Office space is increasingly moving online thanks to effective collaboration tools for teams. More and more businesses now allow their employees to work from home. Team management software such as ClickUp makes it possible to work online in real-time, making remote work a better office alternative.
ClickUp is a great software for managing complex projects, but there are some features you can only find in ClickUp alternatives. Software like Trello, Monday, and Smartsheet have many options that might be better suited for your enterprise, so you might like them better.
Let’s look at ClickUp competitors and see if you can make the switch for a much better user experience.
ClickUp Competition: A Quick Comparison
Before we start with the nitty-gritty details, here’s a brief look at some of the best online management programs:
| ClickUp Alternatives | Monthly Payment Plans | Best For |
| Wrike | Free: Collaboration on limited active tasks Professional: $9.80 per use rBusiness: $24.80 per user Enterprise: Contact the support team. | Businesses of all sizes |
| Monday.com | Individual: Free Basic: $8 per seat Standard: $10 per seat Pro: $16 per seat Enterprise: Contact the sales team. | App integrations |
| Smartsheet | Pro: $7 per user Business: $25 per user Enterprise: Contact the sales team. | Workflows on spreadsheets |
| Asana | Basic: Free Premium: $10.99 per user Business: $24.99 per user Enterprise: Contact the sales department. | Flexible and adaptable project management |
| Trello | Free: Unlimited cards on limited boards Standard: $5 per user Premium: $10 per user Enterprise: $17.50 per user | Simple tasks with small to medium teams |
| Nifty | Free Starter: $39 per member Pro: $79 per member Business: $124 per memberUnlimited: $399 per member | Reducing project development cycles |
Best ClickUp Alternatives for 2022
Attention to detail is one of the best qualities you can find in employees. When it comes to selecting the best management software, your attention to detail will be put to the test. To help you out, let’s talk about the best alternatives to ClickUp and their key features.
1. Wrike
Online work management cannot proceed without a smooth workflow process. A management software plays a key role in this process, ensuring everyone is on the same page for each assignment.
Wrike does that in style, and that’s why it is one of the best ClickUp alternatives.
The platform has elegant designs with even better collaboration tools for teams. It ensures powerful automation of tasks that save time and cut the clutter to a minimum. Cross-departmental collaboration can’t get any easier than it is with Wrike.
Best Features of Wrike
There are many reasons corporations such as Google, Siemens, and Snowflake trust Wrike for their management tasks. It provides powerful tools for IT, marketing, project management, and customer services departments.
Let’s see which features distinguish Wrike xfrom other online management platforms and why many experts prefer it more than similar programs.
Cross-Tagging
Wrike provides an architecture to team members through cross-tagging. Here, participants can see tasks in the context of their specific projects as well as from a larger perspective.
It is especially useful when multiple departments are working on different workflow streams toward the same goal. That way, anyone can check out the activity and follow the process.
You can access a folder from multiple places by adding cross-tags. That folder will then appear in your relevant workstream without duplication. When you click that folder, you can see the project, task, and milestones associated with the folder’s content.
Proofing
Proofing in Wrike is a collaboration feature to add comments and share feedback with team members. It allows comments on documents, images, and videos at specific points to request editing or changing content.
You can also compare original and edited versions side-by-side to select the best image or video design. The editors or team leaders can then approve the changes on the spot, thus saving valuable time and effort.
What’s amazing is that you can also invite outsiders for comments or approvals through email. The software gives multiple options to control what and how much you want to share with external collaborators.
Gantt Charts
Microsoft Project is a popular project management software that allows tasks with timelines, which are highly effective in project planning. Like Microsoft Project, Wrike also has the same feature but with many more collaborative tools.
It lets users create tasks with simple drag-and-drop methods. You can also edit those tasks with the bulk rescheduling tool. Plus, you can create milestones to visualize and plan tasks, which are useful for progress monitoring and comparing results.
