ClickUp Review – The Good and The Bad for 2024

There are numerous project management software on the market today, which is why it can be overwhelming when you want to decide on the one you think will be the most fitting for you.

As one of the most consistently highly-ranked top project management solutions on the market, I have broken down ClickUp's features, customer support, integrations, and pricing while including real-life user reviews to present an accurate and detailed description of the software.

Let's look at how the tool handles itself in different use cases, its advantages & drawbacks, and whether it is the best project management solution for you.

What is ClickUp?

ClickUp is a project management platform that allows you to plan, track progress, and organize all types of work, elevate team collaboration & communication, manage your team's workload and prioritize tasks, and integrate with the best third-party tools.

The cloud-based project management tool enables you to manage projects from start to finish and build total alignment within the team through real-time chat, team sharing, and collaboration tools, allowing you to simplify work and hit your goals.

With ClickUp, you can create customized sales funnels & manage sprints, store and manage documents, track employee performance, organize project budgets & manage financial goals, conduct product launches, and track leads and prospects, as the task management tool provides solutions for agile, marketing, sales, design, engineering, financial, human resources, IT, and other teams.

You will even find many advanced features and specific programs for industries like healthcare with a HIPAA-compliant enterprise plan, as well as so many features for remote work that make task management & collaboration easy wherever team members are.

Pros and Cons of ClickUp

ClickUp Pros

• Excellent for Solopreneurs & Teams: Besides being one of the best productivity apps for teams of all sizes, ClickUp works great for solopreneurs. It enables you to speed up your task completion, enhance productivity, and eliminate errors with the free version. For instance, you can write down reminders or quick ideas in the notepad and utilize the Chrome extension for time tracking, screenshots, and creating different tasks. ClickUp lets solopreneurs create strategies for all clients separately, after which you can mix the tasks on your to-do list and respond to all needs on time.
• High Level of Customization: From web page branding and project funnels to customized automations built from scratch, ClickUp provides top-notch customization capabilities. The software lets you personalize how you manage, assign tasks, and select the best-suited structure for your industry according to your preferences and workflow execution. You can customize your workflows and visualize an entire pipeline on Kanban boards, lists, tables, calendars, and Gantt charts, or even gain insight into how the workload gets distributed among team members through workload and box views.
• Versatile & Easy-to-Use Dashboards: ClickUp provides strong visuals and presents information in a digestible way, with the multitask bar allowing you to manage complete tasks simultaneously. You can switch between different views to gain a new perspective, bulk-update tasks, reassign tasks for multiple team members, or if one member is sick. ClickUp lets you update custom statuses for tasks by changing the status, due dates, and dependencies, and you can choose from over 50 widgets for building your dashboards for high-level reporting.
• Extended Free Version: ClickUp offers paid plan subscriptions and a free tier that beats most of the ClickUp alternatives by including unlimited tasks & members, Kanban boards & different views, dashboards, collaborative docs & real-time chat, time tracking, two-factor authentication, proofing, task dependencies, integrations, 24/7 customer support, and other features that you can usually find in paid versions of other tools.
• Extenuated Team Collaboration & Communication: The project management software enables you to edit documents, chat or exchange emails with colleagues, and utilize features like comment sharing and file proofing to conduct reviews for marketing and design projects. ClickUp lets you ask and answer questions, provide approval, receive feedback, format content with embeds & attachments, and use comments on docs, attachments, and tasks for proofing. Through proofing, you can provide clear markers on design mockups, highlight markups, add feedback for videos, and more.
• Flexible Time Tracking: All the features ClickUp offers for time tracking make time management for your projects easy and adjustable. The task management tool allows you to record time on all devices through a free Chrome extension, add time subsequently, create entries by date range manually, set estimates, attach notes, mark billable time, and even apply labels to categorize and filter time for tasks. Discover potential bottlenecks by sorting tasks by time spent and view the total time spent on all subtasks and tasks.
• Advanced Reporting Capabilities: ClickUp lets you increase your team's productivity through advanced reporting tools that provide insight into new tasks and pending tasks your team is currently working on, uncover unclear notifications and overdue tasks, and check the leaderboard to see who has checked off the most comments and notifications. The project management tool showcases how different members manage tasks, highlighting the complete output of the team, time spent on each task, members producing fast & accurate work, members falling behind, and more.
• Efficient Mobile App: Unlike much other software, ClickUp enables you to use all the previous tools through a robust, user-friendly mobile app and manage multiple projects on the go. The project management software delivers all the ClickUp features through a high-functioning mobile app that lets you create tasks, stay on top of project updates, catch up on notifications, or map out your entire day from home. What's helpful as well is that the app comes with an intuitive user interface that makes everything straightforward.

