Hello, all. I would like to introduce you to ClickUp, a completely free productivity management tool for all your current and future projects. Development teams, personal projects and even non-development activities such as marketing can be hosted and managed within ClickUp easily. I like to think of ClickUp as a better Trello.
I would like to say firsthand that as a user of ClickUp, this tool better suits my needs than Trello. I may still use Trello on occasion for some personal tracking and such, but otherwise I have plans to completely abandon Trello-based management and switch over to ClickUp.
It’d be much better to experience ClickUp and play around with it on your own time, so I’ll just talk briefly about what it is and why I’ve decided to share it here. I will be using Trello as an opposing example for showing why ClickUp has worked better for me.
What is ClickUp?
ClickUp is a free management tool that you can use for your projects. When I say free, I don’t mean that you can just start an account and have access to limited features - ClickUp has an abundance of features available to free plans for a wide variety of usage. Free plans are not trial periods, they are full plans packed with useful features. Paid plans (per team) contain very minimal gains that the occasional team may need to go above and beyond, such as:
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Unlimited storage (file attachments)
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More cross-platform integrations (Google Drive, DropBox, GitHub, etc)
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Full reporting access (Worked on, team points, who’s behind, time tracked and time estimated)
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Unlimited features (free plans have 100 uses of certain features, e.g. custom fields)
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Permission access (viewing, commenting, editing - defaults to edit on free)
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Two-Factor Authentication (somewhat of a bummer that payment is required to use this)
Sounds like Trello though. Why not use that?
Trello is a very limited platform where you have single-layer access. You create a team, you create a board in that team and that’s about it. Members are either admins, members, commenters or nothing. There are two paid plans; Gold and Business Class. Even then, you are very limited to what you can do. Gold offers very little expansion to a free plan and Business Class doesn’t quite suffice for teams either.
As for Trello powerups and features within plans, let’s compare them to ClickUp.
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Trello Free allows you one powerup per board, three with Gold, unlimited with Business Class. ClickUp Free allows you to use six (or more, haven’t checked) extensions and unlimited extensions with all paid plans.
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Trello Business Class allows you to view activity across boards. ClickUp allows you to view activity across workspaces and projects, regardless of the plan you’re using. Paid plans give you more tools to do precision inspection of space and project activities via the Reporting menu.
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Trello Business Class allows you to create collections of boards for organisation. ClickUp FREE will allow you to do the same, in a much more organised fashion.
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Trello Business Class: You get to create a team and within that team are several boards without much coherent organisation. The collections feature allows you to associate boards and create collections of boards to give further organisation to that mess.
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ClickUp All Plans: You get to create a team, to which you can also create multiple spaces in. Each of these spaces can support a different topic (Development, Marketing, Corporate Plans, Community Engagement, etc). This is already organised in itself without needing to pay or do anything extraneous. Then, even more organisation! You can create projects and lists of tasks for those projects. Even more, you can view the tasks for either a single project or all projects in a list view or Trello-like board view!
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When you talk about ClickUp, you mention “spaces” and “projects”. What do you mean?
Ah, the best part of a ClickUp organisation. If we’re going to compare the two, think of it like this:
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Trello cards are tasks in ClickUp, except ClickUp tasks have more to offer. Instead of just checklists, you can have nested checklists and subtasks (subcards in Trello terms, though Trello isn’t as cool to have those).
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Trello lists are task statuses in ClickUp, except ClickUp task statuses are cooler and have much more organisational use than lists or cards with labels. You can display statuses in a list view or a Trello-like board view. You can change task status (list) colours, names and perform actions on parts of an entire list.
- A note on labels: Trello labels are like tags in ClickUp, except you have access to an entire colour pallette instead of ~9 basic colours with Trello. Once you’ve organised your tasks into various statuses, you can even further organise them with tags. The amount of organisation ClickUp offers you is crazy.
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Trello boards are lists and projects in ClickUp. Lists are part of projects that contain sets of tasks to be handled, while projects contain those lists. Projects can have many lists and you can view the tasks of all lists or isolated lists. This allows you to divide projects up into different subjects.
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Trello teams are spaces and teams in ClickUp. Spaces can be used to split up topics. Like, you can have a Development space containing projects related to development and a Marketing space that allows members of your Marketing team to handle tasks. Each space can support different task statuses for projects and can be assigned to varying members of a team. Teams are like Trello teams, except they contain all your spaces and such in one convenient place.
Can we see some examples to better understand the difference?
Of course! I will show an example of two different development boards, one in Trello and one in ClickUp. A lot of details are omitted from both boards for obvious reasons, but there’s just enough to show you each of them at work.
Keep in mind that these are all real boards used in active projects I am working on. They are not examples from the ClickUp team, nor are they boards I created off the fly to demonstrate their usefulness. I have used them both.
Feel free to drop me a response if you have any comments or questions about ClickUp or Trello, I’d be happy to answer them to the best of my ability. I’ve done what I could to showcase ClickUp hopefully enough to entice you to give it a try. 
It may require some playing around-with in the beginning, but once you learn how to get around a bit after some time using it, it comes very naturally. I already have three ClickUp teams running at the moment and it’s been less than three months since I first started using it (one I’m a member of a fairly large team, the other two are personal teams).
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. And BTW, 2.0 is only available to 5,000 teams right now. It will fully release some time in July.
