Compare project management software by proving what can leave the service, what can be reconstructed, and who controls the workspace, identity, data, files, automations, and recovery. An Export button does not prove portability. The result may be useful for analysis yet unable to recreate comments, permissions, views, dependencies, attachments, or workflow behavior.
Map the complete project model
Inventory organizations, workspaces, teams, projects, boards, sections, columns, tasks, subtasks, IDs, descriptions, owners, assignees, due dates, dependencies, milestones, status, comments, activity, attachments, custom fields, forms, templates, dashboards, portfolios, calendars, integrations, automations, guests, permissions, and archived items.
Separate legal rights, account authority, technical custody, export access, and practical reusability. An administrator may control members while billing or primary ownership belongs to someone else. A project export may omit workspace-level settings. Keep credentials and tokens outside the comparison ledger.
Inspect documented export and import routes
Asana's project import and export guidance documents project export to JSON or CSV and task import by CSV. It also distinguishes projects, search views, and My Tasks. Treat those scopes separately; a project file is not evidence that the organization, teams, permissions, automations, or all user data can be recreated.
Trello's export documentation describes board JSON export, plan-dependent CSV and workspace export, raw attachment options, a comment-history limit in board JSON, and no direct JSON or CSV re-import that recreates a board. That is a clear example of export without symmetric restoration.
Run a representative portability test
Build a fictional project with sections, subtasks, two assignees, due dates, dependencies, comments, an attachment, custom fields, labels, checklist, recurring or automated action, archived task, guest, and restricted item. Export through the ordinary interface. Record plan, role, settings, time, format, counts, and errors.
Inspect stable IDs, hierarchy, relationships, users, timestamps, completion, comments, activity, attachment files versus links, custom-field definitions and values, dependencies, recurring rules, and archived items. Hash the original archive where useful and keep it read-only.
Import into a clean test workspace or neutral staging model. Compare every field and relationship. Rebuild representative views and permissions. If the destination does not support an import, score that as a manual transformation or unavailable capability rather than assuming a developer can solve it cheaply.
Compare ownership and continuity
Record primary owner, administrators, billing owner, identity provider, domain controls, recovery contacts, data residency if relevant, retention, deletion, audit logs, API access, rate limits, and offboarding. Test a normal member, guest, project administrator, and organization owner with fictional data.
Check whether attachments remain downloadable after account closure, whether comments and activity retain attribution, and whether departed users can be mapped without impersonation. Assess provider outage, subscription downgrade, administrator departure, integration failure, and vendor shutdown.
Score operational fit and exit cost
Use a matrix for daily usability, accessibility, mobile and offline needs, integrations, automation, reporting, permissions, guest collaboration, export completeness, documented import, attachment retrieval, API, recovery, security, cost, and required expertise. Mark unknown as unknown.
Define an exit schedule: periodic exports, independent attachment backup, account and role review, restoration exercise, and owner succession. Include a dated inventory of active projects, archived projects, integrations, external collaborators, and automation owners. Measure how long export, transformation, verification, and permission reconstruction take so the exit estimate is evidence-based. No project tool guarantees identical behavior elsewhere.
The comparison is complete when an authorized person can export a representative project, account for omissions, reconstruct critical work, recover control, and explain remaining dependencies. Keep the test evidence with the final decision for later review. Prefer the tool whose limitations and exit cost are acceptable, not the one with the longest feature list.
Sources
- Project importing and exporting — Asana Help Center
- Export data from Trello — Atlassian Support