ClickUp Cons

• Self-Managed Onboarding: In the very beginning, you will be required to enter a lot of information to get your team started, as ClickUp runs on a self-managed onboarding process. The missing piece that would improve the process would be an interactive walkthrough or a detailed video guide demonstrating how to navigate the task management software. After your team has finished a lengthy onboarding process, you will need to get a grasp on an overwhelming volume of features. The learning curve can discourage you if you don't want your team going through significant training to use ClickUp.
• User Interface Needs Improvement: What doesn't help with the complaints about the steeper learning curve during the initial setup is the user interface that the users have described as unappealing and confusing. The empty spaces and panes create more confusion with the many available tools. For a more user-friendly project management tool, the text size should be bigger and the color scheme more contrasting for the users to distinguish between features more easily.
• Too Many Customization Options: While the extent of customization ClickUp offers can be one of its biggest pros, it is important to point out the disadvantage of the users having to choose between numerous options for the software to run optimally. Choosing between “done” and “not done” options are what you will sometimes find among the best project management software; many claim this is enough. The downside of this high flexibility is that it requires users to systematically plan the implementation and use of the tool for the most benefit.
• Too Many Features: The task management software delivers so many tools that it can cause some users to feel overwhelmed by the volume and variety of features, especially during the setup process. The learning curve can seem steep compared to other project management tools, and teams have been having trouble grasping the features from the start and being confused about whether they should use some tools for one purpose or another. For instance, the task/list/folder/space hierarchy has confused users.
• Less-Intuitive Calendar: For many users, the calendar can seem ineffective and the least-developed feature in ClickUp. There are numerous buttons users need to click to proceed to the next step, including clicking “done” after entering a date, or else they will need to do it again.

ClickUp Pricing Options and Plans

ClickUp's pricing includes three paid plan subscriptions, one of which is an enterprise subscription for advanced users and a free tier that is more generous than any other free plan on the market.

Free Forever Plan

To say that this project management software offers a free plan perfect for a small team is an understatement, as ClickUp provides many features in its free tier that other tools deliver only in paid plans.

One of the tools other project management software don't provide for free is the Gantt chart functionality, which is where this task tracking tool stands out.

Firstly, you get to create unlimited projects and spaces and add unlimited users.

While there is a limit of 100MB for storage and 100 automations, please remember that many of ClickUp's competitors don't even offer features like Gantt charts, automations, and dependencies unless you purchase a higher plan.

The free plan also provides goal-setting and custom field customization, among other limited features.

Below, you can see how goal-setting looks in ClickUp:

The free plan is highly suitable for personal purposes and beginners, but it can also be fitting for infrequent use and smaller teams.

To upgrade, you must upgrade all team members within your workspace. You need to notify the ClickUp team within 30 days of the purchase for refunds.

Unlimited Plan

Suppose you purchase ClickUp's unlimited plan for just $5 per month. In that case, you can access everything from the free forever plan plus other project management tools like unlimited integrations, unlimited dashboards, resource management, agile reporting, form views, guest users, guests with permissions, teams (user groups), goals & portfolios, and more.

Check out how it might look to use resource management for a product launch:

Just as the name suggests, the unlimited plan removes the limitations on features that you have in the free plan, allowing you to create unlimited dashboards, utilize unlimited Gantt charts & custom fields, integrate with third-party apps without constrictions and even use unlimited storage.

If the free plan is a bit restrictive for you, this one might suit you as it removes the majority of limitations while providing 1,000 automations and unlimited storage.

On top of all that, you can set permissions to restrict certain users from accessing specific documents and data or grant user access, which decreases the chances of data breaches.

The unlimited plan will cost you $9 per member per month if billed monthly.

Business Plan

You can purchase the Business plan for $12 per user per month ($19 if billed monthly). You will get all the features from the unlimited subscription, and the boosted security features like two-factor authentication, SSO (Single Sign On) for Google sign-in, and other external platforms.

With the features like the resource management chart that gives insight into the people's available resources, this tier becomes the first plan in ClickUp catered toward multi-person businesses.

