Trello MCP: Two Servers, and Both Read Comments

Trello shipped an official MCP server on July 22, 2026. It is hosted at https://mcp.trello.com/v1, it authenticates with OAuth, and it works on every Trello plan including free. After a year of this search term pointing at community repos of wildly different quality, there is finally an obvious answer.

Install the official one. That is the right call for most people and this post is not going to talk you out of it.

It has grown fast. At launch it could not read a single card comment, and a lot of the advice still on the results page dates from then. Ask your agent what is overdue across your boards and it answers instantly. Ask it why the card labeled “Blocked” has been sitting there for three weeks and it can now read the comments and the activity history on that card to tell you.

The capability table everyone quotes is only half the story. The list underneath it, the one headed “coming soon”, is where the remaining gaps are.

Two Atlassian MCP servers, and only one reaches Trello

The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is the open standard that lets an AI client call outside tools mid-conversation. If you want the ground-up version first, we wrote a plain English explainer on what MCP is.

Atlassian runs two of them and the naming does nobody any favors.

The Atlassian Rovo MCP server covers Jira, Confluence, Compass and Bitbucket. It is scoped to an Atlassian Cloud site. It is the one most people find first, because it is the one Atlassian markets to companies.

Trello MCP is a separate server on a separate endpoint, scoped to the Trello workspaces you authorize. Atlassian’s own comparison table in the repo says Trello data “may also be available” through Rovo in a future release, which is a polite way of confirming it is not available there today.

So if you already wired up Rovo for Jira and assumed your boards came along, they did not. That is a five-minute mistake that reads like a permissions bug.

What the official server actually does

Here is the shipped surface, taken from the official repo rather than from a directory listing.

Boards and lists: view and create boards, view labels, view and move lists.

Cards: view, create, update, move, archive, mark done, attach and detach labels, assign members.

Checklists: view, create and update checklists, add and update items.

Comments: read, add and edit comments on cards.

Activity: view action history and activity summaries across cards, lists and boards.

Custom fields: fetch, create and update custom field data on cards. This needs Trello Standard or higher.

Attachments: read existing attachments and attach web links. Local file upload is not supported yet.

Search: find cards and boards by keyword.

Planner: view calendar events, create focus-time blocks, link and unlink cards to events.

Inbox: view, create, update and archive Inbox cards.

Three details are worth having straight before you connect.

Every plan works. Trello’s own support doc is explicit that there is no paid requirement. The single exception is creating focus time in Planner, which needs Premium or Enterprise. Reading calendar events from a connected Google or Outlook calendar is available more widely.

Multiple workspaces per connection. You pick the workspaces on the consent screen. If your work board and your side project live in different workspaces, authorize both. An agent only sees the workspaces you selected and has no idea the others exist.

Nothing gets deleted. Atlassian’s docs say destructive delete operations are not supported. The tools to do it were never built. An over-eager agent can bury a list in the archive, and you get it back from the board menu in about four clicks.

That last one deserves more credit than it gets. Handing an agent delete permissions on a shared board and trusting the prompt is not a safety model, which is the argument we made at length in how to vet an MCP server before you connect it.

Agent skill first

One thing in the official repo is genuinely useful and almost nobody mentions it. It ships an agent skill called trello-use that teaches a client the ARI id format the tools expect, how to handle UTC dates, and when to use Inbox tools instead of board tools.

npx skills install atlassian/trello-mcp-server

Load it before your first real prompt. Without it you spend your first session watching an agent guess at id formats and apologize.

The list that matters is the one marked “coming soon”

Atlassian publishes what is still coming in the same docs as the capability list, which is honest and rare. It is a much shorter list than it was at launch.

Not shipped yet:

• Attachments: uploading local files. Reading attachments and adding web links work.
• Labels: create and edit them, rather than just attaching existing ones.
• Members: view and manage board and workspace members, and assign members to checklist items.
• Boards: edit board details and archive a board.
• Cards: copy a card.
• Planner: link events back to cards.

Check Atlassian’s support page before you plan around any of these, because the list keeps shrinking.

Why reading comments matters

This is the part I would want somebody to tell me before I connected anything.

A Trello card title is an index entry. “Fix login bug.” “Q3 pricing page.” “Renew the domain.” It tells you a thing exists. It tells you nothing about the thing.

Everything you would actually ask an agent about lives one layer down. Why this slipped. What the client said. Which of three options we picked and who objected. That material is in the comments, in the attachments somebody dragged on, and in the activity trail showing the card bouncing between two lists for a month.

The official server now reaches most of that layer. It can build you a board from a conversation, triage your Inbox, block two hours tomorrow for the thing you keep avoiding, and read the comments and activity history behind a card. That makes it a reasonable tool for a “what happened here” question, not only a “what is due” one.

What it still cannot reach is anything that never became a card. A recap of the quarter can only draw on what your team wrote down in Trello.

The 57-tool community server

delorenj/mcp-server-trello is the one the directories rank, and for once the directories are pointing somewhere reasonable. It has 431 stars, an MIT license, and it was last pushed on August 4, 2026. It runs on Bun with npx and npm as fallbacks.

Fifty-seven tools. The official server now covers comments, activity and custom fields, so what the community server adds is the extra surface, including file attachments, and its own rate-limit handling.

Comments: add_comment, update_comment, delete_comment, get_card_comments.

