Trello Data Export: The 1,000-Action Ceiling
Trello exports the recent past. Its JSON carries the 1,000 most recent actions on a board, so an old, busy board loses its early history quietly and without warning.
Exit score: 20 / 30
How hard Trello makes it to leave with your data intact, scored against 6 criteria from the vendor's own published documentation. How we score.
| Criterion | Score | What the documentation says |
|---|---|---|
| Self-service | 5/5 | Board-level JSON export is available to all users from inside the product, with no request to support and no administrator involvement. |
| Format openness | 4/5 | JSON and CSV, both open and universally readable. JSON preserves structure properly. One point deducted because the structured format and the spreadsheet format sit on different sides of a paywall. |
| Completeness | 2/5 | The documented ceiling is the problem: JSON exports include "the 1000 most recent actions on a board, which includes comments". CSV excludes comments entirely and by default covers only non-archived cards. |
| Not paywalled | 2/5 | CSV export requires Trello Premium, and workspace-level export of any kind — JSON or CSV — is Premium only. Free and Standard users get board-by-board JSON and nothing else. |
| Documentation clarity | 5/5 | Atlassian states the limits outright, including the 1,000-action cap and the reason comments are absent from CSV: "Spreadsheets aren't ideal for storing 'many-to-one' data like comments." |
| Caps and expiry | 2/5 | The 1,000-action cap is a hard content ceiling rather than a convenience limit, and it applies per board. Older activity on a busy board is simply not in the file. |
What comes out
- Board structure as JSON — lists, cards, labels, members, due dates.
- The 1,000 most recent actions on each board, which includes comments within that window.
- Raw attachments, at workspace level, if you tick "Include raw attachments" when creating the export.
- CSV of non-archived cards, on Premium workspaces.
What stays behind
- Any board activity older than the 1,000 most recent actions — including the comments inside it.
- All comments, if you export as CSV rather than JSON.
- Archived cards, which CSV excludes by default.
- Inbox cards, which the documentation says cannot be exported directly.
- Everything above board level, unless you are on Premium.
Trello is the product on this site we most often recommend for teams whose work is a queue. It is cheap, it is free for up to ten collaborators, and it is genuinely the right instrument for the job.
It also has the least complete exit of anything we have scored so far, and the reason is a single sentence in Atlassian's documentation that almost no review mentions.
The 1,000-action ceiling
A Trello JSON export contains "the 1000 most recent actions on a board, which includes comments".
Not all actions. The most recent thousand.
On a board a fortnight old, that is everything. On a board your team has been running since 2021 — moving cards, commenting, assigning, completing — a thousand actions is somewhere between a few weeks and a few months of activity. Everything before that is not in the file.
What makes this genuinely hazardous rather than merely limiting is that the loss is silent. The export succeeds. The file is large. The cards are all there. It is only the history attached to them that has been truncated, and nothing in the archive says so.
If you have a board where the discussion is the valuable part — a decision log, a client account, anything where "why did we do that" matters — the honest position is that Trello is not where that history is safe long-term.
The format choice is a real fork
Trello offers JSON and CSV, and they are not two views of the same data.
JSON preserves structure and includes comments, subject to the ceiling above. It is available at board level to every user including free ones. It is also, for most people, unreadable — a JSON file is something you feed to another system, not something you open and browse.
CSV is readable in Excel and excludes comments entirely. Atlassian is refreshingly direct about why: "Spreadsheets aren't ideal for storing 'many-to-one' data like comments." That is technically correct and it means the format most people would naturally reach for is the one that discards the discussion.
CSV also covers only non-archived cards by default, so anything you have tidied away is absent unless you go and unarchive it first.
The practical consequence: the readable format is the lossy one, and the complete format is the one you cannot read.
Leaving costs money on a free plan
CSV export requires Trello Premium. So does exporting a whole workspace at once, in either format.
For a free or Standard workspace with fifteen boards, that means fifteen separate JSON exports, done one at a time, each capped at a thousand actions. It is not impossible. It is tedious enough that people give up partway and decide the older boards were probably not important — which is a decision made by friction rather than by judgement.