Additionally, this plan provides a KPI tracker, burndown charts, widget creator, custom data exporting & goal folders, all of which help keep track of workers' progress and project goals.

Here is how setting up a ClickUp dashboard might look like in the business plan:

You will also find Google SSO, advanced public sharing, advanced automations, advanced dashboard features, advanced time tracking, granular time estimates, workload management, timelines & mind maps, and more tools that will benefit larger businesses looking for enhanced security.

A mind map created in ClickUp:

Mid-to-large-sized teams looking for industry-level security and advanced goal forecasting with real-time data will benefit from the business plan the most.

Business Plus Plan

The business plus plan starts at $19 per member per month, and it will grant you access to everything from the business plan, along with more exclusive features geared towards projects of bigger scope & size or multiple teams.

One of the great things about the Business Plus tier is that it allows you to customize the workload capacity.

You will unlock a much larger number of automations that you can use and benefit from advanced task management tools like team sharing, custom role creation, custom workload capacity, custom permissions, multiple-list subtasks, and API.

The business plus tier even provides an admin training webinar and priority support for your team.

If paid monthly, the business plus plan will cost you $29 per member per month.

Enterprise Plan

For the enterprise subscription, you will have to contact the ClickUp sales team to get your quote as the project management platform doesn't provide the prices for this tier publically.

An example of the user interface in the enterprise plan:

If you choose this tier, you will get access to everything from the business plus plan, increased API functionality for internal customizations, MSA & HIPAA compliance, the ability to sign into accounts from multiple providers, and a legal review with a contract for a customized ClickUp agreement.

You can use ClickUp to manage projects with highly-increased functionality through tools like white labeling, advanced permissions, unlimited custom roles, default personal views, live onboarding training, a dedicated success manager, and access to managed services.

Below, you can see how you can choose to conduct employee onboarding in ClickUp:

What's particularly important for larger businesses is that the ClickUp team will provide custom, guided onboarding, a dedicated account manager, and customized support that will help you resolve any issues.

The level of support the ClickUp customer support team provides in its enterprise tier is unmatched by the best project management software on the market. Since this is ClickUp's most advanced tier, it best suits large enterprise companies and premium teams.

Key Features of ClickUp

Project Hierarchy & Views

Because ClickUp offers over 15 views for your projects and timelines, you can structure your workload however you like. The hierarchy system enables you to execute efficient task management and assign and delegate tasks perfectly while staying on top of the big picture.

You can keep track of the same data through the box or workload views or visualize tasks through lists, calendars, boards, Gantt charts, and even mind maps, workload, and activity views.

On a smaller scale, you can create a clear task hierarchy with nested subtasks that allow you to break down subtasks into themes, epics, and user stories after you have established subtasks, dates, dependencies, and checklists.

Define properties to highlight the resources needed to finish a task through custom fields, and add web links, design files, cost calculations, email addresses, and more. Utilize the progress percentage bars to pull info on subtask progress.

Task Management

How easy it is to organize and execute task plans makes ClickUp one of the best project management tools for productivity. When you use ClickUp, you can set daily & weekly reminders to ensure all tasks meet the deadline and choose from over 35 ClickApps that make customizing tasks and subtasks easy.

Break down the tasks into layers of subtasks, rearrange them, and edit in bulk through the bulk action toolbar. Manage recurring tasks, create to-do lists and automatically embed data into calendars, organize deadlines and manage task dependencies according to urgent tasks.

Here is an example of a bulk action toolbar in ClickUp:

Determine tasks for people, sprints, and bugs, group tasks by category, build specific workloads for bug tracking & product launches and create reusable templates, and manage tasks spanning several projects or that are used by multiple people through multi-list inclusion.

Rank tasks by five levels of priority, ranging from low to urgent, add custom tags, and filter tasks from different projects & locations quickly, add relationships to tasks & create dependencies to map out a clear order of execution among tasks and utilize clips to capture and share screen recordings within ClickUp.

Here is an example of task relationships & dependencies being added in ClickUp:

Customization

Automations

Through automations, you can create consistent processes and ready-made frameworks for different assignments and save time.

You can use pre-built automation recipes or customize your automations through the automation customization page that guides you through the process. Along with simple automations, you can generate subsequent & simultaneous automations.

Use ClickUp to automatically assign tasks, move statuses, post comments, and conduct over a hundred different actions.

