Pros & Cons
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- Packed with features for work management and simpler related tasks
- Intuitive interface
- Wide range of automation and integration options
- Seamless document collaboration
- Generous free plan
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- Variety of tools can be overwhelming
- Expensive add-ons
ClickUp Specs
| Android App | |
| API Available for Customers | |
| Automation | |
| Free Account Offered | |
| Gantt Charts | |
| Guest Accounts | |
| iOS App | |
| Number of Collaborators in Free Account | Unlimited |
| Pre-Built Templates | |
| Price Per Month | $7 per user per month, billed annually |
| Time Tracking |
ClickUp is a powerful work management app that brings together a wide range of organizational tools, robust automation capabilities, and an extensive suite of extra features, including deep integrations with popular apps, messaging, and virtual whiteboards. Its intuitive interface and generous free plan make it easy for individuals and teams to get started quickly. However, while ClickUp offers a lot, its numerous add-ons can get pricey, and some of its advanced features fall short of competing with online collaboration platforms. Its sheer breadth of tools can also feel overwhelming for new users. ClickUp is worth considering for teams that prioritize document collaboration, but Asana and Todoist offer more streamlined experiences and focused tools for managing work, so they remain our Editors’ Choice winners.
Project Management vs. Work Management
At PCMag, we distinguish between project management and work management software. Projects have start dates, end dates, and deliverables, while 'work' in this sense refers to a series of ongoing tasks. This distinction isn’t always crystal clear, however.
ClickUp, for example, can track hours worked, tasks, statuses, and more in its Spaces (where you manage most aspects), using a variety of visualizations, just like project management apps. Full-on project management apps, however, often go a lot further. Zoho Projects, for example, can generate in-depth reports on issues, tasks, time logs, and workloads using substantially more types of charts and graphs. ClickUp merely lets you add cards (customizable widgets) to a dashboard. Zoho Projects is thus better for complicated projects, such as the construction of a building, whereas ClickUp’s solution is more suitable for simpler operations, such as the day-to-day work of a marketing manager.
If you’re in the market for a dedicated project management app, you can choose among our Editors' Choice winners for that category: GanttPro for newcomers, Teamwork for client work, and Zoho Projects for small and growing teams.
Pricing: A Good Value, But Add-ons Are Expensive
ClickUp has four primary plans: Free Forever, Unlimited, Business, and Enterprise. The Unlimited and Business tiers have a 14-day trial, but if you're interested in the Enterprise level, you need to contact ClickUp’s sales department for a quote. I tested the Business plan for this review.
The Free Forever tier targets individuals, but it generously includes a calendar view, collaborative docs, a custom field manager, in-app video recording, kanban boards, sprint management, a single form, multi-factor authentication, unlimited members, unlimited tasks, 24/7 support, and 60MB of online storage. Paid plans focus on team management, include a variety of additional features, and introduce higher usage limits.
The Unlimited Plan ($7 per user per month, billed annually) adds unlimited chat messages, custom fields, folders and spaces, forms, Gantt charts, integrations, and storage. It also unlocks email management in ClickUp (if you use a supported provider), goals and portfolios, guests with permissions, native time tracking, support for up to three teams, and more.
The Business plan ($12 per user per month, billed annually) gives you unlimited activity views, dashboards, message history, mind maps, teams, timeline views, and whiteboards. It also features automated integrations (and more automations), Google SSO, private whiteboards, SMS multi-factor authentication, and more.
The Enterprise level (custom pricing) is for large teams. It includes features such as advanced permissions, access to ClickUp's API, HIPAA compliance, live onboarding, and more. If you run a business but don’t quite need everything in the Enterprise plan, you can opt for a special version of the Business plan: Business Plus. Business Plus ($19 per user per month) has all the features of Business, along with some from the Enterprise tier, such as admin training, custom branded forms, custom roles, and more. Note that the Business Plus plan isn't available on ClickUp’s main pricing page; you access it from within your billing settings in your account.
Beyond ClickUp’s plans, you can buy add-ons for more AI functionality. The AI Standard plan ($9 per user per month, billed annually) offers unlimited use of ClickUp’s Brain assistant, a large selection of models, project summaries and updates, web search and research, writing, and more. You also get limited access to AI agents, automation tools, and image generation. The AI Autopilot Bundle ($28 per user per month, billed annually) unlocks the unlimited use of AI automations, agents, dashboards, image generation, note-taking, and more. Discounts are frequently available.
