Is Trello really a competitor though? JIRA and Trello couldn't be more different.

I'd think Trello and Asana are much closer competitors. JIRA is like an over engineered spaceship with more features than anyone could learn in a lifetime. Comparatively Trello functions more like a Prius. Priuses and spaceships don't compete.

We don't view JIRA and Trello as competitors.

JIRA shines in areas that (a) have workflow and (b) require repeatable processes across a number of people.

Once you have 20+ people on a project, you need repeatable processes.

In cases like bug tracking, project management, customer service, help desks, HR onboarding and hundreds others you need workflow.

Trello shines in areas where you have (a) small teams or (b) require ad-hoc semi-structured data.

In small teams, even if repeatable process would help you, it's not worth the cost of setting up a system - you achieve it by social means.

Trello also has many, many use-cases where you want to start something quick, or personal. In this case it really shines, with near-zero friction to get started.

Scott, CEO Atlassian

This. I hear a lot of whining about JIRA, which is fair since it's a huge pain to configure and learn all the quirks of, but usually it's overkill for those folks (perhaps myself included right now).

But the folks who have a working process and a large number of people and teams are usually complaining the other way round: that no tool supports their workflow. Which is where JIRA shines. I don't know another tool that can be configured to such ridiculous detail.

The Trello acquisition makes total sense because it fills in that gap that JIRA is bad at.

"We don't view JIRA and Trello as competitors."

You might not view them as that, but they are, well were.

On a side note, I think it's great that you're involved in the discussion here.

I totally agree. Trello is not a competitor to JIRA.

Don't get me wrong – I like them both. When I have to plan out personal projects, Trello is great. During the day, we use JIRA. The use cases are different, and the products are both suitable. I'm madly bemused that people look at the very, very surface layer of the UI (oh look, it has cards in columns!) and assume the products are the same.

Yes, I just recently evaluated switching my small team from JIRA->trello. I'd do it in a heartbeat if the licensing costs were better aligned.

I think Trello fills a niche for people who don't need all of the features that JIRA provides, but they need something to track tickets/cards/whatever you want to call them. The products are pretty different but I can envision an overlap of users. I use both currently and if I didn't have Trello, I might have to use JIRA for everything.

"Is Trello really a competitor though?"

In the Innovator's Dilemma sense, absolutely.

why would they do that though?

Trello covers a market that was not really served by any Atlassian products (or rather, market segments that weren't well treated).

Trello has a huge active following, and a lot of users who would otherwise not know Atlassian products.

Getting any sort of proper cross-selling going on would be great for their ecosystem long-term. People might start at Trello, but go to Atlassian products as their team scales and need other coordination tools.

I don't think you spend $425 million to kill a "competitor", especially when that competitor has a lot of paying customers anyways.

In the context of discussion about mergers and acquisitions, I believe "killing a competitor" almost exclusively means purchasing a company so that it's no longer a threat. In the course of doing so, you assimilate the acquiree's users, or at least try to. This is the meaning I interpreted from the comment you responded to.

The rarer definition, which is that a company actually shuts down the product and doesn't make an attempt to migrate its users, strikes me as something more typical for a small startup that has not yet reached real market validation, but which has very impressive R&D.

Autodesk acquired Softimage and then 3 years later shut it down to great user uproar. Autodesk them tried to migrate them to Maya.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2014/03/softimage-died-to-make-max-...

https://www.change.org/p/autodesk-save-softimage

http://web.archive.org/web/20140519212219/http://e-roja.com/...

This is too bad, because Trello is much nicer than JIRA for everything I care about...