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ClickUp is a work management app with built-in document collaboration. Since it natively combines tasks and documents, each task can be assigned a document from which project tasks can be tracked. While it has other collaboration features like chat and whiteboards, this integration between task management and document collaboration is its main selling point. If you run a small to midsized team that revolves around content production or has a workflow that’s heavily centered on documents, you may find ClickUp’s tight integration appealing. Otherwise, you’re better off with a more flexible tool, such as Asana, that manages workflows well regardless of how your team uses documents. If you’re in the market for traditional project management software, meanwhile, we recommend GanttPro for beginners, Zoho Projects for small but growing teams, and Teamwork for client work.
How Much Does ClickUp Cost?
ClickUp has four plans: a free plan, an Unlimited plan that costs $84 per person per year, a Business plan that costs $144 per person per year, and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing.
Like many productivity apps, ClickUp is going all-in on artificial intelligence (AI), putting a ChatGPT-like generative text model right inside your tasks and collaborative docs. To get ClickUp’s AI package, you need to pay an additional $5 per person per month.
The free plan is generous, but it’s designed for personal use. You get 100MB of storage, five spaces (where projects are housed), unlimited tasks, 100 lists or folders per space, three whiteboards, docs, templates, the ability to add view-only guests, kanban view, calendar view, time tracking, real-time chat, native integrations, and 100 automation runs per month (one run means the automation executes once; more on automations below). One big limitation is that you can only open the Gantt view 100 times in a month.
The Unlimited plan removes a lot of these limits, as the name suggests. You get unlimited storage, unlimited spaces, permission-controlled guest accounts, and no limits on features like Gantt view. You can have up to 200 lists or folders per space, 10 whiteboards, 1,000 automation runs per month, and integration with cloud storage services such as Box and Google Drive. But you’re still limited to one team per workspace.
The Business plan adds proofing and Google Single Sign-On and lets you create unlimited teams. Additional features like workload management, granular time estimates, advanced dashboard features, timelines, and mind maps also help larger teams and are therefore included in the Business plan. You get 400 lists or folders per space, unlimited whiteboards, and 10,000 automations runs per month. Automations can be complex, with multiple action steps and conditional triggers.
The Enterprise plan includes everything in the Business plan plus company Single Sign-On, API support, team sharing for spaces, superior customer support, custom permissions, and the ability to manage restrictions for sharing access. Enterprises also get an option of white labeling, so you can easily add your own branding to the app.
How Do ClickUp’s Prices Compare With the Competition?
While ClickUp offers a free forever plan, there’s no free trial of the paid plans, so you can’t test out important features like guest accounts, unlimited access to the Gantt view, automations, and so forth.
That said, the price for the Unlimited plan is in line with other project management apps for small businesses, such as GanttPro (about $96 to $240 per person per year).
But the $19-per-month Business plan costs less than the higher-end tiers of services from Smartsheet, TeamGantt, and Wrike (roughly $25 to $60 per person per month), though these apps are more powerful and are suitable for larger organizations.
Getting Started With ClickUp
ClickUp has a clean and modern interface, where the sidebar and the top toolbar do the heavy lifting. The always-present sidebar lets you quickly switch between spaces, lists, dashboards, and documents.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)ClickUp’s hierarchical structure is slightly different from what you might see in other work or project management apps. At the top level is your workspace, where you can add team members. Within workspaces are projects, each of which starts with a dedicated space. There’s a lot of freedom within spaces for managing work. For example, a space can host lists directly, or you can create folders and then put your lists in them. A list can have tasks and subtasks.
ClickUp’s home page gives you a bird’s-eye view of your role in the organization. By default, it shows all your assigned tasks for the day, as well as overdue tasks. A dedicated Calendar in the sidebar shows upcoming meetings and task due dates. You can pin tasks that are important to you in the LineUp section, which is a handy way to avoid jumping through different spaces to get back to an important task when you’re ready to focus on it.
A separate section lets you create multiple custom dashboards. It’s similar to the custom dashboards in Celoxis and other project management apps. You can add different modules to track progress across projects, including graphs, reports, and time-tracking data.