Unlike the work management component of Monday.com, ClickUp doesn’t force you to sign up for a plan with an arbitrary team size, which is nice to see. The latter also has a more robust free plan and is slightly cheaper across the board, too. Asana and Trello, meanwhile, also have compelling free plans. ClickUp's Unlimited plan is cheaper than Asana's Starter tier ($10.99 per user per month, billed annually) and slightly more expensive than Trello's Standard version ($5 per user per month, billed annually). ClickUp is thus a decent value, so long as you don’t feel the need to shell out for add-ons.
Interface and Ease of Use: Many Elements and Tabs
You need to create an account first, regardless of whether you plan to use ClickUp for free or pay for it. It works best as a desktop app (macOS, Linux, and Windows) or on the web, but you can also download mobile apps for Android and iOS.
ClickUp has a clean and modern interface in which the sidebar and tabs do the heavy lifting. The always-present and customizable sidebar lets you quickly switch between dashboards, documents, forms, spaces, and whiteboards, while you can swap between different views of spaces via tabs. Whether you need to check in with your team members, consult your calendar, fill in a timesheet, record a screen clip, or see how close you are to accomplishing a goal, nothing in ClickUp is more than a click or two away.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)ClickUp’s home page gives you a bird's-eye view of your role in the organization. It shows your agenda, recent activity, relevant comments, priorities, and tasks alongside your inbox. You also get a personal list where you can add tasks. If you’re looking for progress tracking, head to the dashboard tab of the sidebar.
When you sign in for the first time, ClickUp walks you through the process of setting up your first space. Then, a helpful onboarding checklist appears at the bottom-right of your screen that asks you to complete a few introductory tasks, such as integrating apps, learning how to navigate ClickUp, talking to ClickUp’s AI assistant, and more. It provides videos showing how to do each.
I didn't have trouble navigating pages in ClickUp, but there are so many different elements that I regularly felt overwhelmed (especially at first). In other words, getting used to ClickUp will take some time. The app can seem more complicated than competitors, but that's mainly a function of how many features it offers. ClickUp’s documentation is extensive, though, and you can always query its AI Brain assistant with questions. All plan users have access to email support tickets, and paid subscribers can contact the company via a live support chat.
Managing Work: A Unique Structure
ClickUp’s hierarchical structure is slightly different from what you see in other work or project management apps. Your Workspace is at the top level, and everything else exists within the context of it. Workspaces house Spaces that contain your actual tasks, alongside dashboards, documents, folders, forms, lists, and whiteboards. You can access all the content in a particular space via a dedicated sidebar, or you can use the always-present, global sidebar to see the above across all the spaces within a workspace.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)Like Monday.com’s Boards, the core of a Space in ClickUp is a spreadsheet. You can add a variety of different views to Spaces, though, including activity, calendar, chat, dashboard, document, form, Gantt, kanban, list, map, mind map, table, team, timeline, whiteboard, and workload views. Views appear at the top of Space as different tabs you can flip between.
You can populate Spaces with tasks and add details to them via columns. For example, if you’re a writer working on a review, you can add a task for the review with category, due date, priority, status, and writer columns. Then, you can populate your task with subtasks, such as plan, write, edit, add art, and publish. As you work through your review, you can check off tasks as you complete them. Clicking through to a task (or subtask) opens up a panel where you can add attachments or make comments as necessary.
I found the process of adding tasks and filling them out with relevant information easy, but wrapping my head around the difference between Spaces and Workspaces, or a Space’s core spreadsheets and its different views, definitely gave me pause at first. It also wasn’t immediately clear why I could access, for example, documents in a Space but also from the sidebar. (I later understood that the sidebar houses documents across different Spaces.)
Dashboards are ClickUp’s main way of tracking progress. Here, you can see a variety of metrics on a Space (or multiple Spaces) across various cards. ClickUp’s dashboards are similar to Monday.com’s: You can set up cards to track task statuses, do calculations, store notes, show off recent activity, view total assigned tasks, and much more. I particularly enjoy the convenient filters you can engage to see only the metrics you’re interested in and the simple way to set up email reports on a custom schedule.
