ClickUp is a cloud-based project management tool that effectively balances a range of features while ensuring affordability and user-friendliness. With collaboration and shared task-setting functions, teams benefit from status alerts and project updates that align workflows around shared goals. Moreover, ClickUp’s high level of customizability and visibility into every project and task make it one of the best project management tools available in the market today.
ClickUp vs. The Best Project Management Software: How Does It Stack Up in 2023?
ClickUp offers a unified platform that allows teams to manage everything in one place, from chat and tasks to documents and goals. With a range of productivity tools, customizable features, and versatility for businesses of any size and industry, ClickUp is one of our top choices for project management software. Before we dive into the specific reasons and features that make ClickUp stand out, we’ll also break down the other leading options on our list.
Monday.com is a highly versatile project management software package that offers tools to support nearly any department in your company. We consider it to be a top pick in the market. Take advantage of Monday.com’s 14-day free trial period by signing up today.
While Smartsheet’s interface may resemble a spreadsheet, it boasts a much higher degree of versatility and power, especially when it comes to customizing how you track your project’s progress. Sign up for Smartsheet today and take advantage of its 30-day free trial period.
Teamwork specializes in enhancing collaboration among team members while also improving visibility into workflow steps, as the name suggests. Sign up for one of Teamwork’s pricing tiers and enjoy a 30-day free trial period.
To learn more about our top picks, including ClickUp, you can read detailed reviews that cover each option’s strengths, weaknesses, and pricing. We also provide links to free trials, allowing you to test each option and determine which one is the best fit for your needs before making a commitment.
ClickUp: The Good and The Bad
One of ClickUp’s biggest advantages is its top-notch customization capabilities. With this online software solution, you can fully customize your projects to fit your workflow, business model, personal preferences, and any other requirements. This makes ClickUp an incredibly flexible solution, ideal for teams across various industries. For instance, the “Custom Fields” feature allows you to add all kinds of information to your views, while custom dashboards let you choose from over 50 widget variations to build your dashboard for high-level reporting and work overview. These features, along with many others, make ClickUp the best project management tool in our opinion.
Effortless Team Collaboration and Communication: Team collaboration and communication are essential for a project’s success, yet many businesses struggle to maintain these elements, particularly in remote work settings. ClickUp is an excellent solution that provides advanced features for small and large teams to streamline communication in a single platform while collaborating in real-time with anyone. ClickUp’s platform allows for sending and receiving emails, chatting with colleagues, or editing documents with other team members, no matter where they are located. With ClickUp, you can stay connected and up-to-date from anywhere, whether your team is office-based or working remotely, and eliminate bottlenecks and silos that hinder productivity. These capabilities make ClickUp an excellent project management tool for businesses of all sizes.
ClickUp offers affordable pricing without sacrificing functionality. You can try out the platform with its Free Forever Plan at no cost. If you need more features, you can opt for a paid plan that starts at just $5 per user per month. Additionally, ClickUp offers flexible pricing plans that allow you to choose the features you need, making it an excellent choice for both small businesses and growing enterprises. With its competitive pricing, ClickUp is an ideal solution for businesses looking for top-notch project management software without breaking the bank.
Real-Time Reporting Made Easy: ClickUp provides advanced reporting capabilities that allow you to create, customize, and pull reports effortlessly. You can gain valuable insights into your team’s performance, track project progress, and view individual team members’ schedules, including current projects, missed deadlines, and completed tasks. With over 50 customizable dashboard widgets, you can easily get a high-level overview of the project, and the reporting tools enable you to track the progress of each task and the project as a whole.
ClickUp offers more than 15 different views to choose from, giving you the freedom to view your projects, timelines, and team structures in whichever way you prefer. In addition to the standard views such as List, Box, Calendar, Board, and Gantt views, ClickUp also offers unique views like Mind Map (for visual planning and organizing), Workload (for visualizing team capacity and managing resources), and Activity view (for a consolidated view of all activities across locations, people, and project types). This versatility makes ClickUp an ideal choice for teams across various industries and needs.
ClickUp simplifies time management by providing flexible time tracking features that enable you to keep track of your work and enhance time management. The tool allows you to track time, set estimates, add notes, and view reports, helping you stay on top of your work hours. Additionally, you can mark billable time to determine how many hours should be billed on invoices and adjust your tracked time accordingly.
In today’s world, having access to project management software on-the-go is crucial. ClickUp understands this and provides a mobile app that is easy to use and allows users to stay productive no matter where they are. The app features an intuitive interface and user-friendly features, making it simple to create new tasks, update team members, and manage projects from your mobile device. With ClickUp’s mobile app, you can work, collaborate, and stay up-to-date anytime and anywhere.
What ClickUp Is Lacking
ClickUp’s users often express concern about the steeper learning curve associated with the platform. This may be due to the wide range of features available, which can be overwhelming, especially during the initial setup. ClickUp’s user interface also requires improvement, with small text sizes and faint colors that do not provide adequate contrast. Additionally, the extensive customization options may also feel daunting to some users. To make the most of the software’s flexibility, users must plan systematically for its implementation and use, which can be time-consuming and intimidating.
