Can ClickUp Really Do It All? – Full Review (2023)

Functionality

ClickUp is broken down into spaces, folders, and lists. Spaces would be what I consider the team. Inside the team, there are different projects that need completing, which are the folders. Inside the folders are the tasks. ClickUp refers to them as lists.

First, ClickUp offers its users a ton of views for different levels of users, while still displaying the same information. For example, inside of tasks there are several fields to like time tracking, due date, date creation information, comments and many more. Depending on the view, ClickUp will display the relevant information for that view.

Also available on ClickUp are templates. And I know this is pretty standard for a lot of software, but what I don’t see too often is a library this lucrative. The library also allows you to save custom templates, as you would expect. The integrations are also industry-leading, with over 1000 options. This translates to seamless integration with many of your standard programs.

For collaboration purposes, the app allows you to sync calendars with other team members and chat directly on the product. There are also integrations to send emails directly from tasks. There is a feature where you can set goals for the team or for yourself. This will work hand in hand with their milestones feature, where you can set up the option to lock tasks until another is completed if that task depends on it.

New to the project management tool is ClickUp AI. This is a writing assistant that can do things like summarizing tasks, task and subtask creation, meeting notes, and even basic things like blog writing and email writing.

On the time management side of things, the application allows you to track times for tasks. This could price useful for a smaller business using contract work and need a way to log hours. The time tracking can expand into the big picture of the project time spent. So if you are managing a project and notice that you are burning resources on one task, you may find it fit to move someone based on that observation. That can expand even further to reporting. You can develop a dashboard that live tracks everyone’s hours if that’s the kind of work you like to do.

As for services offered, ClickUp offers a library of videos, tons of free training, no shortage of documentation, and a promise of security and privacy.

Performance

ClickUp claims the uptime for the app has its highest levels in the last 12 months, and that’s something you can actively track on their website. As far as I can tell, that is true.

Adding tasks and going through different modules works almost instantly. Changing the status of the different tasks is simple and easy to accomplish. From my testing, it feels as though I can navigate essentially the entire website in what seems like 3 clicks.

User Interface

One of the most impressive things for me is the amount of views this application has. I’ve done various professional jobs from different angles of engineering, and I can confidently say that I can see the use in basically all of the views. Project lead that needs to monitor the workload for each employee? It does it. Are you a project manager that needs to focus on the schedule for the project? There’s a view for it. Want to embed onboarding videos or important tutorials for the project to have easy access to? You got it.

Navigation on the app is excellent, and as I stated earlier, it feels like you can get everywhere in a few clicks. There is a light and dark mode which I would consider standard at this point. You can also customize the entire theme so that your buttons and highlights can all be company colors.

The ability to customize the fields is a huge addition. You are able to adjust the type of field you want it to be, allowing ClickUp to have all of your needs. A category that you need that ClickUp doesn’t have by default? No worries- you can still have it all.

Innovation

When considering similar apps that I’ve used, the views available are a simple but powerful feature that some competitors lack.

If you come from a website building background, you may appreciate the ability of the app to use forward slash as a command in the fields to display an action menu. This feature, when perfected, will allow you to squeeze yet another inch out of your productivity’s potential.

Finally, being able to not only add custom fields to any level but customize what the custom field does is truly something a lot of competitors lack.

Versus The Field

There are a lot of competitors in this sector of project management tools, but the one I think at the top of my mind is monday.com. Both of the apps do similar things, but that could just be because there are only so many ways to task manage.

Integrations for both are plentiful, however, I feel ClickUp’s way of integrating services like Teams or Google Workspace makes it an asset. Competitively priced, you’ll find ClickUp’s free-to-use version is strikingly comparable to the paid variations of monday.com.

ClickUp’s free version also does something a lot of competitors don’t and that’s offering unlimited users. This is particularly impressive because their free version is loaded.

Another thing that ClickUp excels at is the option to customize fields at all levels of the hierarchy, and that is available on the free version. ClickUp allows the user to edit both embedded documents, which is another detail where the users won’t have to leave the app.

I think ClickUp would compliment a smaller business that may already use Microsoft Office or Google Workspace and want to create a centralized space for their teams.

Ease Of Use

Intuition when using the application is overall there. You will still need to learn the app, but that is pretty standard with any software. However, the learning curve will be short if you are coming from something like Microsoft Teams.

Likes And Dislikes

Comparing my knowledge of Microsoft Teams from my corporate career, there is nothing here that would turn me off of the app, but if I had to pick something, I’d say the automation could be more in-depth.

Inversely, I love the ease of use of the software. If you come from something like Teams, this will be self-explanatory, and you will see the value in this tool immediately.

At The End Of The Day…

This project management tool does exactly the things you’d be looking for. The functionality is top-tier, the speeds are fast, and the innovation is there and constantly improving. If you are a small business looking to maybe add contractors and you want a streamlined space in which you can manage the work, I see this as an asset for you. I also see this as a powerful tool for college students looking for a way to grab hold of their studies.