Users can link the tasks with dependencies. This feature reschedules all the tasks linked with dependencies when one date is changed. It is a vital tool for project planning and management.
Pricing Plans
Wrike.com offers a Free Plan for new startups, allowing them access to simple task management tools for collaboration. Here is a summary of the pricing plans offered by Wrike.com:
- Free: Collaboration on limited active tasks
- Professional: $9.80 per user per month
- Business: $24.80 per user per month
- Enterprise: Contact the support team
2. Monday.com
Project collaboration using online software requires instant communication, and Monday.com knows that best. It uses a Kanban development mechanism to enable high-level communication and team collaboration.
Kanban allows users to work on tasks by balancing workload with team capacity. It is an effective software system that helps boost the team’s creativity. Work tasks are spread out on a board, where members can see the progress of each at any time.
Best Features of Monday.com
Monday.com is one of the best management software for a reason. It provides unique features you cannot find in other options, including ClickUp, Nifty, and Wrike.
Some of these key features include data integration, a creative dashboard, automation tools, and connected apps. Let’s see the best features of Monday.com in detail.
Automation
Monday.com would not have been as popular as it is today had there been no automation. This feature makes teamwork a seamless operation.
Suppose you’re working on an article assigned to you by your content manager, and you have completed it. Once you mark the task complete, Monday.com can change its status, which every team member can see.
The software can also move it to a specific group you can identify in the settings. It can start the next task upon the arrival of the due date and can also send emails to team members.
The whole process becomes more streamlined, as you don’t have to do every task manually. The feature also allows you to create your own automation and choose folders and files for multiple actions.
Multiple Views
When you open Monday.com, you will immediately notice neatly organized menus, including a Kanban board, dashboard, Gantt chart, and timeline. These windows make handling complex tasks and projects easier and much more efficient.
You can take a bird’s eye view of the project and know whether everything is on track. Individually, these views give you details about tasks from different angles. Collectively, they give you control over the micromanagement of the project.
For example, charts help you visualize project progress relative to set goals and use color coding similar to the one used in Kanban view.
Therefore, both views represent different perspectives but with the same thematic visuals. The timeline also uses the same colors to show the current status of each task, along with its planned and finished dates.
Monday Apps
Most management programs are limited in their ability to perform specific tasks because they only contain a handful of commands. In comparison, Monday.com offers so much more, as you can install apps on the software from the Apps Marketplace.
These apps serve many purposes, including integration with other programs. Take, for example, the Time in Status app on Monday.com. It can help you track times for tasks in the Monday workflow. Another app, Microsoft Forms, allows you to embed MS forms seamlessly.
You can choose from categories such as software development, time management, integrations, productivity and efficiency, and many more. The possibilities are endless, as these apps are open source. This means any developer can make their app and introduce it on Monday.com’s platform.
Pricing Plans
There are one free and four paid plans that businesses can use depending on the number of team members.
- Individual: Free
- Basic: $8 per seat per month
- Standard: $10 per seat per month
- Pro: $16 per seat per month
- Enterprise: Contact the sales team.
3. Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a leading program in workflow management. It allows enterprises to plan, execute, and report a project at every scale. As you might have guessed from its name, it has a spreadsheet format.
The key features of Smartsheet include portfolio management, workflow management, a marketing calendar, and project collaboration. The software has different levels for each employee, which are all connected at the source.
Best Features of Smartsheet
Smartsheet is among the best platforms when it comes to cloud-based management and collaboration because of its creative features. It is a favorite of many Fortune 500 companies, which rely on its productive options to make their project management tasks effortless.
Let’s look at the prominent features of Smartsheet to see if it is the best fit for your business or not:
Customized Solutions
Smartsheet offers custom solutions to diverse organizations. Its clients include hospitals, multinational corporations, marketing companies, hotels, and even tourism enterprises.
Another great thing about Smartsheet is that it allows companies of all sizes to benefit from its features. From small startups to large corporations, there is something for everyone in this project management software.
