Migrate from Trello to Notion became urgent for me the day I opened Trello and found a board with forty-three cards, half of them undated, half of them assigned to a client relationship that had ended months earlier. I’d been meaning to switch to Notion for a while, but that board was the moment I realized waiting any longer to migrate from Trello to Notion meant losing track of actual client history I still needed.
The thing that had kept me stuck on Trello for so long wasn’t loyalty to the tool. It was fear of the migration itself — the idea of manually recreating months of cards, checklists, and comments sounded like a weekend I didn’t have. I’d heard horror stories from other freelancers about half-finished migrations that left them working across two tools at once for weeks.
That fear turned out to be mostly unfounded, once I actually sat down and figured out how to migrate from Trello to Notion properly instead of trying to do it card by card from memory. There’s a real export process that carries over almost everything, and the parts that don’t transfer automatically are manageable if you know what to expect going in.
This isn’t a theoretical walkthrough. It’s the exact process I used, including the mistake that cost me an afternoon, and what I’d do differently if I were starting the migration today.
Why I Finally Decided to Migrate From Trello to Notion
Trello’s board-and-card system is genuinely great for simple project tracking, and I don’t think it’s a bad tool. What pushed me to migrate from Trello to Notion wasn’t that Trello stopped working — it’s that my actual work had outgrown what a pure kanban board could hold.
I needed client notes, project documents, and task tracking to live in the same connected space, not scattered between Trello cards and a separate notes app. Notion’s databases could hold all of that together, with the same kanban board view Trello offered, plus the linking and structure Trello was never built for.
The other factor was cost. Trello’s free tier gets restrictive once you’re running multiple boards with the automation features that actually make it useful. Deciding to migrate from Trello to Notion also meant consolidating onto a single tool instead of paying for two overlapping subscriptions.
I’d looked at this decision for months before actually acting on it, mostly because switching tools always feels riskier in theory than it turns out to be in practice.
What Actually Transfers When You Migrate From Trello to Notion
Before diving into the steps, it helps to know what you’re actually getting when you migrate from Trello to Notion, because expectations matter here. Trello’s own export includes your boards, lists, cards, card descriptions, and due dates. That’s the core of what most people need preserved when they migrate from Trello to Notion.
What doesn’t transfer cleanly is attachments, comments, and Power-Up data like custom fields from add-ons. If you’ve got file attachments on your Trello cards, you’ll want to handle those separately before starting the main migration, since they won’t move over automatically with the standard export.
Knowing this upfront saved me from assuming the migration would be one-click and complete. It’s close, but the gap between “close” and “complete” is exactly where my afternoon got lost the first time around.
Step-by-Step: How to Migrate From Trello to Notion
Here’s the exact sequence that got my own boards moved over cleanly, once I stopped trying to do it manually.
Step 1: Export Your Trello Board as JSON
Open the Trello board you want to migrate, click the menu in the top right, and look for “Print, export, and share.” Choose “Export as JSON.” This downloads a file containing your full board structure — lists, cards, descriptions, and due dates.
Do this for every board you plan to migrate from Trello to Notion, since Trello only lets you export one board at a time. If you’ve got several active boards, this step alone can take a few minutes, but it’s worth doing carefully rather than rushing.
Step 2: Use Notion’s Built-In Trello Importer
Notion actually has a dedicated import tool for this exact situation. Inside Notion, go to Settings, then Import, and select Trello. You’ll need to connect your Trello account directly, which lets Notion pull your boards without you manually uploading the JSON file at all.
This is genuinely the easiest way to migrate from Trello to Notion, and it’s the step most people don’t realize exists. I found out about it after already exporting everything manually the first time I tried to migrate from Trello to Notion, which is exactly the mistake I mentioned costing me an afternoon.
Step 3: Review What Actually Imported
Once the import finishes, go through the new Notion database it creates and check it against your original Trello board. Cards, lists, and due dates should all be there, converted into a Notion database with a board view that looks close to what you had before your migrate from Trello to Notion process began.
Attachments and comments won’t be there, so this is the point where you go back to Trello and manually grab anything important from cards with file attachments or comment threads worth preserving.
Step 4: Rebuild Your Board View and Fields
Notion’s importer creates a basic board view, but it’s worth spending a few minutes customizing it once you migrate from Trello to Notion. Add any fields you want beyond the basics — priority, project type, whatever matched your actual workflow in Trello, plus anything new Notion’s flexibility makes possible once you’ve fully committed to the switch.