As you switch to a space, the top toolbar automatically changes to show tabs that you can switch among, such as a pinned document, a board view, or a kanban view. When you move away from the current space (to see a notification or a task, for example), ClickUp puts a Back button in the space’s section of the sidebar, allowing you to quickly jump back to the project at hand.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)ClickUp Project Management Features
ClickUp markets itself as an all-in-one work management app, encompassing tasks, documents, whiteboard, and chat. As many teams already use a dedicated messaging app, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, it’s unlikely ClickUp’s chat function will win you over. That said, you can chat right inside tasks in ClickUp if you like.
ClickUp covers all the important task management features that small to midsize teams might require, including Gantt views, permissions management, proofing, and reports. You can also add custom fields to tasks to track things that are unique to your project.
Feature-Rich Task View
ClickUp’s feature-rich task view is divided into two sections. On the left is a space for a description. Here, you get ClickUp AI support, so you can get help writing something here or using the space to generate ideas. On the right is a place to upload files, add comments, and track changes. ClickUp has an intuitive gesture for adding files. If you drag and drop a file into the left area, it’s added as an attachment; do it on the right, and it’s added as a comment.
From the top toolbar, you can assign a task to multiple members, teams, or a guest. You can set a start date and due date for every task. The task can be moved to the next stage of its workflow using a small arrow button next to the task status. Each task includes a time tracker, along with an option to enter time manually, but there is no way to enter a time estimate for how long a task might take. More advanced project management apps, such as LiquidPlanner, use time estimates. Business users can track billable time from a task, but there are no tools for managing client billing or invoicing.
ClickUp Views: Board, List, Gantt, Calendar
ClickUp has several ways to view your tasks. If you’re a fan of Trello’s kanban board, you’ll feel right at home with the board view, which looks better than Trello’s interface, with sharper elements and higher information density.
The list view takes the classic to-do list and breaks it into color-coded sections, showing you all the tasks across all the folders and projects in the space. You can jump to a particular folder at any time.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)While the Board view and List view are the two defaults, you can also manually add the Gantt view and Calendar view. The Gantt view requires a bit of setup, as you must add due dates to every task and dependencies where they are relevant for it to be useful. (If you’re unfamiliar with this type of view, read our guide to getting started with Gantt charts).
Once enabled, the interactive Gantt chart works as you’d expect from a project management app. A green bar at the top moves the entire project timeline. You can move individual tasks using drag and drop, and you can drag the end points to change the start and end dates. Clicking and dragging from one task to another creates a dependency. When you drag a task that contains dependencies, all subsequent tasks in the chain also get rescheduled automatically. Any task can be converted to a milestone using the right-click menu.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)Proofing
ClickUp offers basic proofing tools so you can preview any image or PDF and pin comments to a specific part. But that’s it. Unlike ProofHub, you can’t use arrows or boxes to annotate specific areas of an image, and there is no proofing-based approval process either. Smartsheet also has more in the area of proofing tools.
That said, what ClickUp offers for proofing is better than what is offered by most project management apps, which typically go no farther than support for uploading images.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag/Apple)ClickUp Permissions
ClickUp’s free plan does not provide any permission management. All members who join have access to create and edit items. In the paid plans, both members and guests can be given specific permissions for folders, lists, tasks, views, docs, dashboards, and goals.
You can set four different permission levels for your team members. View Only gives the person read-only access. Comment level gives the person the ability to add or reply to comments on the item. The Edit level lets the person share and make changes, but they can’t delete items. Full Access means the person can create, edit, share, and delete items.
You can also define specific access for guest accounts if you’re hiring outside contractors. Guest accounts can’t access the entire workspace or individual spaces, but you can invite them to view specific folders, lists, and tasks. Guests can create tasks and views, but they can’t create spaces, folders, lists, goals, or tags. They can’t invite users, but they can access time tracking, time estimates, and custom fields.
ClickUp is lacking in reassignment features, something that Celoxis offers natively. ClickUp also doesn’t notify you if there’s a risk of a team member missing a deadline. There’s no option to automatically reassign tasks if someone is sick or if work priorities change. You have to do all that manually (though bulk editing helps a bit) or set up an automation for a specific use case.
ClickUp AI
As mentioned, ClickUp has incorporated generative AI, which you can get for an added fee. You get a taste of how the AI works in the free plan, but your requests are limited. If you have used a generative AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT or Google Bard, it works similarly.