Here are some of the fields Smartsheet works with and how it helps them manage their tasks effectively:
- Marketing: The software allows marketing teams to set a comprehensive strategy for a marketing campaign. What’s more, it lets users track how the project is doing in real time.
- IT and Ops: Smartsheet has dashboards for hardware and infrastructure, software development, data migration, third-party software updates, and portfolio updates.
- Construction: It has layouts and schedules for preconstruction, safety management, resource management, and field operations.
Customized Scales
Imagine you are the general manager of a company, and you want to see an overall picture of the team’s organizational goals on your desktop. From time to time, you also want to peek into tasks assigned to your project manager, designers, and developers.
A software that does both these tasks effectively will make your job easier, and that’s what Smartsheet.com does best. It provides a layout for employees at different levels so that they can concentrate on their tasks effectively.
For example, an operations executive will get high-level visibility to see the organizational progress for set goals and will, therefore, be able to make better strategic decisions.
On the other hand, a project manager will get a real-time view of all the ongoing projects and associated tasks, along with their progress. They will see the milestones and red flags even before they become major issues.
Digital Asset Management
Smartsheet, in collaboration with Brandfolder, offers a valuable digital asset manager. It helps teams from various industries manage content on a single platform. It provides end-to-end visibility of your content, creating a synergy between your content strategy and content delivery.
It also allows companies to bring all the collaborators on a single page through a centralized approach. The result is the synchronization of different stakeholders, all working towards a single goal.
Finally, the program has a mechanism for easy approvals of digital assets and fast delivery to customers. The editors can work in real-time with creators and, together, can make changes faster. The assets can then be published to Brandfolder immediately.
Pricing Plans
The program does not have a Free Version, but a free demo is offered for a limited time. It has three plans for businesses:
- Pro: $7 per user per month
- Business: $25 per user per month
- Enterprise: Contact the sales team.
4. Asana
Large corporations might need complex software, but if you are looking for a simple program for your small enterprise, Asana is a good option. Though it allows large-scale project management, and you can keep using it through expansion, its interface is minimalist and perfect for new businesses.
The interface allows multiple options, such as list view, timeline, and boards. Its range is also vast, so it works best for fields such as marketing, construction, operations, and for leaders.
Best Features of Asana
The online platform helps you stay organized as a team, where you can make plans, execute them, and communicate with your entire team in real time. Even better, it has multiple creative features that enable teams to perform these tasks without a scramble.
Workflow Builder
Asana recently introduced Workflow Builder to give organizations more control over workflow automation and customization. It enables enterprises to create seamless workflows based on their unique needs, helping teams perform much more efficiently.
You can create a visual tool to build a workflow based on your requirements and organizational structure. It also gives more control to team members, as they can proactively create tasks and set up processes to fill the gaps.
In short, it helps teams develop an effective project plan by perfecting the processes as the workflow moves forward.
Workflow Builder has many templates from which you can select the one that best suits your project’s needs. You can customize these templates so that you have more freedom to build the best project management coordination platform.
App Integrations
Many cloud-based project management programs offer app integrations. If so, what is so great about Asana?
One thing that distinguishes Asana’s app integration from other programs is creating apps of your own. It works well with hundreds of your favorite apps, such as Google Docs, Outlook, Salesforce, Zoom, and many more. If you cannot find one that solves your problem, you can use Asana’s API to build one for your unique needs.
Users can create apps and share them on the App Directory for millions of customers online. The development interface allows coding in cURL, Javascript, PHP, Node, and Python. These newly created apps can then easily integrate with the Asana platform.
Workload Management
The Asana Business Plan includes Workload, a project management tool that distributes work among teams in a rational manner. The purpose is to save time and energy without putting too much pressure on team members.
Workload ensures proper staffing for each project. Therefore, team members are neither overwhelmed nor underworked. The interface lets you view and manage who’s given how much workload through graphics, lines, and charts.
