ClickUp review: A project manager to replace them all?
ClickUp claims that it can do everything you need – while that might be wishful thinking, there's no denying its power and versatility
Pros
- Generous free plan
- A sensible spread of pricing tiers
- Versatile functionality
Cons
- Odd interface quirks
- Gantt chart view is too restricted
ClickUp is a relative newcomer but has lofty ambitions, claiming it can replace all of your other project management apps. That’s definitely marketing hyperbole, but it certainly doesn’t detract from what’s on offer here: a remarkable project management tool that impressed us in almost every area.
ClickUp review: What do you get for the money?
ClickUp’s main strength is the breadth of its plans. Unlike most of its competitors, ClickUp actually has a plan for everybody. First is the generous free plan, which offers unlimited use of most basic functions to as many people as you’d like to invite. This makes ClickUp as good as Trello for allowing large teams to work together for free.
That said, you’ll likely quickly run into the many caps ClickUp has put in place, such as only being allowed to use a Gantt chart 100 times. Thankfully, removing these restrictions and signing on to the aptly named Unlimited plan is pretty cheap, costing only £4 per person per month.
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We like how ClickUp has this intermediate tier and wish more project-management solutions would follow suit. These small, incremental steps between plans make it very easy to scale up operations for your team, without breaking the bank. Besides removing these caps, the Unlimited plan also offers interesting extras, such as Agile support and the ability to integrate forms.
One step up we find the Business plan, which at £10 per user per month is more than double the price, but offers an equivalent increase in usability. Business offers extra functionality such as time-tracking, timelines, mind maps and a host of other features. However, we have a suspicion that most of these extras won’t be needed by most companies, as reasonable as the price may be.
Finally we have the Business Plus plan, which lands at £16 per user per month. Compared to other advanced plans, such as those offered by Monday.com, it’s pretty cheap, but has a different feature set on offer. It mainly focuses on even greater flexibility, letting you customise users’ permissions and track subtasks across multiple boards, to name but two.
ClickUp review: What’s it like to use?
The overall ClickUp experience is best described as smooth. It’s clear the company’s designers really thought about how it’s all supposed to work, and it shows from the moment you first start ClickUp.
All you need to do is enter your details, walk through a questionnaire asking what you’ll be using it for and that’s it, you’re ready to go. You’ll be directed to your first project, which also serves as your tutorial.
A few project management tools have opted for this approach, where your tutorial is inspecting tasks and clicking them away. It’s great for people who have rarely, if ever, used this type of software before. If you’re an old hand, you may find yourself a little annoyed at having to click everything away before you can get started.
As with a lot of project management software, the list view is the nerve centre of ClickUp. But unlike many competitors, you don’t have a choice in the matter: it’s not like Asana, which lets you pick the default view you prefer.
The list view is pretty good, though. We like how you can assign colours to every task type, so you can see at a glance where a task is in the process. It also applies to subtasks, so if a subtask hasn’t been started but its parent has, they’ll have different colours.
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ClickUp does a fine job of showing subtasks in the list view. Only Wrike does it as well, and it’s miles ahead of Smartsheet, which jumbles them in with regular tasks.
We had a similarly positive experience with ClickUp’s board, which is easy to use and puts all the information you could need at-a-glance on the front of the card. It also lets you either expand or collapse subtasks, which is something we wish more project management tools would do.
This functionality extends to the Gantt view, which lets you decide whether or not you want subtasks to show up. Nevertheless, the Gantt chart disappoints. It’s small and won’t let you see more than a week at a time. If tracking dependencies is a priority for you, ClickUp may not be the best choice.
We definitely can’t fault the massive amount of detail you can add to tasks and their cards, though. By clicking on a task, you get to use one of the most thorough systems we’ve seen. There are fields for comments, attachments, subtasks and more.
ClickUp review: Are there other useful features?
Besides the basics, ClickUp has some pretty nifty extras, some of which are quite rare. These include mind maps, which let you freely associate concepts and have become increasingly popular among project managers, thanks to their organic flow.
Slightly less esoteric are things such as timelines, workload management and handy Agile tools (though it’s no Jira), all of which make ClickUp extremely flexible. ClickUp is also one of the few project management tools that has time-tracking built-in, making it a suitable choice for anybody that bills by the hour.
ClickUp review: Should you sign up?
Though ClickUp likely won’t replace all of your other business-oriented apps, there’s no denying that it’s a powerful project-management tool that can get a lot done. If you’d like to try it out, it comes with a free 30-day trial; chances are, you’ll sign up right after.