To be fair, ClickUp’s extensive features can be overwhelming for new users who may find it challenging to understand how to use the tool without proper guidance. The onboarding process is lengthy and requires users to enter a lot of information, which may deter some. However, given the many features available, it’s understandable that proper onboarding is necessary. It would be helpful to have an interactive walk-through or more hands-on approach to learning how to navigate the software and use its features. Once users become familiar with the platform, it becomes less daunting to use.
ClickUp offers advanced time tracking features for its users, but some of them are only available in the Business pricing tier or higher. If you want to track the time spent on specific tasks and mark them as billable hours, you’ll need to subscribe to the Business pricing tier or higher. Similarly, you can only add time entry descriptions and labels to particular tasks if you’re on the Business tier or higher.
ClickUp Pricing and Options
ClickUp has several pricing options to cater to the needs of all businesses. You can choose a plan that makes the most sense for your team.
The Free Forever plan is an excellent option for those who want to try out ClickUp without spending a penny. It is ideal for personal use and beginners who are new to project management. Despite being free, this plan still provides access to ClickUp’s range of powerful tools, including unlimited projects and users. However, the plan has a limited file storage of only 100MB.
The Unlimited plan, priced at only $5 per member per month, is an affordable option that provides access to all features available in the Free Forever plan, as well as advanced reporting, unlimited storage, and integrations. Additionally, users can set permissions to grant or restrict access to certain features and try out over 1,000 automations.
The Business plan, starting at $12 per member per month, offers unlimited access to almost all of ClickUp’s features. It provides enhanced security with advanced features like Google Sign-in and two-factor authentication, making it an ideal choice for larger businesses. Along with the standard features, the Business plan offers a resource management chart, turndown charts, KPI tracker, and a widget creator.
The Business Plus plan, which starts at $19 per user per month, is an excellent option for organizations with multiple teams. In addition to all the features available in the Business plan, this plan offers exclusive features like custom role creation, team sharing, priority support, admin training, and increased automation and API access.
The Enterprise plan is ClickUp’s highest-level plan, designed for large and high-end teams. To get a personalized quote for this plan, you need to contact ClickUp’s sales team. This plan offers all the features available in the Business Plus plan, and includes additional features like white labeling, Enterprise API, MSA and HIPAA compliance, Single Sign-on (SSO), and guided onboarding. With this plan, you will also be assigned a dedicated success manager, and receive free access to managed services, ensuring that you have access to top-notch support whenever you need it.
ClickUp Tasks
ClickUp provides an easy and efficient way to plan, organize, and collaborate on projects. Its highly customizable task management tool enables users to streamline their workflow and meet project deadlines. With over 35 ClickApps to choose from, you can tailor tasks and sub-tasks to fit your project’s specific needs. Collaborating with team members is made easy, with the ability to assign action items and share screen recordings.
ClickUp’s sub-task feature is particularly useful for complex projects, as it simplifies the process of understanding all the tasks associated with the project and how they relate to each other. The software also includes daily and weekly reminder options to ensure that important deadlines are never missed.
In addition, ClickUp offers automation features to save your team time during both the setup and tracking process. Automating certain tasks ensures that no important steps are overlooked or skipped.
ClickUp Docs
ClickUp offers a robust documentation tool that allows you to create visually appealing documents, wikis, and other resources. With its advanced formatting options, you can embed bookmarks, add tables and roadmaps, and tag and assign action items to team members for better collaboration. Plus, you can convert text into trackable tasks to ensure all deadlines are met.
The versatility of ClickUp’s Docs tool is impressive, as you can tailor your document design to your specific needs, from simple bullet lists to detailed knowledge base documents with multiple links. The tool is also easy to organize, allowing you to connect docs to workflows and categorize them for quick access and easy searchability.
With ClickUp’s security features, you can easily control access to documents. As the document creator or administrator, you can decide which team members can access or edit each document. Guests can be given access to some documents, while others can be made public.
ClickUp Goals
With ClickUp’s Goals tool, you can easily create trackable objectives for each project, complete with defined timelines, measurable targets, and automatic progress tracking. There are several ways to track progress, including monetary, numerical, true/false, and task targets. You can also create sprint targets by adding tasks from different teams into weekly sales goals or objectives.
The Goals tool provides you with the flexibility to organize your goals based on their relationships. For example, if you have related objectives, you can group them together in a folder, making it easier to track your progress towards achieving them. If your team has multiple weekly goals, place all of them in a single folder, and it’s easier to track your team’s progress toward reaching all of them as a group.
we highly recommend ClickUp as a project management solution. It offers a wide range of features and functionalities that are perfect for small teams and independent workers, but it also has the flexibility and scalability to meet the needs of larger enterprises. ClickUp is also competitively priced, allowing you to identify and remove bottlenecks while keeping projects and tasks on time.
Although ClickUp has a slightly steeper learning curve compared to its competitors, the tradeoff is that it provides more detailed project tracking. If you’re looking for a simpler tool that’s easier for your employees to master, there are other options available on our best project management software list.
Be sure to check out our list to find the best fit for your business needs and budget.