It is worth being fair about this. Trello is not unusual in gating bulk export behind a paid tier, and at $5 a seat Premium is not expensive. But it does mean that on the plan we most often recommend, the exit is the narrowest.
Attachments need a deliberate tick
Workspace-level exports offer an "Include raw attachments" option. If you do not select it, attachments come through as references rather than files.
References to an account you are about to close are not attachments. They are links that will stop working, and they will stop working quietly at some point after you have stopped paying attention.
For any board where people have been dropping files into cards — which is most boards — this single checkbox is the difference between a real archive and a list of dead URLs.
What Trello does well here
One thing, and it earns full marks: the documentation is honest.
Atlassian states the 1,000-action cap plainly. It explains why comments are absent from CSV rather than leaving you to discover it. It tells you archived cards are excluded by default.
That matters more than it might appear. A documented limitation is one you can plan around — as this page is doing. An undocumented one is found during a migration, at which point the original data may already be gone. Several products score worse than Trello on this criterion while having better exports, and that trade-off is a bad one for the buyer.
The verdict
20 out of 30. Trello is easy to leave and hard to leave completely.
The cards come with you. The structure comes with you. What thins out is the history — the thousand-action ceiling on JSON, the total absence of comments in CSV, the archived cards left behind, the attachments that need an explicit tick.
None of that is a reason to avoid Trello, and we still recommend it for the work it suits. It is a reason to be deliberate: if a board is accumulating decisions you will want in three years, Trello is where they are stored, not where they are safe. Keep that material somewhere it can leave with you, and use Trello for the thing it is genuinely excellent at.
Before you cancel
- Export as JSON, not CSV, if you care about comments at all.
- Export board by board rather than assuming a workspace export is available — it is Premium only.
- On a long-running board, accept that early history is gone and capture anything critical manually first.
- Tick "Include raw attachments" on workspace exports, or your files stay behind as links to a service you are leaving.
- Unarchive anything you want in a CSV before exporting, since archived cards are excluded by default.
- Check attachment links after export — attachments referenced rather than embedded stop working when the account closes.
What we could not verify
- Whether the 1,000-action limit counts card creation and moves as well as comments, or comments alone.
- Whether attachments hosted by Trello remain reachable after an account is closed, or only during the subscription.
- What happens to a board's export when it exceeds some larger size — the documentation names the action cap but not a card or board size limit.
These are open questions, not criticisms. Where a vendor does not publish an answer we leave it unscored rather than guessing, and the score is calculated only from what is documented.
Questions people ask
How do you export data from Trello?
Board-level JSON export is available to everyone from the board menu. CSV export requires Trello Premium, and exporting an entire workspace at once — in either format — is also Premium only. So on a free plan, the route out is one board at a time as JSON.
Does a Trello export include comments?
JSON exports include comments, but only within the 1,000 most recent actions on the board. CSV exports exclude comments completely — Atlassian explains that "spreadsheets aren't ideal for storing 'many-to-one' data like comments". If discussion history matters, JSON is the only option.
What is the 1,000-action limit in Trello exports?
Trello's JSON export contains the 1,000 most recent actions on a board rather than its complete history. On a board that has been running for years, that means the early activity — and the comments inside it — is not in the file, and nothing in the export tells you what is missing.
Do Trello attachments export?
At workspace level you can select "Include raw attachments" when creating the export, which packages the files themselves. Without that, attachments are references rather than files, which is a problem once the account they point at is closed.
Is Trello export free?
Partly. Board-level JSON is available to all users. CSV, and any workspace-wide export, requires Premium — so for teams on the free plan, leaving means exporting boards one at a time in a format that is fine for machines and awkward for people.
Where this information comes from
Product details change often. Each item below links to the primary source we checked, so you can confirm anything that matters to your decision.
Vendors change their export tooling without announcing it. If something here no longer matches what you see in the product, tell us and we will re-check it.