A move out of Trello rarely fails on the technical side. Exporting a board is easy. It fails on something else: the team brings everything across, including three years of archive, drowns in it by day two, and goes back — “at least over there it was familiar”.
Below is a workable one-to-two-day sequence and the list of mistakes that cost the most. It’s written around a move to Gosudarynya, but the first four steps apply to any tracker.
First, decide why you’re moving
It sounds obvious, but it determines what you’ll carry over. There are usually four reasons:
- Payment and access. Paying a foreign service from Russia is awkward, and access can be unreliable.
- Tasks live in the chat anyway. The board exists, but the team actually discusses everything in a messenger, and some assignments never make it to the board.
- Money and clients aren’t next to the tasks. Trello is about cards; invoices, margin and clients are kept separately in a spreadsheet.
- The board has sprawled. Dozens of lists, hundreds of cards, nobody knows what’s current.
If your reason is the third or fourth, copying the structure one-to-one is pointless: you’ll move the same problem into a new interface. A migration is the one convenient moment to clean house.
Step 1. Export your data from Trello
JSON (available on the free plan). Open a board → the menu on the right → “More” → “Print and export” → “Export as JSON”. You get a file with every card, list, description, label, due date, comment and attachment link.
CSV (on paid plans). Same place, “Export as CSV” — a table that’s easy to read and clean up in Excel or Google Sheets. As of July 2026 CSV export is a Premium and Enterprise feature; on the free plan, take the JSON.
Important: attachments are not included in the export. Both JSON and CSV contain only links to files stored on Trello’s servers. If your cards hold mockups, contracts or photos you need, download them separately, before the subscription lapses.
Export each board individually — there’s no workspace-wide “everything at once”.
Turning the JSON into a readable table quickly
If CSV isn’t available and you’d rather not pick through JSON by hand, open the file in any online JSON → CSV converter, or extract the fields you need from the cards array: name, desc, due, idList, labels, closed. A closed: true field marks archived cards — you can discard those immediately.
Step 2. Do a review pass (the most important step)
Open the table and sort the cards into four piles:
- Active right now — bring these across, always.
- Planned for the coming month — bring these.
- “Someday” — don’t bring these. Create one card called “Ideas from Trello” with a link to the export, and that’s it.
- Completed and archived — never bring these.
A practical ratio: out of a 400-card board, typically 30–60 cards make it to the new tracker. That’s normal, and it’s the goal rather than a loss.
Don’t throw the archive away, though — keep the JSON and CSV in cloud storage. The history stays accessible while your working space stays free of clutter.
Step 3. Redesign the structure from scratch
Trello lists aren’t always process stages. Over the years a board usually turns into a mixture: some lists are statuses (“In progress”, “Done”), some are categories (“Client A”, “Marketing”), and some are a dumping ground (“Misc”, “Later”).
Split these explicitly when you move:
- Process stages → board columns. Four is usually enough: backlog, in progress, in review, done. How to assemble a board that works — a detailed walkthrough.
- Categories and clients → projects (and clients in the CRM, if your tool has one).
- The dumping ground → deleted back in step 2.
Look separately at “epic” cards with 40-item checklists. Those are usually several different tasks fused into one, and they’re worth splitting right away.
Step 4. Add people and permissions before tasks
Invite the team and assign roles before you move the cards. The reason is simple: a task without an owner transfers fine, but then you have to reopen every one of them to assign it. Add the people first and the owner gets set as you go.
While you’re there, check what each role can see: in Trello access is usually “the whole board”, whereas trackers with roles let you scope it — so a contractor sees only their own project, for instance.
Step 5. Move the tasks
Honestly about the mechanics: Gosudarynya has no automatic task import from a file — you can export your own data out at any time, but moving data in is done by hand. So there are two routes:
- By hand, from the shortlist. After the review pass you have 30–60 cards left — that’s an hour and a half to two hours for one person. It sounds longer than it is, because 90% of cards are short.
- Through the bot, from your chats. If the work was being discussed in conversation anyway, some of it doesn’t need moving at all: let the bot recognise tasks in your work chats and confirm what it finds.
Which is exactly why the review step isn’t a formality: it decides whether the move is a two-hour job or a two-day one.
What to carry over on a card: title, description, owner, due date, project. Comments and checklists only for active tasks where the discussion genuinely continues. Trying to move every thread on every card is a reliable way to stretch the migration into a week.
Attachments should be downloaded from Trello and re-uploaded to the tasks they belong to. This is the one part you can’t postpone: once the subscription lapses, the links stop working.
Step 6. One week in parallel — then a hard cut-off
Leave Trello in read-only mode for a week: if something was forgotten, you’ll have somewhere to fetch it from. But from day one, new tasks are created only in the new service.
After that week, close the Trello board. Not “let’s leave it up for now” — close it. Two live trackers always end the same way: half the team uses one, half the other, and nobody sees the whole picture.
The six most common mistakes
1. Moving everything. The big one. Three years of archive is of no use to anyone on the team, but it makes the new tracker exactly as unreadable as the old board was.
2. Forgetting the attachments. The export contains links only. Once the subscription is cancelled the files are gone — and they’re often contracts and design files.
3. Copying the structure literally. If the board was awkward, a copy of it will be awkward. A migration is a reason to redesign.
4. Not explaining the “why” to the team. Changing tools without an explanation reads as a manager’s whim. Say plainly which pain you’re fixing: “assignments get lost in the chat”, “we can’t see per-project margin”. Without that, quiet sabotage is close to guaranteed.
5. Keeping both services “just in case”. Ends in two sources of truth and a return to Trello.
6. Migrating during a crunch. Pick a calm week. Moving in the middle of a big delivery is a guaranteed rollback.
How long it actually takes
For a team under 10 with one to three active boards:
- Export and downloading attachments — 30–60 minutes.
- Reviewing the cards — 1–2 hours (better done with the team).
- Setting up structure, people and permissions — 1 hour.
- Moving the shortlisted tasks — 1.5–2 hours.
- Connecting the bot and notifications — 10–15 minutes.
A working day with room to spare. It only runs longer when the review step gets skipped.
Bottom line
Moving out of Trello is a discipline problem, not a technical one: don’t drag the excess along, redesign the structure, and switch the old thing off on time. The technical part takes an hour — but if you move the chaos across as-is, in a month you’ll be shopping for your next tracker.
A step-by-step checklist for moving to us is on the Trello migration page. If you haven’t decided where to go yet: Trello alternatives and a review of Russian trackers.
Gosudarynya — 7 days free, no card. The bot pulls tasks straight out of Telegram and MAX chats, and CRM and per-project finance are already inside.