ClickUp offers time-tracking tools in its timesheet tab. You can manually add tasks to your timesheet and fill out how much time they took, as well as categorize tasks as billable or non-billable. Alternatively, you can track time within ClickUp itself. The simplest way is to simply toggle a timer as you work. Otherwise, you can pair a timer to a certain task or add notes and tags to it that explain what you spent time on. ClickUp gets the job done for basic time tracking tasks, but you should consider a dedicated service if your needs are more complex.
Beyond work management, ClickUp lets you collaborate with team members on whiteboards, create documents, make forms, and even record shareable clips. ClickUp’s document creation is, in particular, a highlight, thanks to its tight integration with the work management features. You can embed a task list in a document as an interactive table, including assignees, due dates, and priority status. It's possible to link each document to a specific task, making detailed references easy. Documents also offer embedded previews for popular services, such as Google Slides, Figma, Loom, YouTube, and more. Proofing is also available, so you can add and resolve comments across images, PDFs, and videos.
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These features work, and the document collaboration aspect could be useful if that's a key component of your business operations, but they aren't likely to replace dedicated services for most people. Google Docs, for example, has a cleaner interface and a deeper feature set outside of work management applications, as does Jotform for forms.
Permissions and Roles: Complicated and Powerful
ClickUp users can be guests or members, and the type of guest or member you are determines your level of access.
Guests are people who are not part of your organization and don’t use your organization’s email domain. With the Free Forever plan, guests have full access to anything you share with them, but you can’t adjust their permissions. On paid plans, you can specify permission-controlled guests and view-only guests. The former can have comment, edit (which doesn’t include deleting), full edit (with deletion), and view-only permissions. When you share a particular item or Space, you can choose from one of the above.
Members have separate permission options. Free Forever members get full access to everything in your Workspace, not just the items you share with them. Paid plan member options include limited view-only, limited, and full. Limited view-only members have permissions to the view-only items and Spaces you share with them. This role is good for somebody who works at your organization but doesn’t need edit access. Limited members can have comment, edit, full edit, and view-only permissions for each item or Space you share with them. Finally, full members, like Free Forever members, have full access to the Workspace.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)If you sign up for the Business tier (or higher), you can create custom roles to suit your team’s needs or tweak the permissions of guests and members across your account. The level of granularity here is impressive. Enterprise users can take permissions even further with advanced permissions that allow you to let users request access to items, make Spaces private by default, and more.
I appreciate having significant control over roles and permissions, but ClickUp doesn’t make it easy to figure out exactly which roles and permissions are available to you depending on your subscription. Gating much of that control behind certain subscription tiers further obfuscates what’s possible. ClickUp also lacks reassignment features, so you can’t automatically reassign tasks if someone is sick or priorities change.
Communication and Collaboration: Many Ways to Connect
ClickUp gives you a variety of ways to interact with coworkers. For one, it offers an entire chat system (you have to enable it manually). As you might expect, you can send messages to other team members, mentioning tasks, sharing audio and video clips, and more. For asynchronous communication, you can access your email from within ClickUp, as long as you activate that feature first, too. Currently, ClickUp supports Gmail, IMAP, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 accounts.
Beyond chat and email, you can comment directly on tasks. Just click on a task and write your comment in the comment panel. You have access to the same functionality in comments that you do in chats, and you can also send emails within a task. If you need to get in touch with someone about anything related to ClickUp, these tools work, but you likely won’t swap your team over from Slack or other dedicated communication apps, which have deeper functionality.
It's simple to create and share documents with team members, and multiple team members can work on a document at the same time. Similarly, ClickUp’s whiteboard functionality allows you to brainstorm or create flow charts, process charts, and more together as a team. Once again, the collaboration elements aren’t quite replacements for those you get in Google Docs or Lucidchart, but they save you from switching over to those other services for simpler tasks.
Integrations and Automation: A Substantial Variety
ClickUp offers integrations for over a thousand services. You can connect it with cloud storage providers like Google Drive, communication apps like Slack, and many others. In testing, I connected my ClickUp account to Google Calendar, which then appeared in my planner and was enabled for two-way sync. In other words, I could create and edit Google Calendar events right from within ClickUp. The whole process took just a few clicks to get going.