You can assign each task point based on time or difficulty and estimate the effort required by these tasks. These points will then show who is not working at full capacity and who has too much work to handle.
Suppose Person A has too many tasks; you can drag and drop one of their tasks to Person B, thus rebalancing the workload. The program will immediately let Person B know they have a new task to do.
Pricing Plans
Asana offers a free Basic Plan, but the real magic happens when you get a paid subscription.
- Basic: Free
- Premium: $10.99 per user per month
- Business: $24.99 per user per month
- Enterprise: Contact sales
5. Trello
Trello is one of the best yet simplest task management platforms that brings everything together on the Trello Board. It allows multiple cards on the same board, where team members can see tasks assigned to them with due dates.
Team members can check a card when they start a specific task and mark it complete once they are done with it. The next person on the team gets the notification and starts working on the rest of the task. That way, each team member contributes to the task until it’s completed.
Best Features of Trello
Engineers consider simplicity as the hallmark of great design, and Trello has integrated that philosophy into its software. There are many unique features in Trello. Let’s look at these features to see if it is the best ClickUp alternative for you or not:
PowerUps
Trello offers add-ons for increasing efficiency and performing a specific task, which are called PowerUps. These are apps you can add to Trello from its store.
Trello develops most of these apps itself, but users can also make and add theirs to Trello PowerUps. For example, you can add Google Chat PowerUp to get all the Trello comments and chats sent to your Google Chat. Similarly, you can add Google Drive PowerUp to access Drive from Trello cards.
Finance, analysis, and project management PowerUps are also available. These add-ons help your business achieve better collaboration, communication, and progress reporting.
Butler Automation
Automation in Trello does not require any coding, so you don’t have to be a programmer to set it up for your company. Trello automation, called Butler, is a built-in feature you can use on any card. As a result, you save a significant amount of your project management team’s time and effort.
You can use Butler to create powerful buttons, rules, and commands to automate both simple and complex tasks in minutes. For instance, you can set a rule to mark a due date complete when a task is done on a card. Another rule can move the same card to the next task category.
Templates
Trello templates are where things get interesting. If you are a marketing company, your working style and employee mindset will be completely different from a construction company. Using boring templates will not work, no matter how efficient they are.
Since Trello offers colorful and effective templates, you can enjoy creativity without compromising efficiency. There are dozens of templates for every industry, so you can select one or the other depending on your needs. You can also change themes from time to time to keep things interesting.
Pricing Plans
Below are the options in terms of free and paid Trello services:
- Free: Unlimited cards on limited boards
- Standard: $5 per user per month
- Premium: $10 per user per month
- Enterprise: $17.50 per user per month
6. Nifty
Nifty is one of the best project management platforms for small and medium-sized companies. The software allows organizations to work on project management, communications, and functions in one platform.
The idea behind Nifty is to reduce meeting hours that companies have traditionally used for status updates. These meetings are counterproductive when you can check the real-time progress of tasks and assess who’s performing their work with better efficiency.
Best Features of Nifty
There is something to Nifty that makes it a desirable option for companies such as IBM, Horizon, and Loreal. The software gives them a clear roadmap to accomplish a task from inception to completion, with effective reporting along the way.
Let’s look at some of the best features of Nifty to give you an idea if it’s the best choice for your organization or not:
Discussions
Nifty offers a free platform for companies to establish knowledge hubs and discussion channels that streamline communications. The purpose is to engage team members in a threadbare analysis and to brainstorm and generate the best ideas.
Teams can take these ideas further for developing complex projects, such as product development or event management. These are not simple messaging discussions but are designed to facilitate project collaboration.
Thus, you can turn a message into a task or a flowchart and invite all the relevant members to participate in it. The purpose is to convert discussion into actionable content that can help in achieving concrete goals.
Project Portfolios
Nifty has one of the best project portfolio management software. This feature is designed to organize projects on a single page, where you can assign tasks to team members.
