[dasil003]

This article is making the obvious comparison, but it falls down on the slightest inspection because Trello and JIRA aren't really even in the same space. Yes, Trello can substitute for JIRA if your needs are simple, and yes JIRA has boards to meet different kinds of planning workflows, but the actual overlap of usages is pretty small.

What made Trello successful is that it is an incredibly simple SPA that never wavered in its vision. The minute Trello designers try to go down the road of meeting the needs of a ticketing system then the magic and broad utility of Trello will be poisoned.

There's probably some truth to the claim that Trello was eating some of the low-end of JIRA's market, but it would never credibly kill Atlassian, at least not without branching out into a lot of other products first.

The acquisition makes a lot more sense to me in the portfolio building aspect, Trello can satisfy a very wide array of business needs that go well beyond traditional dev tools. I put it more in the category of Dropbox Paper—simple, modern, real-time-collaboration-based, mobile-friendly tools with a very strong essential vision leading to extremely broad utility.