Connect Trello to BigQuery with No Code

With Portable, you can sync Trello data into your BigQuery warehouse in minutes. Access all of your Project And Task Management data from BigQuery without having to manage cumbersome ETL scripts.

The Two Paths To Connect Trello To Your Data Warehouse

There are two ways to sync data from Trello into your data warehouse for analytics.

Method 1: Manually Developing A Custom Data Pipeline Yourself

Write code from scratch or use an open-source framework to build an integration between Trello and your warehouse.

Method 2: Automating The ETL Process With A No-Code Solution

Leverage a prebuilt connector from a cloud-hosted solution like Portable.

How To Create Value With Trello Data

Teams connect Trello to their data warehouse to build dashboards and generate value for their business. Let’s dig into the capabilities Trello exposes via their API, outline insights you can build with the data, and summarize the most common analytics environments teams are using to process their Trello data.

Extract: What Data Can You Extract From The Trello API?

Trello is a productivity tool used for managing workflows, projects and tasks.

To help clients power downstream analytics, Trello offers an application programming interface (API) for clients to extract data on business entities. Here are a few example entities you can extract from the API.

• Organizations
• Boards
• Actions
• Cards
• Checklists
• Labels
• Lists
• Members
• Etc.

You can visit the Trello API documentation to explore the entire catalog of available API resources and the complete schema definition for each. As an example, here are some of the details for the boards endpoint in the Trello API documentation.

As you think about the data you will need for analytics, don’t forget that Portable offers no-code integrations to other similar applications like Asana, Jira, and ClickUp that can be useful for comparison purposes.

Regardless of the SaaS solution you use, it’s important to find a productivity tool with robust data available for analytics.

Load: Which Destinations Are Best For A Trello ETL Pipeline?

To turn raw data from Trello into dashboards, most companies centralize information into a data warehouse or data lake. For Portable clients, the most common ETL pipelines are:

1. Trello to Snowflake Integration
2. Trello to Google BigQuery Integration
3. Trello to Amazon Redshift Integration
4. Trello to PostgreSQL Integration

Once you have a destination to load the data, it’s common to combine Trello data with information from other enterprise applications like Jira, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Zendesk, and LinkedIn.

From there, you can build cross-functional dashboards in a visualization tool like Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or Retool.

Develop: Which Dashboards Should You Build With Trello Data?

Now that you have identified the data you want to extract, the next step is to plan out the dashboards you can build with the data.

As a process, you want to consume raw data, overlay SQL logic, and build a dashboard to either 1) increase revenue or 2) decrease costs.

Here are three project analytics dashboards you should consider as a starting point.

1. Open Tasks (By Assignee) - If your team is analyzing tasks, it's easy to build a quick summary of open tasks for each assignee to help to keep everyone in the loop.
2. Overdue Tasks (By Project) - Every once in a while, tasks are delayed. Setting up alerts or notifications when tasks are overdue within a project can help your team stay on track.
3. Average Time To Complete Tasks (By Month Created) - For operational teams and support teams, the completion time for tasks can be a great metric to help streamline processes. By showing trend data of the average time to complete tasks, you can better understand how your operational initiatives are working and consistently strive to support clients in real time.

Beyond the dashboards above, replicating Trello data into your cloud data warehouse can unlock a wide array of opportunities to power analytics, automate workflows, and develop products. The use cases are endless.

Now that we have a clear sense of the insights we can create, let’s compare the process of developing a custom Trello integration with the benefits of using a no-code ETL solution like Portable.

Method 1: Building A Custom Trello ETL Pipeline

To build your own Trello integration, there are three steps:

1. Navigate the Trello API documentation
2. Make your first API request
3. Turn an API request into a complete data pipeline

Let’s walk through the process in more detail.

How To Interpret Trello’s API Documentation

When reading API documentation, there are a handful of key concepts to consider.

Authentication

There are many common authentication mechanisms. OAuth 2.0 (Auth Code and Client Credentials), API Keys, JWT Tokens, Personal Access Tokens, Basic Authentication, etc. For Trello, it’s important to identify the authentication mechanism and how best to incorporate the necessary credentials into your API requests.

Trello uses API keys and tokens for authentication. In addition to the authentication parameters, you will need your organization ID from Trello to make API requests. Your organization ID can be found in the URL when you visit Trello.

Resources

It’s important to identify the Trello API endpoints you want to use for analytics. Most APIs offer GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE methods; however, for analytics, GET requests are typically the most useful. At times, POST requests can be used to extract data as well.