It gives you control over the participation of members, so you can share information with your team as much as needed. These public or private projects allow you to invite a team member on a specific task and share relevant information with them privately.
Within a portfolio, you can assign project ownership to a specific employee, who will then handle it as a team lead. Automation in a portfolio is also present, which makes things easier for larger projects and saves time and valuable effort.
Time Tracking
Complex tasks and large projects make it difficult to track the progress of each employee and whether they are performing their tasks efficiently or not. Good thing, Nifty has high-quality time tracking options to give project managers more information about the team’s performance.
Time tracking is also useful for employees, allowing them to track their productivity and see where they can improve their performance.
In other words, Nifty gives you more control over time tracking data. As such, you can analyze a project by checking how much time each task took. This helps in future project planning, too.
Pricing Plans
Niftypm offers many of its services free of charge, so new businesses with limited budgets can benefit from this platform a great deal. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid service, here are its pricing plans:
- Free: Two active projects and 100MB space
- Starter: $39 per member per month (up to 10 members)
- Pro: $79 per member per month (up to 20 members)
- Business: $124 per member per month (up to 50 members)
- Unlimited: $399 per member per month (unlimited members)
What Are the Best ClickUp Alternatives?
Project management is increasingly becoming an online affair, especially years into the pandemic. Companies now prefer outsourcing, work-from-home setups, and virtual meetings. For such projects, there are many ClickUp alternatives available to help streamline the process, each with unique features and tools.
The best project management tool for your organization is the one that best suits your needs. If you’re heading a large team, you can use software like Monday or Asana. For smaller teams with simple tasks, Trello can be your best option.
You can also get premium features from the same software by choosing a pricing plan according to your organizational structure and task complexities.
ClickUp Competitors FAQs
Now that you know all about ClickUp competition, let’s look at some of the most commonly asked questions about ClickUp, project management, and cloud-based collaboration platforms:
1. What is online project management software?
An online project management program provides companies with a platform to coordinate their work in real-time. These programs have tools for communication, task management, progress reporting, and post-project analysis.
The business world is now connected worldwide, and companies are increasingly outsourcing their work to people from other countries. To coordinate such projects, online project management tools are a necessity.
2. Is ClickUp too complicated?
ClickUp has many complex features that individuals may find overwhelming. For example, creating a task requires practice and may be too complicated for some users. That said, large companies have complicated projects that require complex task creation, and ClickUp has worked for these companies.
Formal software training may be necessary for the entire staff; otherwise, some team members may make mistakes that impact the entire team’s performance. For these reasons, people look for alternatives to ClickUp.
3. Why do companies look for ClickUp alternatives?
ClickUp is a great software for big corporations and has many great features for project management, team collaboration, and real-time progress monitoring. However, there are some features that other programs offer that are absent in ClickUp.
For example, you will find that the time tracking and automation features of Monday.com are much better and are simpler to learn for everyone.
4. Is Monday better than Smartsheet?
Monday has a better user rating than Smartsheet on many software review forums, including G2, SoftwareAdvice, and Capterra. The program has made a name for itself in a short time, offering many features to customers.
Moreover, its automation tools are more powerful than many of its competitors. The software also has a better workflow management platform for large teams.
In comparison, Smartsheet has a more versatile layout and provides more options for in-app communications. It helps teams coordinate rapidly and is a great option for brainstorming. The software has the potential to completely replace traditional in-office status meetings.
5. Is Trello too simple for complex projects?
Trello seems too simple a platform to manage complex projects, as its interface only contains cards. Team members can assign themselves tasks, or a project manager can do so manually. As the complexity of tasks grows, there are not many tools available to manipulate.
Then again, the software does have some secret weapons that can change it completely. The Butler tool, for instance, is a highly competitive program that can transform your workload from cumbersome to simplified. One problem is that these powerful tools are only available when you get the paid plan.
