ClickUp Review 2025: The All-in-One Productivity Platform That Does Everything

ClickUp Just Raised the Stakes Again

In September 2024, ClickUp shipped version 3.0 of its AI suite, rebranded as ClickUp Brain, alongside a major overhaul of its dashboard system. The update arrived roughly two months after the company quietly hit $250 million in annual recurring revenue -- a number confirmed during a Product Hunt AMA by CEO Zeb Evans. For a platform that only launched in 2017, that trajectory is hard to ignore.

What makes the timing interesting is the broader market shift. Asana laid off about 100 employees in late 2023 and has since focused on enterprise accounts. Monday.com continues to push its "Work OS" positioning but leans heavily into CRM and marketing use cases. And Notion, once an indirect competitor, now directly overlaps with ClickUp in project management territory after rolling out its Projects feature. The result is a market where ClickUp's "do everything in one place" pitch has gone from aspirational to genuinely competitive.

We ran ClickUp as our team's primary workspace for four weeks -- twelve people, three active projects, and a fair amount of mess to organize. Here's what stood out, what frustrated us, and whether the platform lives up to its ambitions.

The Workspace Hierarchy -- Brilliant and Overwhelming

ClickUp organizes work into a five-level hierarchy: Workspaces, Spaces, Folders, Lists, and Tasks. In practice, it plays out like this: the Workspace is your entire organization, Spaces are departments or major project areas, Folders group related projects, Lists hold the actual tasks, and Tasks are where individual work items live with their subtasks, comments, and attachments.

On paper, the hierarchy makes sense. In reality, it took our team roughly a week and a half to agree on how to structure things -- and we're people who review software for a living. The flexibility is the culprit here. ClickUp lets you do basically anything with the hierarchy, which means there's no single "right way" to set it up. A marketing team might use Spaces for each client. An engineering team might prefer Spaces for each product with Folders for sprints. Neither is wrong. But the decision paralysis is real, especially for teams migrating from simpler tools like Trello.

That said, once the structure clicks (no pun intended), the system rewards the investment. Being able to view the same set of tasks across 15+ views -- Board, List, Gantt, Calendar, Timeline, Table, Workload, and more -- is genuinely powerful. Our project manager lived in Gantt view. Developers stuck to Board view. And the team lead toggled between the Dashboard and Workload views to keep tabs on capacity. Same underlying data, completely different lenses. No other tool in the category matches this level of view flexibility.

ClickUp Docs: Close, but Not Quite Notion

The built-in document editor has come a long way. You can create nested pages, embed live task lists, tag team members, and convert paragraphs into tasks. For meeting notes, project briefs, and quick internal docs, it works well enough.

The reality is, though, that it lacks the polish of dedicated tools. Formatting options feel limited compared to Notion. The editor occasionally hiccups with large documents -- we had a 40-page wiki-style doc that became noticeably sluggish after about 25 pages. And the template selection for Docs is thin compared to the task template library.

Where ClickUp Docs earns its keep is integration. A doc linked to a project automatically surfaces relevant tasks. Mention a task in a doc and it becomes a live link that updates with status changes. That kind of bi-directional connection between documentation and execution is something Notion and Google Docs simply cannot replicate without external integrations, and in practice it's surprisingly useful for keeping project context in one place.

Automations That Actually Save Time

The automation builder ships with over 100 pre-built templates. Status changes that re-assign tasks. Due date reminders that ping Slack. Tasks that auto-move between lists when a field value changes. Standard fare for project management tools in 2025, but ClickUp's implementation is better than average.

We built 23 custom automations during our four-week test run. The most useful one was simple: when a task moved to "Review" status, it automatically assigned the relevant reviewer based on the project's custom field, set a 48-hour due date, and posted a notification in the team's Slack channel. Setting that up took about ten minutes. It replaced a manual handoff that had been eating 20-30 minutes per day across the team.

The limits show up when you try to chain complex multi-step workflows or need conditional logic with more than basic branching. For those cases, you're still better off with Zapier or Make.com. But for automating the repetitive gruntwork within ClickUp itself -- assigning, notifying, moving, updating -- the built-in system pulls its weight.