For Trello, the boards endpoint is a great place to get started.

Request Parameters

For each API endpoint, you would like to use for analytics, you need to understand the method (GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE) and the URL, but there are other considerations to take into account as well. You should look out for pagination mechanics, query parameters, and parameters that are added to the request path.

Some API endpoints offer pagination. For instance, when listing members of an enterprise, the endpoint uses startIndex and count parameters for pagination.

Some API endpoints require unique identifiers from a previous API response to be included in the URL path.

For instance, to get all members in an enterprise, you need an enterprise ID that is returned from another endpoint.

How Do You Call The Trello API? (Tutorial)

1. Follow the instructions above to read the Trello API documentation
2. Identify and collect your credentials for authentication
3. Pick the API resource you want to pull data from
4. Configure the necessary parameters, method, and URL to make your first request (Either with curl or Postman)
5. Add your credentials and make your first API call. Here is an example request using curl (without real credentials):

curl --request GET \
  --url 'https://api.trello.com/1/organizations/{id}/boards?key=APIKey&token=APIToken' \
  --header 'Accept: application/json'

How Do You Maintain A Custom Trello ETL Pipeline?

Making a call to the Trello API is just the beginning of maintaining a complete custom ETL pipeline.

Here is a getting started guide to building a production-grade pipeline for Trello:

• For each API endpoint, define schemas (which fields exist and the type for each)
• Process the API response and parse the data (typically parsing JSON or XML)
• Handle and replicate nested objects and custom fields
• Identify which fields are primary keys and which keys are required vs. optional
• Version control your changes in a git-based workflow (using GitHub, GitLab, etc.)
• Handle code dependencies in your toolchain and the upgrades that come with each
• Monitor the health of the upstream API, and - when things go wrong - troubleshoot via the status page, reach out to support, and open tickets
• Handle error codes (HTTP error codes like 400s, 500s, etc.)
• Manage and respect rate limits imposed by the server

We won’t go into detail on all of the items above, but rate limits are a great example of the complexity found in a production-grade data pipeline.

For rate limits, Trello limits the number of requests that can be made by each API key (300 for every 10 seconds), but also restricts the number of requests that can be made by each token (100 for every 10 seconds).

If you don’t respect rate limits, and if you can’t handle server responses (like 429 errors with a Retry-After header), your pipeline can break, and analytics can become out-of-date.

What Are The Drawbacks Of Building A Trello ETL Pipeline Yourself?

You can probably tell at this point that there is a lot of work that goes into building and maintaining an ETL pipeline from Trello to your data warehouse.

If you want less development work, faster insights, and no ongoing responsibilities, you should consider a cloud-hosted ETL solution.

Let’s walk through the setup process for a no-code ETL solution and its benefits.

Method 2: Using A No-Code Trello ETL Solution

No-code ETL solutions are simple. Vendors are specialized in building and maintaining data pipelines on your behalf. Instead of starting from scratch for each integration. Companies like Portable create connector templates that can be leveraged by hundreds or thousands of clients.

Step-By-Step Tutorial For Configuring A Trello ETL Pipeline

Off-the-shelf ETL tools offer a no-code setup process. Here are the instructions to connect Trello to your cloud data warehouse with Portable.

1. Create an account (no credit card required)
2. Add a source - Search for and select Trello
3. Authenticate with Trello using the instructions in the Portable console
4. Select your warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or PostgreSQL) and authenticate
5. Set up a flow connecting Trello to your analytics environment
6. Run your flow to replicate data from Trello to your warehouse
7. Use the dropdown to set your data flow to run on a cadence

What Are The Benefits Of Using Portable For Trello ETL?

No-Code Simplicity

Start moving Trello data in minutes. Save yourself the headaches of reading API documentation, writing code, and worrying about maintenance. Leave the hassle to us.

Easy To Understand Pricing

With predictable, fixed-cost pricing per data flow, you know exactly how much your Trello integration will cost every month.

Fast Development Speeds

Access lightning-fast connector development. Portable can build new integrations on-demand in hours or days.

Hands-On Support

APIs change. Schemas evolve. Trello will have maintenance issues and errors. With Portable, we will do everything in our power to make your life easier.

Unlimited Data Volumes

You can move as much Trello data as you want without worrying about usage credits or overages. Instead of analyzing your ETL costs, you should be analyzing your data.

Free To Get Started

Sign up and get started for free. You don’t need a credit card to manually trigger a data sync, so you can try all of our connectors before paying a dime.