ClickUp Review: Is This Project Management Tool Worth It?

This ClickUp review will help you identify whether it is a good project management tool or not and how does it fare up against the competition?

Project management is SO important for keeping your business organized. In the hunt for a great project management tool for my business, I came across Clickup, and I must say I’m impressed. I tested all the fundamental aspects of what a great project management tool needs, like tasks, views, extra organizational features, and also stacked it up against the competition. And at last, I looked at how much value for the money it provided. 

What is ClickUp?

Clickup is a project management tool, but it’s so much more than that. It is a suite of productivity tools like note-taking, wikis and documents, task management, team collaboration, and more. It has integrations with hundreds of apps and has some of its own extra add-ons for you to add even more features to the platform. 

Features and Accessibility

Clickup is available as a web app that gets synced and saved automatically so that you can work on any device, anywhere. It also has downloadable apps for Windows, Mac (Both Intel and Apple Silicon), Linux, Android, and iOS. But something that surprised me was its extensions, including a web browser and email extensions, and even as an Alexa and Google Assistant app that works with voice commands.

Needless to say, it is available for every platform imaginable on this Earth. 

As for the features, here are some of the top ones:

1. Excellent organization in the form of Spaces, Folders, and Lists
2. 15+ different views, including boards, calendars, lists, mindmaps, Gantt charts, etc.
3. Many built-in add-ons to add extra features to the already feature-rich platform
4. Many templates and automation to save time
5. Integration with many apps like Google Drive, GitHub, Slack, OneDrive, Figma, Zapier, etc
6. Documents to write entire articles, take notes, and do lots more with collaboration features
7. Great reporting tools

There is an abundance of features; you can virtually do anything and everything in the app. I believe it offers the most features compared to other project management tools on the market.

Pricing

Let’s get the price out of the way before we deep dive into the app. Clickup has a free forever plan with most of the bells and whistles, and there is a single pricing tier that costs $5/member/month, making this app relatively cheap.

Update: Clickup recently added new pricing modules costing $9/month/member and $19/month/member/

The free forever plan is probably the most generous I have seen in any freemium app. You get everything. The only places where you are limited are storage, integrations, and reporting dashboards. 

If you are a one-man company, then this app is perfect for you. It is even great for teams with a good number of members if you don’t keep on uploading a lot of photos or stuff. 

Onboarding

Once you sign up with the app using your email and name, a series of video tutorials and articles will explain everything you need to know about how the app works. As a reward for watching the explainer videos, you can also get a $10 credit to spend on Clickup. Cool!

Apart from that, if you are switching from other tools like Asana, Jira, Monday, etc., then Clickup can automatically import your data from those apps and set it up correctly.

Ease of Use

Here’s what the interface of the app looks like:

There are many features, which make the app seem a bit clunky and filled up. In addition, it’s not overly easy to use. If you are a beginner, then you most probably won’t be able to find your way through the app. 

Apart from that, the app feels very organized, and it feels very modern and nothing from the 90s. So it’s an enjoyable experience. 

If you are new to project management tools and are scared of Clickup, don’t worry, as they include 24-hour free help and training to use the app. More on the support later. 

Once you get used to the app, it is going to be pretty straightforward. 

Tasks and Views

Once you sign up with Clickup, create a workspace and a space, then you can create tasks and view them in various ways. 

Creating tasks in Clickup is very easy, but it depends upon the type of view you are working in. For example, if you are using the board view, then you can create a task with the ‘+’ icon over here:

Or in a list view, that button is over here:

Once you create a task, you can edit and customize that to your heart’s content. 

Some of the items you can change are:

1. Changing status: Status is the stage your work is in. As a writer, I can use Clickup to manage my content ideas and move them into different stages like Writing, Editing, Brainstormed Ideas, Published, etc.…
2. Description Editing: You can add extra details to the task to make it clearer to your teammates. And even in the description, you can add fancy things like a Table of Contents, Tables, Bulleted Lists, Code, etc.…
3. Checklists and Subtasks: As the name suggests, you can associate some extra tasks with your work and create either a checklist for them or make them as a subtask. 
4. Attachments: This is pretty common, and you can add some images and videos to your task
5. Comments: Talk to your teammates about a specific task.
6. Timeline: To see even the most little change made to the task
7. Due Dates: Set start and end dates for your task so that you can be reminded about it

And there’s a lot more!

For the views, I prefer the Board view, but there are a ton of more to choose from.

Docs

As a writer and business owner, this feature interested me a lot.

The Docs feature was pretty good. It wasn’t as feature-rich as Google Docs or Word but had all the essentials plus a few extras. The interface is pretty easy to navigate and feels very clean. 

You can add headings, format your text, add checklists, quotes, code blocks, links, etc.

The best part is that you can select a specific block of text and make a task out of it in your space.

There are collaboration features present, and they are pretty standard. For example, you can enter comments. These can be general or relating to a specific piece of text. There are also a lot of comment editing options, and you can assign your comment to some other member. 

ClickApps

Clickup has 37 additional apps. The installation is super quick and easy. You just have to toggle a button. Some of the ClickApps are screen recording, automation, collaborative editing, emoji reactions, etc.

Once you download the apps, integrate seamlessly into the app so nicely that you won’t even feel as if they are addons. 

The apps are great, but I feel that there is room for even more apps to be increase the value of Clickup as a project management tool.

Support

With an app like Clickup, support is super important. Clickup has extensive documentation consisting of documents and videos, which solve most of the problems regarding the app. They also have an on-demand demo you can schedule to get to know the app better. 

There isn’t a live chat feature, but you can send your query through a form. The responses are pretty quick and come within a day.

Alternatives to Clickup

Google Sheets

If you are an absolute beginner and Clickup feels too intimidating, then a spreadsheet is great. Google sheets is a web-based app and comes with your Google account for free. It is not a proper project management tool but can function as one, provided you don’t want a lot of features. Google Sheets has excellent collaboration features built-in, so working with your teammates shouldn’t be a problem.

Asana

Asana is one of the most popular project management tools. It has a considerable amount of features and is very easy to use. Its interface feels more user-friendly to me, and it’s equal to Clickup in all other aspects. The only problem is that Asana doesn’t offer a generous free plan like Clickup, and a lot of the valuable features are behind a paywall.

Monday.com

Monday.com is quite similar to Clickup. It has most of the advanced features you would expect, and just like Clickup, it has its own library of extensions to add to the platform. It integrates with more apps than you’ll ever need and has a plethora of different views, dashboards, templates, and automation options to speed up your workflow. The team collaboration is pretty robust too. However, it doesn’t offer a lot in the free version compared to Clickup.

Trello

Trello is another alternative to ClickUp. It’s based around the principle of Kanban, that is: visualize your work and limit how much you work on at any given time.

It’s easy enough to learn and you can use Trello to collaborate with others or manage personal creative projects. The free version is also relatively powerful.

Find out more about personal kanban with Trello.

Security and Privacy

Security and Privacy of a project management tool are paramount as that is where you store your company’s critical upcoming projects and work. ClickUp leverages 256 Bit SSL, has 2-Factor Authentication, SSO (Single Sign-On), and is hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services), making it a secure app. 

All your data is private and can’t be accessed by others.