Without actually doing anything, you can change assignees & priorities, apply tags & templates to status changes, update task statuses, tags, and assignees when a priority changes, assign teammates when statuses change & tags get added, and much more.

Through automations, you can set actions to get triggered on a due date, change the status, priorities, assignees, and tags when a task is created, swap assignees, or add new templates & tags when the workload moves to a new location, and create any automation based on any trigger or condition.

ClickUp offers dozens of templates that are free to use in all ClickUp pricing plans and are even available for guests. The templates are categorized into three tiers, including beginner, intermediate, and advanced users. And then, there are numerous categories, ranging from creative & design, engineering & product, finance, and HR to personal use and sales.

Templates

Each template has its design shown on the template list along with a description & use cases demonstrated once you click on it. In the description, you will find the number of statuses, custom fields, and view types available for each template.

The amazing thing is that ClickUp allows you to share a template you have created publically, send it to someone from another workspace, share it with your clients, and even sell it.

Integrations

This project management software allows you to connect with over 1,000 tools for free.

From its native API integration through which you can build your custom integrations & ClickUp apps, time management tools like Toggl & Everhour, Dropbox, Vimeo, Zoom, Slack, and more to bug-tracking tools like Bugsnag, communication tools like Hangouts Chat & Intercom, or Google Calendar, ClickUp allows you to connect with pre-existing and customizable integrations to bring all functionalities your team needs.

Through simple integration with Zapier, you can access and automatically transfer data between applications through an extensive 1K+ app network.

You can bring all the features from your previous project management software through the automatic import feature. Select what task & user details you want to transfer from Asana through Asana Import, bring over all your contacts & attachments from Trello through Trello Import, and customize all your imports from Jira, Todoist, Basecamp, Wrike, and more.

Relationships & Collaboration

Through the ClickUp project management platform, you will gain the tools to create links between tasks and connect tasks to access related items. You can link clients to deals, customers to orders, users to bug reports, and everything in between.

Task dependencies are a type of ClickUp relationships that you can place between tasks & subtasks to organize your work. You can choose between “waiting on,” “blocking,” and “linked” dependencies to set a clear order of prioritized operations.

ClickUp enables you to add links between your documents and quickly access relevant ClickUp documents that you can connect to workflows and categorize for easy searchability. Like Google Docs, ClickUp provides collaboration documents that enable your team to collaborate in real-time.

You can check which teammates are working on a document and what changes are made, which makes it easy to exchange help & feedback.

Besides collaborating on and formatting documents, the project management tool allows you to embed bookmarks, add tables & roadmaps, tag members and assign action items, and generate trackable tasks.

For more advanced relationships, you can build lists of tasks and link them together to create an easily-accessible database, and track numbers & categories of task relationships and pull them from a table to quickly access related documents, tasks, and integrations through rollups.

You will always see which tasks and documents are related and mentioned with automatic links connecting the related tasks and docs.

Reporting & Goals

ClickUp is a project management platform that provides industry-leading reporting capabilities that enable you to gain more insight into team performance, allowing you to check how many tasks your team completed on a given day, week, or month, task statuses & time spent on each task, who is underperforming and who is overperforming, and measure your team's estimations and time needed to make future adjustments.

The tool allows you to hit your goals on predetermined timelines accurately, track progress using monetary, numerical, true/false, and task targets, and add tasks from different teams into a goal to create sprint targets. Creating folders allows you to organize your sprint cycles, weekly employee scorecards, and your team's OKRs. You can also track the progress of multiple related goals through folders by visualizing progress percentages across multiple goals in a single view.

If you link tasks or lists to a goal, ClickUp will track your progress automatically, allowing you to link all tasks in a sprint to a single goal. Track items that can break down into single units by creating numerical targets. The tool allows you to set monetary targets for your goals to track sales & revenue targets and use the true/false targets for simple objectives.

The platform provides the Pulse ClickApp, through which you can see high-level activity reports that display what teammates are online and their current tasks. You can choose which date to display data for and view when your team is the most active, how many users were online for each hour, and even show online guests.

Time Management

This project management software's robust time management functionality allows you to track your teammates' capacity and avoid overscheduling.

From adding notes to your time entries, applying labels & categorizing time spent on tasks, and tracking billable time for invoices to filtering, editing, and calculating combined time spent, ClickUp's time management engine has made it simple for you to track time, add notes, set estimates, import tracked time from other apps, and view precise reports.