Step 5: Manually Move Attachments and Comments
For any cards with attachments you actually need, download them from Trello and upload them directly to the corresponding Notion page. It’s tedious for a large board, but for most people this only applies to a handful of active cards, not the entire history.
For comments, I just copied the important context into the card’s description or a notes section, rather than trying to preserve the full comment thread format. Nobody’s really re-reading old Trello comment threads anyway — what matters is the actual information inside them.
Step 6: Archive the Original Trello Board, Don’t Delete It
Once everything’s verified in Notion, archive your Trello board instead of deleting it outright. Keep it around for a few weeks as a backup in case something got missed in the migration. I archived mine instead of deleting and was glad I did when I noticed a missing due date two weeks later.
Real Example: How My Own Migration Went
This is genuinely how my own attempt to migrate from Trello to Notion played out, not a cleaned-up version.
I had three active Trello boards when I decided to migrate from Trello to Notion — one for client work, one for content planning, and one personal project board. The client board was the priority, since it had the most active, time-sensitive information.
Using Notion’s built-in importer, that board took about ten minutes to migrate from Trello to Notion, cards and all. The manual part was going through six cards with file attachments and re-uploading them directly into Notion, which took maybe twenty more minutes.
The content planning board was simpler since it barely used attachments, so that one imported almost completely clean. The personal project board I actually just left on Trello for a while, since I wasn’t using it enough to justify the migration effort, which is a fine outcome too — not every board needs to move at once.
Common Mistakes People Make During This Migration
These are the mistakes I made myself, or watched other freelancers make, trying to migrate from Trello to Notion.
Mistake 1: Manually recreating cards instead of using the importer. This is the mistake I made the first time, and it’s completely avoidable. Notion’s built-in Trello importer does the heavy lifting, so there’s no reason to manually rebuild a board card by card.
Mistake 2: Deleting the Trello board too soon. Archive it instead. You won’t know what’s actually missing from your migration until you’ve used the new Notion setup for a couple weeks, and having the original Trello board around as a reference is worth the minor clutter.
Mistake 3: Assuming attachments and comments transfer automatically. They don’t, and assuming they will means discovering the gap at the worst possible moment — usually when you actually need a file that didn’t come over.
Mistake 4: Migrating everything at once. If you’ve got multiple boards, migrate the highest-priority one first, confirm it works the way you need, and move the rest over once you’re comfortable with the process instead of doing your entire migrate from Trello to Notion effort in one overwhelming session.
Mistake 5: Not customizing the board view after import. The default imported view is functional but basic. Take the time to add the fields and structure that actually match how you work, since this is also the moment to fix anything that felt limiting about your original Trello setup.
Comparing the Two Tools Beyond the Migration
Trello’s strength is pure simplicity — a card-based kanban board with almost no learning curve, which is exactly why so many people start there. If your workflow genuinely never needs more than that, there’s a real argument for not migrating at all.
What pushes people to migrate from Trello to Notion is usually the need for more structure — linking tasks to notes, documents, or client records, which Trello was never designed to do. Trello’s own help documentation covers the export process in more detail if you want the full technical rundown before starting your own migrate from Trello to Notion project.
How This Fits Into a Broader Notion Setup
Once you migrate from Trello to Notion, your project boards don’t need to sit in isolation from the rest of your workspace. If you’re running client work through the same system, the setups in my guide to using Notion as a CRM for freelancers can connect directly to your migrated project boards, so client relationships and active work sit right next to each other.
And if you’re building out a broader system beyond just task boards, the same connected thinking from my guide to building a second brain in Notion applies well to a migrate from Trello to Notion setup too — link related pages together instead of leaving your newly migrated boards disconnected from everything else.
Final Thoughts
Deciding to migrate from Trello to Notion doesn’t have to mean the weekend-long ordeal I was originally dreading. Notion’s built-in importer handles the core of it, and the manual parts — attachments, comments, view customization — are manageable once you know they’re coming.
Start with your most important board, use the importer instead of rebuilding anything by hand, and keep the original Trello board archived as a safety net while you settle into the new setup. That’s really the whole process to migrate from Trello to Notion, and it’s a lot less painful than the forty-three-card mess that finally pushed me to do it.
If you’ve been putting off the switch the way I did, that’s really the only advice worth taking from all of this — the actual effort to migrate from Trello to Notion takes far less time than the anxiety about doing it, and once you migrate from Trello to Notion, going back rarely crosses your mind again.