Importing from Trello, Asana and Jira without losing the plan

The first thing a new tool asks you to do is give up the plan you already have. Kyndium's import exists so that the plan you have is the plan you start with.

Three formats, three shapes

Trello exports a board as JSON: lists, cards, checklists, labels with colors, comments, attachment links, and an archived flag on everything. There are no email addresses in it. Lists become lanes, a list named Done becomes a done lane, checklists become sub-tasks, and comments and attachment links go into each task's notes. Archived lists and cards stay out unless you switch them on.

Asana exports a project as CSV with sections, parent task names or ids, tags, assignee emails, due dates, a Blocked By column and custom fields. Sections become lanes, parents become parents, tags become labels, Blocked By becomes a dependency, and custom fields go into the notes.

Jira exports a search as CSV with a status, a status category, issue types, parent keys, epic links, labels, sprint, story points and link columns, often with repeated headers for multi-valued fields. Statuses become lanes in the order of their category (To Do, In Progress, Done), sub-tasks nest under their parent, and the issues under an epic keep an "Epic: …" label rather than nesting, because a Jira epic is a grouping, not a parent task.

Anything else is a spreadsheet: the import auto-matches around thirty common column names and asks you to match the rest.

Rule one: land it the way a template lands

Every import is turned into the same blueprint shape that a saved template uses, and inserted through the same checked path. Lanes, labels, statuses, tasks and dependencies point at each other by index until the server assigns ids, level by level. That means an import gets every rule a template gets: a parent is always inserted before its children, a task in a done lane is complete, and a missing parent drops the child rather than orphaning it.

Rule two: match people, never invite them

Assignees are matched by email to the owner and the people already on the project. Anyone who does not match is listed when the import finishes, so you can invite them and assign their tasks. An import never sends an invitation on your behalf.

Rule three: fail whole

If anything goes wrong partway, a new project is deleted and an addition to an existing project is undone. There is no half-imported board to clean up.

Adding to a project you have

Importing into an existing project reuses lanes and labels with the same name, so a second Trello board for the same client does not create a second Done lane. The review step shows the counts, the lanes, and what will not come over before you confirm.