Most people do not stay on a task tool because they love it. They stay because moving looks like a nightmare. You picture rebuilding every board by hand, retyping every checklist, and losing something important in the process. So you put it off, and you keep using the thing you have outgrown.
The import is almost always easier than the fear of it. Here is precisely what happens when you bring a Trello board into Coalface Tasks, so you can judge for yourself.
You export from Trello, then upload it
There is no account connecting, no permissions dance. Trello lets you export a board as a JSON file. You download that, and in Coalface you go to Settings, then Data, then Import, choose Trello as the source, and upload the file. That is the whole handoff.
Doing it by file means you are always in control of what moves and when. Nothing is pulled across behind your back.
What actually comes across
This is the part people worry about, so let us be specific. When you import a Trello board, Coalface maps it like this:
- Lists become columns. Your board’s structure arrives intact, so it looks like the board you left.
- Cards become tasks, with their descriptions.
- Checklists become subtasks. This is the big one. All the checklist items on a card come across as subtasks, in order, so the little steps you carefully wrote out are not lost.
- Members become assignees, so work stays with the person who had it.
- Labels become labels, and due dates come across as due dates.
In other words, the shape of your work survives the move. You are not starting from an empty board.
Nothing gets quietly dropped
A migration you cannot trust is worse than no migration. So a couple of deliberate choices:
Archived cards and lists are included, not silently discarded, and they are counted so you can see what came in. If a card has no name, it is skipped rather than importing as a blank, and you get a preview of everything that will be created before anything is written. You look at what is about to happen, and only then commit.
Where it lands
By default the import creates a brand-new board, named after your Trello board, and builds any columns it needs. So the import cannot mess up a board you already have. You get a clean copy to check over, and if something looks off you can just delete it and try again. Nothing is destructive.
After the move
Once your tasks are in, they are ordinary Coalface tasks, which means they can do things Trello cards could not. You can protect sensitive fields in the Vault, encrypt descriptions at rest, and, if the board is connected to a WordPress site, keep it in sync two ways. The checklists you were worried about losing are now subtasks with a progress tally, and the whole board can be automated.
The switch is not the wall it looks like from the outside. It is an export, an upload, a preview, and a new board that looks like the one you left, only now it can grow with you.
The short version
- Export your Trello board as JSON, then upload it under Settings, Data, Import.
- Lists become columns, cards become tasks, and, importantly, checklists become subtasks.
- Archived cards are kept and counted, blank cards skipped, and you preview everything before it is created.
- The import lands in a fresh board, so it can never damage your existing work.
If a tool you have outgrown is only holding you because leaving looks hard, this is the part to test first. The move is smaller than the fear of it.