Trello → Wekan
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Trello Standard is about $5 per user per month, Premium $10. Wekan is MIT and free on a small VPS.
Moves cleanly
Boards, lists, cards and attachments — Wekan has a Trello importer that handles the JSON export directly.
You rebuild
Power-Ups and automations, which have no equivalent.
What Trello costs you today
Free tier: unlimited cards, up to 10 boards per workspace, 250 automation runs/month. Paid: Standard ~$5/user/month, Premium ~$10/user/month, Enterprise from ~$17.50/user/month (all billed annually; monthly billing costs more per seat).
What actually holds you in
Boards, cards, and attachments are stored in Atlassian's cloud. Trello does provide a JSON/CSV export, so data isn't unrecoverable, but automations (Butler rules) and Power-Up configurations do not travel with an export and must be rebuilt on any alternative.
What you are moving to
Wekan is a free, open-source Kanban board that deliberately mirrors Trello's UI: boards, swimlanes, lists, and cards with labels, checklists, due dates, and attachments. It self-hosts via Docker, a Linux Snap package (with automatic updates), or from source, and stores everything in MongoDB you control. It even ships a dedicated Trello-import tool for migrating existing boards and attachments.
Free / self-host (commercial support available separately)
Wekan strengths
- Free MIT license, no per-seat cost ever
- UI and workflow are the most Trello-like of any open-source option, so the switch is low-friction for a team used to Trello
- Dedicated Trello JSON/attachment import tool eases migration
- Active project with regular releases and a large, engaged community (20k+ GitHub stars)
What you give up
- Interface is functional but less visually polished than Trello's current design
- Advanced reporting/analytics views are limited compared to Trello Premium
- You are responsible for your own backups, updates, and uptime once self-hosted
- MongoDB dependency adds a small extra piece of infrastructure to operate versus a single-binary tool
The migration, step by step
- 1Export each Trello board as JSON from the board menu
- 2Deploy Wekan via Docker or Snap
- 3Use the built-in Trello import on each board
- 4Verify attachments transferred — this is the step that most often fails silently
- 5Recreate any Butler automations manually
The gotcha
Trello's free tier is generous enough that many teams never needed to pay. Check what you are actually spending before migrating — a self-hosted server has a cost in attention even when it has none in money.
When to stay on Trello
You are on Trello's free tier, or Power-Ups are load-bearing.
More Layer 5 migrations
Figures verified 2026-07-18 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.