ClickUp Review
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- Date Established
- 2017
- Location
- Palo Alto, CA
Pros
- Low monthly cost
- Good value for price
- Excellent customer support
- Modern user interface
Cons
- No detailed reporting
- Moderate learning curve
ClickUp Project Management Overview
ClickUp is a highly rated project management app that has a low cost and a simple pricing plan. We like that the tool allows you to create any template you need to manage your team with plenty of flexibility to pivot as the project evolves. With a beautiful UI and plenty of features, we think ClickUp would be a great fit for a growing organization. But is the ClickUp project management app right for your business? Find out in this full ClickUp review.
Table of Contents
Web-Based Or On-Premise
ClickUp is web-based and requires no downloads to function properly on your computer.
Pricing
ClickUp has simple pricing options with a free trial available:
Free Plan:
- 100 MB storage
- Unlimited tasks
- Unlimited users
Unlimited Plan:
- $5/user/month (when paid yearly)
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited list, board, and calendar views
- Unlimited integrations
- Guests and permissions
- Goals, portfolios, and custom fields
Business Plan:
- $9/user/month (when paid annually)
- Everything in unlimited plus…
- 2FA and Google SSO
- Goal folders
- Custom exporting
- Private, protected, and default views
- All dashboard widgets
- Extra guests
- All automations
- Mind maps and timeline views
- Advanced time tracking
- Workload
Enterprise
- Contact sales for pricing
- Everything included in the Business plan plus…
- Single Sign-On (SSO)
- Contract Review & HIPAA
- Increased API Limits
- Dedicated success manager
- Advanced permissions
- Advanced workload
- Custom SAML
- Extra automations
- Custom onboarding
- Training program
- White labeling
Ease Of Use
Hierarchy image courtesy of Clickup 2020
Creating a new ClickUp account is as simple as entering your email address, name, and cell phone number. You will get an activation code texted to your phone. Once you enter the code, this screen greets you:
Before anything else, you need to create a Workspace. You get to decide the name and add whatever members you like. Once this is done, you can create your first Space. This is where things get interesting. ClickUp templates help you organize your project
Courtesy of ClickUp Website 2020
This, at once, feels refreshingly easy and comfortingly familiar. I love this setup, and I wish I had seen it more often across the software programs I have reviewed.
The last step before you are fully ready to start using ClickUp is to set up tasks. Tasks are actionable items that are trackable using statuses. You can also create subtasks within a task, which also has the same workflow elements, including multiple assignees.
And with that, you are in!
Overall, I found ClickUp extremely easy to use. The user interface, as I hope my screenshots communicate, is clean, slick, and a joy to use. Everything seems to be in the perfect place, and it feels like genuine care has gone into the design. Color me impressed!
Customer Service & Support
ClickUp has a decent contact us page, complete with several ways of getting directly in touch with the customer service people: email, phone, instant message, and more.
From that same page, you can reach the help guides and knowledge center (a collection of over 25 articles and videos documenting the inner workings of ClickUp). Helpfully organized into six categories from “General” to “Features” to “Integrations,” the knowledgebase is not as thorough as some I have seen but is certainly adequate for the software as it exists now.
Overall, I would say the customer service and support options for ClickUp are standard. They neither go above-and-beyond nor are they seriously lacking anything. However, the reports I have read indicate that the team in place behind these structures is excellent. As you can see in the Positive Reviews section below, customers are thrilled with the responsiveness of ClickUp’s customer service.
User Reviews
Negative Reviews & Complaints
From what I can tell, most complaints about ClickUp are due to the fact that this is a pretty new company with an equally new product. Here are some examples of common complaints:
Missing Gantt charts which I really need. They are integrating soon with a company that does them, but I need them ASAP!
They just simply don’t have everything I need at the moment. I see most everything on their roadmap so I’ll try to hold out for everything to be built.
I need templates and task dependencies. The team says they are on the way and I greatly look forward to it.
Missing detailed reporting, but after a brief conversation with their friendly customer service representative, it seems like they’re working on it for the next release.
From a design and function standpoint, everything is great. That being said, I wish they had scrum points and burndown charts.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
Most users seem extremely happy with ClickUp, and the software has 5 stars on both Capterra and FinancesOnline. Here are some of the reactions of satisfied customers:
Looks more like the future unlike everything else I have tried. This software has a great design and makes everything simple.
Learning and joining ClickUp was so easy. I chatted in to start and quickly received all the documentation I needed. Once starting my free trial I had everything I needed in the onboarding. When I had a few questions I spoke to customer care and they politely answered all my questions. I enjoy the look of ClickUp and have loved it so far!
This tool has most all of [the] needed features. They are very straight forward and pricing is affordable.
Every other tool seems to be lazy about what they need or don’t seem to listen to the customer. ClickUp adds a lot of the little things people have been asking for. The design and speed are also great.
Even while looking at the product, I was really impressed with how fast ClickUp got back to me. They also built out a feature I requested within a week! Design looks amazing and the tool is intuitive.
