For all the various options it’s been lobbing into the world currently, Trello hasn’t given its most devoted followers the one factor a lot of them crave most—and that’s a ticket again in time to the app’s unique imaginative and prescient.
In an period the place most software program is in a near-constant state of evolution, the very thought of turning again the clock might sound loopy. However loads of people assume Trello—the multipurpose group software owned by Atlassian since 2014—has misplaced its concentrate on the streamlined approachability that when made it value utilizing.
An engineer from England is hoping to repair that. He’s constructed a strong reimagining of the unique Trello idea as a totally open-source service. His purpose is to supply a manner for any like-minded Trello lovers—or anybody who may admire what Trello used to signify—a easy, frills-free, productive expertise extra according to the Trello of a decade in the past.
If you happen to’re studying this with large eyes and an involuntary nodding of your head (or a minimum of the sensation of such nodding, with or with out the bodily motion), his creation is perhaps simply the reply you’ve been coveting.
And even in the event you aren’t, you is perhaps intrigued by the pure simplicity of a productiveness software that’s attempting solely to do one factor—and do it exceptionally nicely.
Trello, reimagined—and reinvented
Let’s get one factor out of the best way first: Henry Griffiths-Ball most likely isn’t a reputation you’ve heard earlier than. He isn’t one of many famed Silicon Valley startup kings who lives to launch a scorching new firm each few years, neither is he a former worker at Google, Apple, or any of the opposite locations many of the flashier founders appear to return from.
He’s, nevertheless, a soft-spoken, regular-seeming man who actually loves Trello—or a minimum of actually liked what Trello as soon as represented. And he’s decided to re-create that previous imaginative and prescient for different individuals who really feel the identical manner, then see the place it goes from there.
Griffiths-Ball has been utilizing his spare time over the previous a number of months to flesh out one thing he calls Kan.bn—or simply Kan for brief. Utilizing the service actually does really feel like stepping right into a time capsule and getting again to what as soon as made Trello so particular, earlier than it went by the sort of id disaster that appears to plague so many companies in the end. And also you don’t essentially should be a Trello fanatic to understand it.
However the historical past of Trello’s evolution is a important a part of Kan’s story. Manner again within the prehistoric period of 2011, you see, a developer named Joel Spolsky confirmed off a show-stealing app he’d constructed as a part of a convention known as TechCrunch Disrupt. On the time, it was in contrast to anything on the market—and it instantly gained over throngs of devoted customers because of its frills-free organizational philosophy.
That service, as you will have surmised, was none aside from Trello. As TechCrunch’s Leena Rao summed up on the time:
The online-based software is designed to be the centralized place the place all collaborative crew work could be assigned and tracked. The startup says that different challenge administration programs are developer-focused, too complicated, and don’t attraction to a broader group. Trello has been constructed for any sort of workflow, from being a business-focused software to even performing as [a] private list-management software.
Even in that earliest type, Trello’s calling card was its simplicity. The service revolved round a then-unusual board-based interface—what’s now generally often called a kanban-style setup—to make it simple to prepare something into lists of column-based playing cards.
Everybody from engineers to product managers and even lowly journalists eagerly embraced Trello and turned it into their all-purpose organizational epicenter for initiatives each skilled and private.
“it simply had this type of magic,” Griffiths-Ball remembers. “They did one thing that was so easy however so efficient.”
In 2014, Trello was acquired by software program behemoth Atlassian for a cool $425 million. And that second, within the eyes of superfans like Griffiths-Ball, is when every thing began to alter.
Whether or not that’s a constructive or a damaging is after all within the eye of the beholder, however as somebody who’s each used and written about Trello for years now, the app’s evolution is unattainable to disregard. At occasions, it’s struck me as a constructive, even thrilling development—equivalent to when Trello added a strong automation system into its software program again in 2019, opening up the door to all kinds of attention-grabbing new potentialities. Different updates appeared notably much less according to the unique imaginative and prescient, equivalent to 2021’s transfer so as to add alternate views into the combo alongside the signature Trello boards—with the goal of turning Trello right into a extra versatile all-purpose productiveness supertool like Airtable or Notion.
That transfer—together with the power to embed issues like Google Docs paperwork straight into Trello playing cards—pale away over time, suggesting that it wasn’t precisely eagerly embraced. However the notion of reworking Trello into one thing extra substantial continued, most not too long ago with this yr’s full-fledged repositioning of the service as a private duties app.
After I first wrote about that change again in February, I felt cautiously optimistic that it wouldn’t be overly disruptive for long-standing Trello followers like myself. Heck, the Atlassian govt I interviewed outright instructed me the service would proceed to help “legacy” use circumstances, regardless of the newfound concentrate on activity administration. And, to his credit score, it does.
The difficulty is with the ultimate type that evolution adopted. In contrast to the early model I noticed whereas engaged on that article, it buried options that had been as soon as entrance and middle and made them cumbersome to entry. It was a comparatively delicate shift on the floor, however all these additional clicks and all the additional trying to find previously distinguished choices made an instantly noticeable distinction in how the app felt to make use of. You’ll be able to definitely nonetheless depend on Trello for any method of challenge administration, however it feels such as you’re leaping by hoops to take action and utilizing a service in a manner it’s not designed to deal with.
