ClickUp Review
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- Date Established
- 2017
- Location
- Palo Alto, CA
Pros
- Cheap monthly cost
- Simple pricing plan
- Excellent customer support
- Modern user interface
Cons
- No detailed reporting
- Limited integrations
Overview
Like many of its competitors, ClickUp was born from a frustrated sense that modern project management solutions could not adequately meet the needs of the working men and women who relied on them to manage work. This frustration led Zeb Evans and Alex Yurkowski to try and build a platform that defied the conventions of the project management industry at large. That platform is ClickUp, and it was launched just two years ago in 2017.
Zeb, Alex, and the rest of the team talk a lot of trash about how good their product is (for a sample, just read through the company’s about us page), but by most accounts, the software lives up to those claims. ClickUp users seem impressed, pleased, and, in some cases, awed by the responsiveness of the team, which — for the time being, at least — has promised weekly updates and features based on customer feedback.
ClickUp is new, and, as you might expect, has some growing to do. Having said that, I found the program pretty remarkable. It is smooth, beautiful, and, most importantly, intuitive. While I don’t like making predictions that could come back to bite me, I feel pretty safe in saying that ClickUp is on its way to being a household name in this industry.
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 two simple pricing options:
Free Plan:
- 100 MB storage
- Unlimited projects
Business Plan:
- $5/user/month (when paid yearly)
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited projects
- Unlimited apps
ClickUp also offers a discount for educators and non-profits. I have to say, this level of simplicity in project management pricing is pretty refreshing. I am used to seeing three to five levels of pricing and features. With ClickUp, you either get the free version or the ‘everything’ version. Additionally, if you don’t want the yearly plan, the price nearly doubles to $9/user/month.
Need an alternative? Consider Redbooth:
Ease Of Use
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 team. You get to decide the name and add whatever members you like. Once this is done, you can create your first project. This is where things get interesting. ClickUp presents you with a couple of choices for how to organize your project. From the simplicity of Kanban, where tasks are “open,” “to-do,” or “closed,” to the much more complicated Content Creation or Scrum categories, there are options, all depending on whether you want to work in a traditional project management environment or an Agile one.
This, at once, feels refreshingly easy and comfortingly familiar. I wouldn’t call these categories “templates” exactly, since they don’t come pre-loaded with tasks, but they fulfill a similar function since they help pre-organize your projects for you. 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 a few “Categories” and “Sections.” This helps break your project down into manageable chunks and can be as simple or complicated as you like. In the words of the tutorial:
Categories and Sections are a better way of organizing tasks in your projects. Projects are broken down into Categories, which are divided into Sections, where tasks are located. Each task is placed into a Section.
Here are some of the examples given for how you might choose to arrange your categories and sections:
And with that, you are in!
You have a couple of options on how to view your categories, sections, and tasks: “Box”, “List”, and “Board” views. I personally find the board view to be the most intuitive of these choices, but you may find you prefer others. Whatever view you end up using the most, it is nice that there are a few options to customize your experience.
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!
Compare with Redbooth:
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 Postive 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 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. This 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. Here are the best integrations for ClickUp:
- Slack
- Github
- PomoDone
- Google Drive
- Outlook
- Alexa
- Dropbox
- Google Assistant
- Calendly
- Harvest
- Clockify
- Toggl
- Zapier
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.
Redbooth has advanced features and well-designed user interface at a low monthly cost:
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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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.