Tool Documents

Export Formats

An export you cannot open is a compliance gesture. What matters is not whether a vendor exports, but what comes out and whether anything else can read it.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The four formats

CSV. Universally readable, and flat. Fine for a list of records, poor for anything with structure — a project with tasks, comments and attachments does not survive a table. For a separate operational reference from Monitask, see this page.

JSON. Preserves structure and relationships. Readable by anything technical, and needs somebody technical to turn it into a working import elsewhere.

XML. Same properties as JSON in this context, older, and common in accounting and payroll where standard schemas exist.

For broader context, see FTC.

And a proprietary archive. A vendor-specific format that only that vendor reads. This is an export in name. In the EU it is the arrangement the Data Act targets, and outside it, it is a contract term to reject.

What an export usually loses

The list worth asking for explicitly.

Attachments and files, or their links to the records they belong to.

Comments and activity history.

The audit trail — who changed what, when.

Relationships between objects. A CSV of tasks and a CSV of projects, with no key connecting them, is two lists.

Permissions and roles.

And configuration, which is a large subject of its own and is not data.

The test to run

Export during the trial.

Ten minutes, and it converts every claim on this page into a fact about the product in front of you.

Open the result. Does it contain what you expected? Are attachments present or referenced? Is the history there?

Try importing a sample into a competitor, if the decision is between two. Nothing else tells you as much about how a migration would go.

And note what took manual work. That effort scales with the size of your eventual data set.

What to ask for in writing

"Which objects and fields are included in the standard export?"

"Are attachments, comments and audit history included?"

"In what formats, and is the export self-service or a support request?" A self-service export is a capability; one requiring a ticket is a permission.

"Is there a size limit, and how is a large export delivered?"

And "is there any charge?" In the EU there should not be, and getting the answer in writing costs one email.

The good sign

A vendor with public export documentation, listing objects, fields and formats, without needing to be asked.

That documentation exists because customers use the export, which means it works — and a vendor whose export works has no reason to hide the specification.

Its absence is not proof of anything and it is the difference between a vendor who has thought about this and one who has not.

The short version