Features
ClickUp comes with a pretty robust list of features, with more joining the list fairly regularly. For a full list, feel free to check the website, but I have included an explanation of some of the most important here:
- Assignable Comments: Should you have a good brainstorm in the comments section of one of your tasks, you can quickly and easily turn those ideas into tasks themselves using the “assign” button. This is a great idea that could be extremely useful, especially if some of your employees are working remotely. On a similar note…
- Task Dependencies: In a useful addition, ClickUp allows you to set up cascading lists of tasks, showing in what order they need to be completed.
- Threaded Comments: In a move that takes its inspiration from social media sites, such as Reddit, ClickUp’s comments come in the form of threads, meaning they are much easier to navigate should long-winded conversations arise.
- Multiple Assignees: While this feature seems like it should be a no-brainer, it is one that I don’t see all that often in the world of project management. ClickUp is one of only a few that make this basic ability available.
- Reporting: ClickUp’s reporting remains relatively limited, allowing you to determine what percentage of a project is yet to be completed. It isn’t much, but it is better than nothing.
- Mentions: This feature is pretty useful should you need to bring in others from your company not already part of your team. You can add anyone with a ClickUp account from your company to your conversations, making collaboration more straightforward.
- Customizable: Just about everything in ClickUp is customizable, from the tasks, comments, sections, and categories, right down to the status toolbars that organize your projects.
Fortunately, even if you do not see your desired feature on this list, Clickup maintains a thorough “coming soon” schedule to let users know what will soon be added to the app.
Integrations
Since our initial review, ClickUp has greatly expanded the list of available integrations, to the point where it would be a little silly to include all of them here. We found nearly 90 native integrations in total. However, Zapier is on the list which gives you access to over 1000+ integrations without needing API documentation.
Additionally, you can build your own custom integrations and ClickUp apps with their public API. The limited integration was one of my biggest criticisms of the app at first, and I am happy to report that I consider the shortcoming very much redressed.
Security
I asked Chris Cunningham, ClickUp’s President of Client Success, about the security measures used by his company to keep the data of their customers safe. After all, the company website claims to be “serious about security & privacy,” but goes into no detail beyond that. Fortunately, Chris was able to shed some light on exactly what security measures are in place:
ClickUp’s infrastructure is hosted in a fully redundant, secured VPN environment, with access restricted to operations support staff only. This allows us to leverage complete firewall protection, private IP addresses, and other security features.
All ClickUp web application communications are encrypted over 256 bit SSL, which cannot be viewed by a third party and is the same level of encryption used by banks and financial institutions. ClickUp maintains ongoing Level 1 PCI compliance, abiding by stringent industry standards for storing, processing, and transmitting credit card information online. ClickUp actively monitors ongoing security, performance, and availability 24/7/365. We run automated security testing on an ongoing basis. We also contract a third party for penetration testing.
Chris added that ClickUp also uses Amazon Web Services for its data hosting.
Final Verdict
As I am sure you have gathered, I quite like ClickUp. This is an incredibly well-designed software that checks so many of the major “I can recommend this” boxes. Even better, over the last couple of years, the developers have addressed nearly all of my original criticisms (though there is still a conspicuous lack of Gantt charts). Despite that, I’m keeping my rating at 4.5 stars for now. The new reports are just a bit too simple, and I do want to see Gantt charts before bumping that up to an even 5.
On the whole, I do recommend ClickUp. The low price, responsive team, and beautiful UI have totally won me over. I highly encourage you to go check out the free trial and see if this will be as good a fit for you as I suspect it will be.
Wesley Kriz
Writing from the Pacific Northwest (read: the Best Coast), Wesley graduated from George Fox University in 2014 with a degree in History, then again from George Fox in 2016 with a Masters of Arts in Teaching. He has been writing about project management for 2 years, and keeps a running list of wacky software brand names; seriously, it's wild out there.
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Organization Name: Savran Saat
It’s fine for basic productivity tasks, but don’t expect to do anything too fancy without paying for premium. It’s a new tool so it’s still quite clunky – it’s frustratingly slow on mobile and on desktop the UI is a little janky sometimes.The thing that made me completely lose interest in ClickUp is the fact that they don’t let you delete your account. Again, warning: YOU CANNOT DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT. This means that they can have your email address forever. Unnecessarily aggressive tactics to keep accounts going when the product is probably fine for most – I would have kept them in mind for future projects if they’d behaved more responsibly.Also we tried to delete our account because we never used but they just freeze the account. They never pay us back even we never used.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Tried ClickUp but it is not intuitive and when I did figure out how to do things, I encountered the interface breaking a lot. Definitely can’t trust this platform to hold all my project details.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
When I first saw this post, I was excited about a new project management tool. After all, habits can’t be changed too easily. Tried to switch from Hitask to Clickup but didn’t like the interface and it offered much less than Hitask. So, I’m staying with Hitask for now. Look forward to your other reviews though. Thank you.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.