Atlassian buys Trello for $425 million, expands collaboration portfolio
A look at Trello's collaboration cards.
Atlassian said it will acquire Trello, which is a collaboration service, in a deal valued at $425 million.
The plan is to combine Atlassian's team and project tracking software with Trello's visual workplace collaboration tools. Of the $425 million price tag, $360 million is cash with the remainder in Atlassian restricted shares.
Atlassian has been building out from its core JIRA enterprise project tracking tools via acquisitions of Confluence and HipChat.
Previously: Atlassian acquires StatusPage, adds outage tracking | JIRA Service Desk gets better knowledge base integration | Atlassian CTO Viswanath talks cloud computing platforms, scale, innovation
Trello is essentially a list of lists that allows various team members to contribute and track progress. Trello's services, which are based on a card format, have a free tier, a business subscription for $9.99 a month per member and enterprise licenses.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO of Atlassian, said in a blog post that Trello provides flexibility and a "card system is intuitive, easy to use, and instantly familiar, which has made it extremely popular with teams across marketing, legal, HR, sales and beyond."
According to the companies, Trello has 19 million registered users over five years. For Atlassian, Trello, which will be run as an independent unit, offers another platform for team collaboration. Trello's customers include the Red Cross to Google to John Deere.
Atlassian and Trello already have a variety of integrations, but will launch more around JIRA Software, Confluence and BitBucket.
The Trello deal is expected to close for the fiscal third quarter ending March 31. The deal is expected to result in a hit to Atlassian's earnings per share in fiscal 2017 and then be neutral for fiscal 2018 excluding charges.