Third-party integrations are distinct from ClickApps, which are modular features of ClickUp itself that you can easily toggle. These include the aforementioned capabilities, such as chat and email, as well as AI features, automations, and more.
ClickUp has a built-in automation system that works both within your workspace and with outside tools. If you have used IFTTT or Zapier, you’ll understand how everything works quickly. At its most basic level, an automation is a little bit of code that says, "When X happens, do Y automatically." You choose the X (the trigger) and the Y (the action). For example, I created an automation that, when I add a new task, automatically updates a task’s assignee field to whoever created the task; this worked without issue.
You can create an automation from the top toolbar in any Space. ClickUp gives you a handy list of suggested automations, though you are free to start from scratch. You select a trigger, pair it with an action, and save some manual labor. When the action occurs (for example, when a task's status changes to ‘Under Review’), ClickUp automatically performs the follow-up action, which could be assigning the task to a particular manager. The number of automation executions you get depends on your plan.
AI: Lots of Features, But Will You Use Them?
ClickUp has a ton of AI functionality, and it’s available across all of ClickUp’s subscription tiers. For an extra fee, you can even expand the capabilities with add-ons. Usage limits and the available features differ depending on your subscription and whether you opt for any add-ons.
You can use ClickUp AI to generate text within documents or tasks. For example, I asked ClickUp to write an article about things to include in a startup pitch deck and to create an outline for selling soaps online. It handled both tasks with ease. Make sure to tweak the generated text for clarity and brevity, though. ClickUp AI lets you fine-tune generated text with different tones and styles, and you can have the AI edit text you already added somewhere in a Workspace. I used AI to summarize task descriptions, which takes only a click and works as expected.
(Credit: ClickUp/PCMag)However, generating text only scratches the surface of what you can do with AI in ClickUp. ClickUp’s AI assistant, Brain, is available at any time to answer questions, take actions for you, or even search across your Workspace. Alternatively, automations can incorporate AI functionality into "if this, then that" statements, which include everything from generating progress updates to translating text. Autopilot Agents are AI bots you can assign to do certain tasks automatically, such as analyzing meeting notes for action items and creating associated tasks. If you like, you can generate AI images from within ClickUp, and, with an add-on, even use your favorite models, such as Gemini 2.5, GPT-5, and Sonnet 4. AI features are only as competent as their underlying models, but in my testing, ClickUp’s AI largely works as advertised. It can get things wrong occasionally, just like dedicated chatbots. ClickUp’s AI documentation encompasses an overwhelming 42 articles at the time of writing, though, which demonstrates just how many AI features are available.
Although it’s impossible to deny that ClickUp’s robust AI feature set is impressive, you might not be able to successfully leverage it. If your business plans frequently fall through the cracks, the Autopilot Agent could be helpful. But if your team tends to be on top of things, the AI might not get much use. If you work in a creative field and regularly need a quick way to visualize something, the AI image generation features might be helpful. But many groups won't find much use for this capability. Most importantly, you need to consider whether you would be better off using a dedicated chatbot for your AI needs.
I suggest reading through some of ClickUp's AI features before you sign up so you can decide if the tasks you plan to use ClickUp for will benefit from it.
Is ClickUp Safe to Use?
I didn't notice any red flags in ClickUp’s privacy policy, but it does collect a variety of information, including both non-personally identifiable and personally identifiable information. This encompasses everything you input into ClickUp, such as the people you work with, the tasks you create, and the things you search for, along with information about the devices (or browsers) you use.
ClickUp promises not to sell any of your data and only “collect and process your personal data in accordance with applicable data protection and privacy laws.” You can opt out of the collection of a variety of information, but ClickUp does note that its platform may become ineffective after doing so, so realistically, you probably won't.
While ClickUp’s approach to data collection and user privacy isn’t quite as comprehensive as Monday.com’s, it’s fairly standard, and ClickUp hasn’t experienced any major hacks or leaks in recent memory. ClickUp also provides a variety of ways to secure your account, including multi-factor authentication and single sign-on.
Khamosh Pathak contributed to this review.