Attachments: attach_image_to_card, attach_file_to_card, download_attachment. Image attachments come back as inline viewable data, so an agent can actually look at the screenshot somebody pasted onto a bug card.

Custom fields: get_board_custom_fields and update_card_custom_field. These need Trello Standard or higher, which is a Trello limit and not the server’s.

Activity: get_recent_activity, plus get_my_cards across boards.

It also handles Trello’s rate limits for you. Trello caps requests at 300 per 10 seconds per API key and 100 per 10 seconds per token. The server runs a token bucket and queues requests instead of failing them, which matters the moment an agent decides to read every card on a 200-card board.

The nicer touches are workflow-shaped rather than API-shaped. There is a dedicated acceptance-criteria extractor, checklist item search by description, and fractional-index list reordering. That is somebody who uses Trello for real, not somebody wrapping endpoints.

The auth trade is the actual decision

Capability is not what should decide this. Credentials are.

The official server uses OAuth 2.0. You pick the workspaces on a consent screen, you grant read, write and search separately, and you revoke it whenever you want. Actions respect the permissions you already have in Trello, so the agent cannot do anything you could not do yourself. Organizations managed through admin.atlassian.com can control which MCP domains are allowed and what access level users may grant, using the same framework as the Rovo server.

The community server wants a Trello API key and token from trello.com/app-key, pasted into your client config as environment variables. That token does not expire. It is not workspace-scoped by default, it reaches everything your account reaches, and it sits in a plaintext config file that half the developers reading this have accidentally committed at some point.

There is a mitigation and you should use it. Set TRELLO_ALLOWED_WORKSPACES and the server will only expose the workspaces you list. Leave it empty and every workspace the token can see is fair game.

Then remember that this server does have delete tools. delete_comment and delete_checklist_item are real, and they do what they say. That is the price of the capability you came for.

This trade shows up on every board tool that has shipped an official server. ClickUp’s official server refuses API keys outright and takes OAuth or nothing, which solves the leaked-token problem and creates a different one for anything running unattended.

Which one you want

Rovo is in that table for one reason, which is that it does not reach Trello and people keep assuming it does.

Between the two that do, the rule is simple. Start with the official server. If a week goes by and you never once hit something it could not do, you are done and you never have to manage a token.

If you did hit a gap, such as uploading local files as attachments, add the community server for that job specifically, scope it with the workspace allowlist, and keep the official one for anything that writes to a shared board.

Once you are connected, this is the prompt worth running first, because it tells you immediately how much of your board the agent can actually see.

Copy this prompt

List every Trello card assigned to me that is overdue or due this week,
grouped by board. Then pick the one that has been sitting in the same
list longest and tell me everything you can find out about why it has
not moved. Say plainly which parts of the card you could not read.

The first half is card data. The second half shows whether the agent went on to read the comments and activity history behind the card, and the last line of the prompt makes it say what it could not reach.

What neither of them reaches

Both servers read what you filed. Neither touches what you saved.

The X thread about the pricing model you are arguing about on that card. The Reddit comment that solved the exact bug three months ago. The LinkedIn post from a competitor that made you create the board in the first place. The article that explained the approach you are now taking. None of that ever became a card. It got a tap on a bookmark icon in a different app each time and vanished.

That split is why the second-brain idea keeps disappointing people. The task layer and the notes layer get all the tooling, and the capture layer gets none, even though the capture layer is where most of what you found actually lives. We went into it properly in building a second brain from bookmarks.

It is the same shape of gap Miro MCP has with connectors and Todoist MCP has with project context. The server reads the object. The reasoning was somewhere else the whole time.

Where ContextBolt fits

Straight about the seam. ContextBolt does not integrate with Trello, and it is not trying to replace it.

It sits on the other side of the same gap. Trello holds what you planned. ContextBolt holds what you saved, the web pages you clipped and the posts and threads you kept from X, Reddit and LinkedIn. A Chrome extension captures them as you save them, tags and clusters them on arrival, and Pro exposes an MCP endpoint so Claude can search that pile by meaning in the same session it reads your board. The two run side by side in the same agent, one for what you planned and one for what you kept.

The design instinct is worth naming, because it runs in the opposite direction to this whole post. ContextBolt’s bookmark server keeps its tool list short. search_bookmarks, list_clusters, get_cluster_bookmarks, get_recent_bookmarks, export_bookmarks, save_bookmark. A server you leave connected in every session has to be cheap to leave connected, and 57 tools is not cheap.

Basic is free and capped at 150 bookmarks, with AI tagging, topic clusters and instant search on your device, which is enough to find out whether you would use it. Pro is $6 a month, removes the cap, and adds cloud sync and the MCP endpoint with its semantic search.

Worth doing?

Yes, and the setup is about five minutes because there is nothing to install.

Go in with the right expectation. Today’s official Trello MCP server can capture, triage, restructure, schedule, and now read the comments and history behind a card. It will earn its place in your client config the first week.

It still only knows what your team wrote down in Trello. Anything that lives in a saved thread or a clipped article is outside it.

Check Atlassian’s support page for the current list before you assume otherwise. It changes often, and several items that were on the roadmap at launch have shipped since.

And while the client config is open, put ContextBolt beside the Trello server for the research behind the cards. Basic is free up to 150 bookmarks.