much as 150% compared to projects where management is done with post it's on a board and physical meetings... I know because we did the business case, which today means we're actively avoiding companies that want to tunnel projects into things like JIRA.

I get that atlassian produce excellent tools for tracking development time so companies can bill me more precisely. Unfortunately the side effect is that everything gets produced slower, more expensively and ends up confusing the shit out of our project managers.

Edit: I guess the spinning-out doesn't say anything about ownership (though the article does say Trello did a round of funding after the spin-out)

Restyaboard: http://restya.com/board (open source, self-hosted)

Phabricator Projects https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/projects/ (open source, self-hosted, or paid hosting)

Kanban: https://kanboard.net/ (open source, self-hosted, or paid hosting)

Wekan: https://wekan.io/ (open source, self-hosted)

And no doubt, lots more not listed here...

Then I remembered my difficulty with finding a proper to-do app. Yes, it will have millions of people make a clone, but it will also have thousands publishing crappy versions.

Here's the migration docs: https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Migrating-from-Trello

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=taiga.io&sort=byPopularity&pre...

Not many todo lists have millions of users, including some that pay actual money for the service. Having looked at many project management tools, Trello has absolutely nailed certain aspects of the user experience that many of the others get wrong. Try pasting an image into a card, for example.

It's not a perfect tool, but if you tried to recreate it yourself, you'd probably start to realize why they netted $450M.

No, but many have been users of companies that ended their beatiful journey soon after being acquired.

I'm cautiously optimistic that Atlassian don't want to waste half-a-billion dollars.

Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow, and does not work for Trello (nor Atlassian).

From a strategic standpoint, selling Trello is probably a more favorable way for Spolsky and Pryor to raise $360 million in cash than through venture capital. In hindsight it's not implausible that the goal behind developing Trello was always to sell it off. Unlike StackOverflow, Trello has lots of competitors and it's value in is in integrating with the rest of a project's workflow. Essentially it's a commodity.

Anyway. Not sure why some people want to move away from Trello now. Is it that they don't want an identity connection between JIRA and Trello (SSO or similar)?

Google paid $1 billion for Youtube. It's now conservatively worth $50 billion.

That means they could have 50 large acquisitions go to zero and still be breakeven on their Youtube deal.

You can use the same economics for most deals.

(to say nothing about consolidating the large apps in this space -- maybe Asana is next on their list?)

I feel like Trello's focus has been on certain segments, not on the general public. The product, in many ways, has been heavily focused and as simple as possible. It kind of infuriates me I have like 4 chrome extensions installed that augments Trello with very basic features... but I kind of understand their mentality.

Kind of the opposite of most Atlassian's products. So this is an... interesting development.

HipChat - Small user base and unscalable architecture. Hundreds of thousands of users and loads of resources to rewrite nearly all of it's backend. Still a work in progress but it's been very stable for the past year and the clients, which were all non-native web views, are coming along nicely.

Fisheye/Crucible - Small user base, unprofitable. Now has thousands of users and is hands down the best code search and review tool that lots of people don't know about.

SourceTree - Massive expose for a very small tool that wasn't well known before acquisition. Many new features, has remained stable throughout.

Greenhopper - Was a small, profitable, plugin. Now built-in, completely integrated hundreds of new features and has adapted well to various trends in Agile (scrum, kanban).

Despite this thread, which shows HN's consistent (and ironic) distain for (or is it lack of understanding of?) successful software companies, Atlassian is actually great at creating great products out of questionable acquisitions.

Outside of Atlassian:

Whatsapp is free now, people like free. That's neat. To people crying out privacy, honestly… privacy is the only thing that VC backed b2c companies sell that's actually worth real money. They were eventually going to open that pandora's box.

Twitch gets to continue existing and it's ad-free for prime members now as well. I like free :).

Firebase is better than ever. Let's all cry a single tear for Parse, we all wanted a massive Mongo cluster backing our data, right?

Whining about a for-profit product no longer having a free-tier is odd to me. Either be fine paying for the service (nothing wrong with that) or pickup software that is free; I for instance personally use org-mode and Emacs heavily for all of my personal information management.

I also do not understand the sentiment that every product acquired will slowly begin to suck; that happens for some products sure but the converse is also the case.

To be fair to Atlassian, I used to hate Jira a lot but in recent years had to use it for work and it quickly grew on me; they are putting effort into improving their services / products, modernizing their software development processes and technologies, and delivering updates to their software on a regular basis.

If you're going to contribute here, please be more constructive or detailed. Why not talk about your ideas for a project that is free that anybody could install on their servers that does what Trello does if you do not like that they may begin charging for Trello?

[0] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369

[1] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3821

PS: Here's a bonus issue that took 10 years to resolve (renaming users!): https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1549

They don't say if it will stay free or not.