You can use ClickUp AI to generate entire articles or scripts inside the task description. For example, you can ask ClickUp to write an article about things to include in a startup pitch deck, or you can ask it to create an outline for selling soaps online if that’s what your business does. You can (and probably should) always tweak the generated text for clarity and brevity. ClickUp AI lets you fine-tune generated text with different tones and styles. You can also use the AI on text that you’ve already entered into ClickUp. For example, if you have a long task description, you can use the AI’s Summarize feature to generate a short summary of it.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)The text generation is quick and reasonably precise. In testing, ClickUp AI successfully generated blog articles and outlines, as well as an action item based on the text of one of the articles.
Overall, ClickUp’s AI integration is well-designed, and it can help you get started with written tasks. But it doesn’t provide extraordinary value. You can get the same results by using the free ChatGPT website or Bing Chat in Microsoft Edge. The AI integration is purely for convenience, but it isn’t worth the extra $5 per person per month.
ClickUp Collaboration Tools
ClickUp includes a collaborative document tool that lets you create and share documents with your entire team. Multiple team members can work on the document at the same time. While collaborative editing is a great way to create and organize all kinds of documents, ClickUp isn’t a replacement for Google Docs or Google Workspace, which excels in extensibility and document sharing.
ClickUp’s Docs natively integrate with its task management, so you can embed a task list in a document as an interactive table, including due dates, assignees, and priority status. Each document can be linked to a specific task, making detailed references easy. Docs also offers embedded previews for popular services like Google Slides, Loom, Figma, and YouTube.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)ClickUp AI is natively integrated into the Docs feature as well. You can start out with a blank document and use ChatGPT-like prompts to write anything you want, from product documentation to a brainstorming list of ideas. Plus, once you generate some text or an outline, you can again use ClickUp AI to generate tasks based on the text.
Speaking of brainstorming, you can also use the included whiteboard as an infinite canvas for sketching out ideas in any project. You can start off with a blank canvas or a template. Then, you can create flow charts, process charts, or anything you want. You can add text and images and collaborate with other members of your team. While this is no replacement for a tool like Lucidchart, you can make simple linked flowcharts effortlessly without jumping to a different tool.
ClickUp Automations
ClickUp has a built-in automation system that works both within your workspace and with outside tools such as email, GitHub, Twilio, and others. If you have used IFTTT or Zapier, you’ll be comfortable with the interface quickly. At its most basic, an automation is a little bit of code that says, “When X happens, do Y automatically.” You choose the X (also called a trigger) and the Y (aka the action).
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)You can create an automation from the top toolbar in any space or folder. ClickUp gives you a handy list of suggested automations, though you’re free to start from scratch. You select a trigger, pair it with an action, and save some manual labor.
When the action is triggered (let’s say, when a task’s status changes to Produce), ClickUp automatically does the follow-up action, which could be assigning the task to a particular manager or moving it to a different project. The number of automation executions you get is limited based on your plan.
App Center Integrations vs. ClickApps
ClickUp’s App Center shows you all the possible integrations to the product. You can integrate with cloud storage services like Google Drive, communication apps like Slack, as well as other apps. For instance, the Zoom integration lets you create and launch Zoom meetings right from ClickUp, saving you the hassle of going to Google Calendar or keeping track of the myriad of Zoom meeting links.
The App Center is different from ClickApps, which are native components of the ClickUp interface that can be enabled or disabled at your whim. ClickApps are in the settings, and the most important ones are already enabled, like Dashboards, Milestones, and LineUp. But it’s worth exploring to see if you find some interesting components that you’d like to enable (ClickUp AI is one of them). ClickApps can also serve as a way to customize the project management interface, helping you remove unused components with ease.
There’s No Such Thing as All-in-One Work Management
ClickUp promotes itself as an all-in-one work management app. But anyone who has used project management software or work management tools knows there is no such thing. ClickUp is suitable for teams who want to combine task management and document collaboration—and possibly whiteboards—in one central place with a modern, intuitive interface. If you manage any other kinds of projects or work, it’s probably not quite right for you. Our favorite work management app and Editors’ Choice remains Asana, which is so flexible that it’s suited to many kinds of work and teams. If you need a more traditional project management app, our Editors’ Choice winners are GanttPro for newbies, Zoho Projects for growing teams on a budget, and Teamwork if your business handles client work.
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