ClickUp

What I like the most about ClickUp is that it gives a lot of freedom back to the user to set up a task management environment that resonates best with their needs and aptitudes. You can choose to organize your work in different kinds of views and formats such as kanban boards, lists, docs, whiteboards or timelines and then you can also set up and customize all kinds of fields to help you categorize, sort, colour-code and prioritize your tasks in any way you like. When it comes to collaboration, the capabilities are also pretty strong because the interaction with other users (such as assigning a new task, asking for an update, or creating dependencies between tasks) is fairly simple and it's further boosted by the smooth integration with Slack. The Brain capabilities (AI) also look really promising and can help you save tons of time from manual digging on tasks (e.g. you can ask for a summary or generation of action items) but I haven't been able to fully utilize it because it is limited under our current plan.

The tagline of the one tool to replace them all was appealing at the time. Easy to configure and use initially in both their free and then entry products as more users came on board.

There are a host of things to like, but if I had to pin it down to just three: The customizable nature of the platform - There is very little you can't achieve with some time and effort in ClickUp. This is especially apparent through the use of custom fields. It's no joke that you could literally build a task list or workflow for any type of project. The implementation of AI and Automation - It's easy to implement automation based on dates, tasks, or a number of other parameters. You can also use agentic AI (or just regular old AI) for generation of periodic reports. This makes repetitive processes a breeze. Custom dashboards and views - With ClickUp, it's possible to create dashboards based on nearly any parameter. There's also a large number of predesigned views that you can then further customize. This makes our weekly PM calls a breeze and has allowed us to easily ensure the resources we need are assigned to the necessary projects.

There is certainly one main disadvantage that we underestimated when signing up for our current plan. There were more than a handful of features that we examined during our trial that are capped for our current plan or even hidden under a more premium version. For instance, during our trial we were pretty enthusiastic about the possibility of collaborating using Whiteboards but it turns out that we can only save 10 of them at the same time. There are also a couple of automated actions that we would like to program based on conditional logic that would only be possible should we decide to upgrade in the near future.

Over time it has been overly complex with too many use cases. Their do everything strength became their weakness for us with increased complexity and what feels like disconnected features and workflows.

My biggest gripe is with the way user roles are assigned. To use the pre-developed 'Assigned' field, you have to be a user. This means you need to be a seat/license for everyone on the team, even if the use of ClickUp is just in assigning specific user's tasks and that user won't actually utilize the software itself (i.e., younger staff that are the doers and not the managers). We had to create a custom field instead, which restricts the ability to use email-based alerts or automations with those users.