Plain and easy, it’s not plain and easy. And it’s laborious to not marvel how lengthy it’ll be till a minimum of a few of these now-legacy use circumstances fade even farther from the foreground.
Trello in 2025 is stuffed with frills and pushes lots of the app’s once-primary features to the background. [Photo: Trello]
I’m removed from the one one who’s seen. A Reddit discussion board devoted to Trello is stuffed with pages upon pages of discussions from pissed off Trello prospects venting in regards to the adjustments, begging for a solution to undo them, and asking for suggestions about companies to hunt out as replacements.
It’s the sensation Griffiths-Ball has been combating for some time now. So he began wanting round to see if anybody had constructed something to deal with the lingering demand for the easy board-based group idea Trello created and ultimately deserted as a major focus.
“I all the time had in my head this concept of one thing like Trello however with a extra fashionable twist and fashionable design practices,” he says. “I assumed I’d take a stab at it and see if I could make one thing that matches my wants—then share it and see if anybody else is happy in regards to the thought.”
And that’s exactly how Kan was born.
Again to sq. one—and past
The attention-grabbing factor about signing into Kan for the primary time is that it feels new and electrifying—and but concurrently fairly acquainted, particularly in the event you’ve spent any time in Trello over time.
But it surely actually is an up to date tackle Trello’s unique type, a minimum of as a place to begin. And particularly as somebody who linked extra with Trello’s unique imaginative and prescient and largely simply tolerated the newer pivots and additions, it’s a little bit of a revelation to make use of.
At its core, Kan offers you a super-minimalist and frills-free Trello-style Kanban board—a framework for creating any sort of playing cards after which dragging and dropping ’em throughout a number of lists in as many boards as you need. And the extent to which Griffiths-Ball has been in a position to construct upon the unique Trello imaginative and prescient is staggering.
Utilizing Kan is like taking a visit again in time to an easier, extra targeted, and even extra minimalist Trello. [Photo: kan.bn]
For now, it appears like a trade-off of kinds: On the one hand, the expertise is—not surprisingly—noticeably much less polished and extra barebones than what Atlassian presently presents. However on the opposite, it’s so delightfully refreshing to make use of a model of the core Trello idea with out all of the bloat and unfocused compromises which have constructed up over time, notably from these most up-to-date Trello adjustments.
The important context to bear in mind is that Kan is just a few months previous and nonetheless the results of a single particular person’s major effort. Though an attention-grabbing asterisk does exist: Griffiths-Ball is dedicated to constructing Kan as a very open-source challenge, and already, he’s had a few dozen different individuals contributing on some stage to the service.
“I’m getting messages from individuals each day,” he says. “That’s the fantastic thing about open supply: You set one thing on the market, and also you get fast suggestions from everyone—not simply on the product however on the code, the options. That’s one thing you simply don’t get with proprietary stuff.”
As a part of that open supply promise, anybody can view Kan’s underlying code on GitHub and, with the correct stage of technical prowess, see for themselves precisely what the service is and isn’t doing. And past that, anybody with the correct information may take the code and host it fully on their personal cloud storage—even (a minimum of in idea) forking and modifying the software program to go well with their very own private wants.
“Particularly within the open-source group, individuals need merchandise but in addition need the power to personal their knowledge,” Griffiths-Ball says. “That, to me, is actually thrilling.”
That self-hosting possibility will all the time stay each free and freely obtainable, Griffiths-Ball guarantees—as will the power for particular person customers to depend on a totally featured hosted model of the service, with none limitations on core capabilities. The place Griffiths-Ball hopes to generate profits and make Kan sustainable is with the service’s crew plans, the place he’ll cost $8 per consumer monthly for a managed setup beginning this month.
However that’s all for down the highway. For now, Griffiths-Ball’s major purpose is to maintain charging ahead towards reaching full characteristic parity with the traditional Trello idea. Excessive up on his highway map (which, naturally, exists as a public Kan board) are objects equivalent to search, keyboard hotkeys, notifications, automations, and native desktop and cellular apps (although, as Griffiths-Ball notes, the web site works fairly nicely in all contexts in the meanwhile, so there’s actually no big rush to maneuver previous that).
The Kan highway map—organized, naturally, inside a Kan board. [Photo: kan.bn]
For a lot of productiveness app dwellers—myself included—it gained’t be doable to commerce Trello for Kan till a minimum of a few of these extra formidable components are addressed. However the basis is already sufficient to be promising. And, with Griffiths-Ball assured he’ll attain that all-important level of major characteristic parity quickly, it’s the following section that’s actually alluring.
Griffiths-Ball, you see, isn’t content material merely re-creating what was misplaced in Trello’s previous. To him, that’s merely section one—and what comes subsequent is basically depending on the individuals utilizing his product, notably with what he’s seen occur to Trello and so many different widespread companies from the attitude of their unique customers over time.
“I don’t need to make one thing that no one asks for,” he says. “I need [the service’s road map] to be led by the customers—to know the way it’s getting used and to make issues that really remedy particular issues for those self same individuals.”
One early thought is making a Sunsama-like planner characteristic that’d carry extra helpful calendar features into the Kan surroundings. However greater than something, the purpose is about avoiding what Griffiths-Ball sees as Trello’s failure—and that’s specializing in the enterprise first and the imaginative and prescient second.
“What’s vital to me is usability. I need to hear how persons are utilizing Kan and I need to understand how we will make it higher for individuals.”
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