Can a person have a Trello account without having Atlassian account?
Asked by Lovie Gilbreath:

I've been using Trello for a while, all while asking questions on Atlassian Community from what I understand as a member of the community without having an Atlassian account. Last night I had a question and it seems I somehow was under the impression I needed to create an account with Atlassian to do this, so I did.

Since signing up last night, I can no longer simply log on to Trello, without it taking me to Atlassian to log on through them. I do not use any other Atlassian service, and don't want my Trello account being linked. When I went to delete my Atlassian account, it says it is going to delete all of my boards. How can this happen? I was working with Trello without an Atlassian account just fine before last night. Now that I felt tricked into setting up an account I must keep that account or they will delete everything I have been doing the past year? I'm not sure how I allowed this to happen.


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I think there's been a misunderstanding. Your account for Community is an Atlassian account, it's the only way non-Atlassians log into it.

I would like to ask how you were logging into Trello before. Email? Google? SSO? etc.

A simple experiment would be to fire up a different browser or "Incognito mode" in your current one and go to Trello.com and click log in, then walk us through what you do and how it responds.

comments: author: Lovie Gilbreath
body: Thanks for the response. It very well could be a misunderstanding. I am fairly new to Trello (about a year I'm guessing) I have been logging on with email. Before creating the Atlassian account I had my email and password for trello and the password had been the same for a long time. When I set up the Atlassian account it needed my email and a new password. I assumed this would be separate from my trello account. There was definitely some change that took place, because in setting up the Atlassian account I had to check a box saying that I understood that Atlassian would now have the ability to view, change boards, etc. (Just like it does with others like adding Zapier or Cronofy)

What is different now, is that when I sign on to Trello, all of my devices have an alert saying Trello wants to use Atlassian.com to sign on. My old trello password doesn't work anymore and where I usually enter the trello password, there is an extra change I can physically see the screen change and the 'Enter Password' bar changes to "Log In with Atlassian"

It is just very different and involves more steps now. Its not a huge deal if this is what it is, but for this mom who just uses her trello account for things like cleaning the house and homework for the kids, it just seems like a lot of unnecessary involvement. In a world where we worry about our privacy and hackers, it make me question whether I should just go back to a notebook and pencil. But I REALLY like Trello. My confusion is over why I cannot just cancel my atlassian account and unlink my Trello account from it without having to completely delete all of my boards.


author: Michael Pryor
body: This is expected. Trello was acquired by Atlassian in 2017, however we are just now getting to the point where our systems are integrated together.

Soon a Trello account WILL BE an Atlassian account, and they will be the same thing (which is where you are now) for everyone.

But essentially what happened was, you signed up for Trello with a username and password... you used it. You came to community (which requires an atlassian account - so you made that with a username and password) and then because you now had an Atlassian account with the same email, your Trello account and Atlassian Account were merged.

It's only more steps today because we haven't yet moved everyone over but once we do, it will be the same as always. Go to trello.com - type your username and password, and you're in. Done.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Ok, I think you've triggered the "convert" process.

Atlassian are gradually getting rid of username/password in Trello and moving everyone over to Atlassian accounts. They started with the bigger users from what I could see - people using Trello inside organisations which were going to claim ownership of domains, and... well, actually, you probably don't care about the rest of that essay, and I don't think you should have to either.

They're now finishing off the smaller non-organisational user changes, and I think they've hit you. I must admit I volunteered ages ago, but that's because I have maybe 30 Atlassian accounts, and this change for me meant one less email/password pair to remember. I'd be even happier if we got SSO, so I could swap between here and Trello without re-entering a login.

\>It is just very different and involves more steps now.

Agreed. It will settle down though. You used to use a username (your email) and password pair to get into Trello. As the login improves, you'll end up using your Atlassian account, for which the login is a username (your email) and password pair, so it'll be much the same.

One thing you might want to have a quick test of is what happens when you are trying to log into Trello and putting in the email address.

If you put in an address that has an Atlassian account, it should say "log in with Atlassian", hide all the other login options and just ask for a password.

If it's not got an account, all the other options will stay on screen.

But, once you've created an Atlassian account with an email address, you will not be able to use that email address to log in with your old password, you need to use the Atlassian account.

\>My confusion is over why I cannot just cancel my atlassian account and unlink my Trello account from it without having to completely delete all of my boards.

I don't think you want to delete the Atlassian account. You will eventually need one to use Trello (and it's fine to use it just for Trello). The main thing is if it works now, and all your boards are intact. You can and should just carry on using it.

However, if your Atlassian account has an unwanted email address on it, you can change this. A bit of a faff, but possible via logging into id.atlassian.com. Changing the email address there will not change your access or your boards in Trello.

So, TLDR - I'm afraid the move to Atlassian accounts is something you are stuck with, and it's more techy than I would like. But once you've got used to it, it's no harder than simple user/password, after the initial pain of updating all your devices.


author: Lovie Gilbreath
body: Thank you so much. I was wondering it this was just the road it was going down and I actually feel better that it may make things easier in the long run. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me.


Tags: atlassian-account