With timesheets, you can view time tracked by day, week, or month and time entries for specific tasks. Sync time tracked from external apps like Toggl or Everhour.

Gain insight into how much time tasks take for each team member, filter your time entries, segment the billable from non-billable entries, and compare your team's current tracked time with time estimates.

Other Features

Google Calendar Synchronization

Google Calendars allow you to gain the ideal time view of all tasks through the ClickUp project management platform and oversee your task list for the day, week, or month.

You can manage your deadlines, timelines, and the overall schedule for all your tasks & projects, with the changes automatically updating in another platform once they are made in one.

Guests

In ClickUp, you can invite people from outside your team to join your workspace as a guest. Guests can access shared items, but you can allow certain guests to use specific features.

You can invite guests to individual dashboards, goals, and docs, allow them to use docs attached to tasks with permissions as they have with tasks, and allow the guests to access trash & restore the items they deleted.

Permissions

This safety-focused project management tool ensures you protect any sensitive information by setting permissions.

With permissions, you will determine what people are allowed and not allowed to access and do in the workspace.

There are four permission levels, and these include the view (read-only access to an item), comment (users can add & reply to comments for an item), edit (can make changes to an item and share it but can't delete items), and full (can create, edit, share, and delete items).

With custom permissions, you can configure the default permission settings for members, guests, and admins.

Webhooks

When you activate ClickUp's Webhooks-supported API, you can push messages between apps automatically and keep track of your workload with automated updates from ClickUp to your other apps.

Through Webhooks, you can subscribe to over 30 events connected to ClickUp's API. You will automatically be notified of your tasks, goals, and hierarchy changes.

Real-Life Customer Reviews of ClickUp

ClickUp Review #1

Jose J G. Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

“After I understood and teach my team how to deploy and integrate ClickUp into our business, it has been a great experience so far, not to mention the wonderful customer support from the ClickUp team. Also, they are releasing new great features every often that we immediately integrate into our workspaces. What I like about ClickUp is that is a very powerful tool that allows me and my team to track tasks, brainstorm ideas, create documentation, content calendars, and planning, share tasks and documents with clients, and many more features that we are still discovering every day.”

ClickUp Review #2

Tenny N, Leisure, Travel & Tourism, self-employed

“I am using ClickUP for all my projects at university. I see it significantly effective to manage tasks and really want my small company to install it but they said to consider. I also use it for personal purposes to create mutual projects with my partners. This app allows me to assign tasks to members in group project more effectively. Despite the usage of free trail, I think it's enough for university projects. It helps me follow up tasks done by memebers better and keep up with timing.”

ClickUp Review #3

Ranjit M. Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

“The ClickUp is a simple, powerful software to boost your productivity. It is free, cross-platform, and fast. They recently renewed their mobile applications to provide a great user experience. They constantly release new software updates and bug fixes. I personally use ClickUp for my tasks management and it is going really well so far!! I would recommend it to all people who are looking for task management and note-taking applications. I like ClickUp because it is feature-rich and free software! Being a software engineer, I always keep learning what's a new market. I use ClickUp for managing my tasks and taking notes. It provides a variety of apps ( known as ClickApps) that we can enable or disable as per our needs. You can create tasks, reminders, or events in ClickUp and add valuable information to it. You can also choose a different layout (Clean, Modern, or Simple) as per your need. The homepage in ClickUp automatically detects your priority tasks in different projects and arranges them in a single view to keep the user focused on the important tasks.”

FAQ

Getting Started with ClickUp as Your Project Management Software

Coming back to its unmatched flexibility, you will benefit greatly from choosing ClickUp as your project management solution as an owner of an established company, but also if you have a smaller team on a tight budget.

Moreover, ClickUp will be a great fit if you want more than project management. The software delivers top-tier CRM functionality and allows you to manage your projects without leaving the app and overcome the biggest project management challenges.

The free forever plan alone will enable you to manage your small projects effectively without needing to purchase higher-priced plans or integrate with external tools for extended functionality.

With the help of ClickUp, you can organize your tasks & projects, organize calendars, handle your workload optimally for all teammates, create product roadmaps & optimize marketing plans, establish supportive & constructive team collaboration, and exchange emails & categorize notes, and so much more.

Even if you want to subscribe to a paid tier, ClickUp starts at $5 per month, which is much cheaper than most other tools. If you want the most versatile project management solution at the most affordable price, try ClickUp today.

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