ClickUp is a powerful Work Management app. It sits between the power established players of Asana, Trello, Teamwork, Wrike, etc. that all focus on Task and Project Management, and the no-code apps like Notion and Airtable. Project management apps typically have a good emphasis on collaboration, Dashboards/team views, and often integrations. This means they have basics like good commenting, time tracking (often through good integrations), good calendar/timeline views, recurring tasks, notifications, etc. On the other side of the spectrum, no-code apps led by Notion, Airtable, Coda, and more have no concept of a "task" or "project" natively, but you can set those up to serve your team in a custom way. However, they are lacking in the "bells and whistle" features of collaboration, team views, etc. that are around the Asana's of the world.
ClickUp bridges many of the features in both groups, with:
- @mentioning between tasks with a reciprocal reference - does not exist in any of the Work Mgmt tools I mentioned (nor in the Nocode group either for that matter)
- Ability to set up a "simple" link between entities. You can't do this in the Work Mgmt tools. And ClickUp is going to improve this dramatically soon. So they are moving towards good NoCode functionality
- Great views including a unique, newly-released Mind Map, which takes into account relations and creates a live view - very unique. Granted, these are hierarchical relations for the moment, but they also will add their horizontal "simple" links as well - this is from their public Roadmap
- Mass Custom Field capability. So you can make your "tasks" become almost as generic as in the nocode tools, much moreso than in Wrike, Asana, etc.
As such, ClickUp well positioned between these two diverse, but potentially converging types of Work Management tools, as a "source of truth" app to keep teams from context switching.
A weak point in ClickUp right now is Project Management: There is a variety of ways to do this, via Lists, Folders, Goals, or even Docs, but none is built as robustly as Asana's or Wrike's Projects. Nor does any have the flexibility of a Nocode tool to simply create your own Project-type. For example if you want to talk about managing your Portfolio of projects in a doc in ClickUp, you can't link to any of those containers, only to Tasks.