Trello adds desktop apps for Windows and Mac

The company also announced Wednesday that Trello boards and cards can now be embedded in separate applications, including Bitbucket, Dropbox Paper and Confluence Cloud.

“By embedding Trello cards and boards inside the apps you use to plan, work, and communicate, teams can stay connected and see who’s doing what (and what needs to get done) without switching apps,” the company said in a blog post.

According to Raul Castanon-Martinez, senior analyst at 451 Research, the addition of features such as the desktop app shows how Trello’s technology has evolved since its acquisition by collaboration software provider Atlassian for $425 million earlier this year.

“The big picture here is how Trello – and the entire Atlassian portfolio for that matter – is evolving,” said Castanon-Martinez.

“The company is enhancing its products with new features that allow users to be more effective with their work; for example, interacting with other users across other Trello boards and across other applications. This enables them to get more work done in one place rather than jumping around between applications.”

He called creation of the desktop app a “natural progression” for Trello.

“It is evolving from an application into a workspace,” he said. “The benefit for the end user will be that it enables them to work with less distractions. Jumping between applications is a productivity-killer.”

The announcements were made against a backdrop of accelerating adoption, with Trello claiming to have reached 25 million user sign-ups. That’s up from 14 million in May last year, according to Forbes.

Atlassian, meanwhile, has made a series of product announcements this week, during its Atlassian Summit conference. This includes Identity Manager for Atlassian Cloud, which the company said offers users SAML single sign-on for identity management, enforced two-step verification, advanced password policies and priority cloud support.

Last week, the company uunveiled a major new addition to its product portfolio: Stride, a collaboration application solely at corporate use.