ClickUp Brain: The AI Bet

ClickUp Brain is the platform's AI layer, and it threads through nearly every part of the application. It summarizes long task discussions, drafts document content, suggests subtask breakdowns, and tries to answer questions about your workspace data. The keyword here is "tries." When asked "What are the overdue tasks in the Q4 Marketing folder?", it returned accurate results about 80% of the time during our tests. The other 20% it either missed items or included tasks from the wrong list.

Content generation is serviceable for first drafts. You wouldn't publish what it writes without editing, but as a starting point for project descriptions or status updates, it cuts the blank-page problem. The summarization feature, though, is the genuine standout -- particularly for comment threads that have ballooned to 30+ messages. Instead of scrolling through two weeks of back-and-forth, a one-click summary gives you the essential context in seconds.

At $5 per member per month as an add-on, ClickUp Brain isn't cheap for large teams. A 50-person organization adds $250/month to the bill just for AI features. Whether that's worth it depends heavily on how much your team relies on in-platform communication. If comments and docs are where your team does its thinking, the summarization alone might justify the cost. If most real discussion happens in Slack, the ROI gets harder to argue.

Performance: The Elephant in the Workspace

There's no way around this: ClickUp can be slow. On large workspaces with thousands of tasks, switching between views takes a beat longer than it should. Loading a complex Dashboard with 10+ widgets requires patience. The mobile app, while functional, lags behind the web experience in both speed and feature parity.

The team has made progress -- the app is noticeably faster in late 2024 than it was a year ago. But when you compare the snappiness of Asana's interface or the fluid feel of Linear, ClickUp's extra fraction-of-a-second delays add up over a full workday. For power users who live in the app eight hours a day, these micro-frustrations accumulate.

Worth mentioning: the desktop app (Electron-based) performs marginally better than the browser version in our experience, and Chromium-based browsers handle it better than Firefox.

How Pricing Stacks Up

ClickUp's pricing tells a clear story: undercut the competition on per-user cost while packing more features into each tier. Here's how it plays out compared to rivals, using annual billing rates:

The Free Forever tier deserves a call-out. Unlimited tasks and members with no expiration is rare in this space. The 100MB storage cap is the real bottleneck, but for small teams doing lightweight task management, it's a legitimate option -- not just a trial in disguise.

The sweet spot for most teams lands on the Unlimited plan at $7/user/month. That's $3-4 less per user than Asana or Monday at similar feature levels, and it includes storage, Gantt charts, goals, and integrations that competitors gate behind higher tiers. For a 20-person team, that gap adds up to $720-$960 saved per year. Not trivial.

The Notification Problem

If there's a universal complaint about ClickUp, it's notifications. Out of the box, the platform will notify you about nearly everything: task assignments, status changes, comments, due dates, automation triggers, mentions, subtask updates. By the end of day two, half our team had notification fatigue. Three people independently described their ClickUp inbox as "unusable."

The tools to tame it exist. You can configure notification preferences per Space, mute specific types, and set "Do Not Disturb" hours. But the defaults are too aggressive, and the settings interface requires navigating multiple screens to get things dialed in. New users rarely bother, which means their first impression of ClickUp is often "why is this thing pinging me every five minutes?"

This is a solvable problem, and it's worth noting that ClickUp has acknowledged it publicly. But until the defaults change, onboarding guides for new teams should include a "fix your notifications" step on day one.

Whiteboards and Dashboards

The whiteboard feature is adequate. You get an infinite canvas, sticky notes, shapes, connectors, and the ability to convert elements into tasks. It's useful for quick brainstorms and sprint planning sessions. But side-by-side with Miro or FigJam, the drawing experience feels stiff, and the template library is thin. Teams already paying for a dedicated whiteboard tool probably won't switch.

Dashboards, on the other hand, got a significant upgrade in 2024. The new widget library includes sprint burndowns, time tracking summaries, workload charts, and custom field aggregations. Template variables let you build a single dashboard that filters by team, project, or time range. For project managers and team leads who need a consolidated view of what's happening across multiple projects, these dashboards are one of ClickUp's strongest features.

We built a "weekly pulse" dashboard during testing that showed overdue tasks, sprint velocity, and time logged per person. It replaced a manual report that someone had been assembling in a spreadsheet every Friday afternoon. That's the kind of win ClickUp delivers when it's configured well.

Who Should Pick ClickUp -- and Who Shouldn't

The recommendation depends less on company size and more on what you're trying to consolidate.

The Verdict