Trello's free plan caps a Workspace at 10 boards, and CSV export is locked behind a paid plan — two limits that rarely matter until an engineering team tries to run real sprints on top of a tool built for personal task lists. Neither is the actual reason teams leave, though. The actual reason is that Trello has no concept of a sprint at all.
This isn't a pitch for switching. It's a walkthrough of what happens, mechanically, if you do: how a Trello board maps onto Spryn, how the import works without a native OAuth connector, and what changes once your team is planning against capacity instead of moving cards between lists.
Why this migration looks different from the others
Spryn imports from Jira, Asana, ClickUp, and Linear over OAuth — connect the account, pick a project, preview, done. Trello isn't on that list, and that's worth being upfront about rather than glossing over: Trello's board model (lists and cards) doesn't map to a project-tracker API in the way Jira's or Linear's issue trackers do, so there's no live connection to build against.
The workable path is CSV. Trello can export a board to CSV natively, but that export is gated to Premium and Enterprise Workspaces — free-plan boards only get a native JSON export. If your board is on the free plan, you'll need to either upgrade temporarily to pull a CSV, or convert the JSON export to CSV yourself before uploading it to Spryn's importer. Either way, the cards themselves aren't blocked by anything; it's just an extra step Jira and Linear teams don't have to take.
The core mapping
Trello's structure is intentionally loose — that's the whole appeal of it for note-taking and personal task lists. Mapping it onto Spryn means making some of that looseness explicit:
> A Trello list is a status, not a container. "In Progress" and "Done" aren't places things live so much as places someone dragged them. Spryn's board works the same way visually, but a card that says "Done" in Spryn also closes out its share of the sprint's committed capacity — Trello has no equivalent number to close out, because it never asked you to commit to one.
Labels become priority or category tags depending on how your team was using them — Trello doesn't enforce a single meaning for a label, so this is the one part of the import worth reviewing card-by-card rather than trusting a blanket mapping. Checklist items inside a card become sub-tasks on the imported issue, which is usually the closest native match Trello has to a task breakdown.
What the import actually does
1. Export. Pull a CSV from your Trello board — natively if you're on a paid Workspace, via the JSON export and a conversion step if you're not.
2. Upload. Bring the CSV into Spryn's importer and map the columns — list, card title, description, labels, checklist items — to their Spryn fields.
3. Preview. Review what will land before anything is created. This is the same preview-before-commit step every Spryn import uses, CSV or OAuth.
4. Confirm. Approve the import. Your Trello board is untouched — nothing is deleted or modified on Trello's side, so it stays available as a reference for as long as you want it.
Because the CSV column mapping happens by hand rather than by an automatic field match, this import takes more attention up front than the OAuth ones do. Most teams spend that time on the label review mentioned above rather than the mechanics of the upload itself.
What you gain, and what you lose
Capacity planning replaces label-and-checklist workarounds. A Trello board can approximate a sprint with a "Sprint 12" list and a due-date Power-Up, but nothing checks whether the cards in that list add up to more than the team can finish. Spryn puts team capacity next to the plan while you're building it, so an over-committed sprint is visible before it starts rather than discovered when half the cards are still open on the last day.
Velocity and burndown stop being a spreadsheet someone maintains. Trello has no native throughput or velocity chart — teams that want one either add a reporting Power-Up or export cards into a spreadsheet by hand each sprint. Spryn computes velocity and sprint health automatically from the sprint's own data, and carries the number into the next planning session without anyone re-typing it.
What you lose is Trello's flexibility for anything that isn't a sprint. If your team also runs a personal-task board, a content calendar, or a lightweight process that was never meant to have a commitment step, that use case doesn't belong in Spryn and shouldn't move. Spryn is built around the sprint cadence specifically — plan, commit, execute, close — not as a general-purpose board tool.
Deciding if it's worth the move
- If your "sprint" today is a Trello list with a due date and nothing checking whether the team can actually finish what's in it, capacity-aware planning is the direct fix.
- If someone on your team maintains a velocity spreadsheet by hand after every sprint, that task goes away — Spryn computes it from the sprint data automatically.
- If you're hitting Trello's board or CSV-export limits mainly because you're running several concurrent efforts on the free plan, check whether those efforts are actually sprints before migrating them — a personal task board doesn't need capacity planning, and moving it into Spryn just for the sake of consolidation adds a commitment step it never needed.
- If you're mostly happy with Trello and only some of your boards are really sprint work, migrate just those — the CSV import works board by board, so there's no requirement to move everything in one pass.
If the fit looks right, export one board and run the preview step before deciding anything else — it costs nothing to see exactly what would move, and your Trello board stays exactly as it is regardless of what you decide afterward.
See spryn.io/switch-to-spryn for the full list of import sources, or spryn.io/sprint-planning-software for how capacity-aware planning works once the backlog is in.