Teamwork vs ClickUp: Which One Is Best in 2024?

A screenshot of a project management software showing task lists and project timelines, illustrating the interface of Productive for comparing teamwork vs ClickUp.

If you’re looking for some of the best project management tools, you’re in the right place.

Teamwork vs ClickUp are both fair options for supporting project managers and their teams with day-to-day management. However, there are some things these tools could be doing better.

We’ll be discussing their benefits and downsides and taking a look at some user reviews to help you make the right choice.

To spice things up, we’re also introducing an interesting third alternative. Productive is an all-in-one PSA platform that can be the ultimate solution for agencies, with everything from resource management to robust financials gathered in a single platform.

Keep reading to learn more!

Teamwork vs ClickUp: Key Takeaways

A screenshot of a project management software comparison table showing Monday, Notion, and Productive with features such as project management, documentation, resource planning, budgeting, and free version availability, for comparing teamwork vs ClickUp.A screenshot of a project management software comparison table showing Monday, Notion, and Productive with features such as project management, documentation, resource planning, budgeting, and free version availability, for comparing teamwork vs ClickUp.


Check out our full feature-by-feature breakdown

  • Teamwork is a project management software with comprehensive features for team leaders and teams of all sizes. While there’s a fair range of features for managing the daily agency process, some of its biggest flaws include underdeveloped budgeting and reporting.
  • ClickUp is a good option for comprehensive project management, with a fair amount of customization options. However, some notable downsides include a lack of features for handling financials and issues with usability (bugs and performance issues).
  • A third alternative is Productive, an end-to-end platform for agency management. Compared to both Teamwork and ClickUp, Productive offers the most powerful budgeting and reporting solutions, making it a great pick for agencies with a growth mindset. While there is no free version, you can check Productive out with a 14-day free trial now.

Businesses Choose Productive

Productive is a powerful project management tool that helps business leaders manage their agency, from collaboration tools to financials.

Book a demo

Teamwork – A Solid Tool for Comprehensive Process Support

Teamwork is a project planning management software with some advanced features for handling your overall business operations.

A screenshot of a project management software showing task boards with "To Do," "In Progress," and "Code Review" columns, highlighting various tasks related to space travel and Mars office projects, for comparing teamwork vs ClickUp.


Teamwork supports simple and complex client projects

Teamwork features:

  • Various project dashboards, including Kanban boards and Gantt charts
  • Tasks management with subtasks and custom fields
  • Time tracking with billable hours management and budgeting
  • Basic resourcing and workload management
  • Integrated docs and workflow automation

Pros & Cons (With User Reviews)

Users usually enjoy the fact that Teamwork allows them to have more complete control over their business processes. However, this also comes with its downsides:

I use Teamwork projects and there’s a lot of things I love about it. The biggest one being just how robust it is. My only complaint with it is that’s it’s not very visually appealing. It’s also a little pricey. I will also say Asana is way more user friendly, while Teamwork took me a while to get the hang of.

Source: Paraphrased from Reddit

You can check out our Asana vs. Monday comparison if you want to find some more streamlined solutions for projects and tasks.

The most common downsides mentioned by Teamwork users include the user interface, which many find overwhelming and difficult to learn. Some state that the onboarding experience and customer service could be more efficient, though other reviewers have reported positive interactions with Teamwork’s support team (so take this with a grain of salt).

Why Consider an Alternative

While Teamwork is more comprehensive than ClickUp, it still lacks certain features in comparison to a comprehensive project management platform like Productive.

For example, there is no integrated time-off management, which can impact the accuracy of your employee availability management and resource scheduling. Additionally:

  • there’s no way to add non-billable expenses to your budgets
  • there are no to-dos for managing your task dependencies
  • time entries cannot be approved individually, only in bulk (as part of a timesheet)

Finally, a G2 review states that: “The ability to establish a set of permissions for each position or project type would be useful”.

For example, Productive also covers this with its Permission Builder, which allows users to set up custom roles and permissions to control who can see and do what across the platform.


USE PREBUILT SETS OR CREATE CUSTOM PERMISSIONS WITH PRODUCTIVE’S PERMISSION BUILDER

We have a comparison between Teamwork and some of the most popular Teamwork.com alternatives, so check out that article to learn more.

ClickUp – A Good Tool for Collaboration and Tasks

ClickUp is a solid tool for managing your task lists, creating templates for projects, and monitoring progress on active projects.

A screenshot of a project management software displaying a "Release Project" with tasks categorized under "Issues Found" and "Review," showing details like assignee, due date, stage, and priority, for comparing teamwork vs ClickUp.


Switch from ClickUp’s multiple dashboard views to find your ideal workspace

ClickUp Features:

  • A variety of project views, including timeline, Gantt, board, calendar, and more
  • Templates for projects, tasks, and docs
  • Integrated time management with a timer and manual entry
  • Custom dashboards with widgets for tasks, time tracking, progress status, and more
  • A workload view for visualizing team capacity

Pros & Cons (With User Reviews)

One of the biggest benefits of ClickUp is its customizability — if you’re working in a business with very specific workflows that change from project to project, this might appeal to you especially. Additionally, ClickUp can also be used outside of professional services agencies for more generalized work management.

ClickUp’s formatting allows you to build out a totally organized and customized platform for your specific workplace and field of work.

Source: G2

Some specific features, such as sprint management and agile reporting, can also appeal to development companies (though consider whether Jira is the better choice for that particular niche).

By far, the most commonly reported downside of ClickUp relates to its performance.

Although the devs are rolling out ClickUp 3.0, touted to be an improved version of the platform, certain users report that issues are still pervasive: “The improvement points for ClickUp are still related to performance, as even after the update to version 3.0, I still encounter issues and instabilities” (G2).

Alongside that, some have been waiting to be accepted onto the 3.0 version fo a while.

Why Consider an Alternative

Barring issues with performance and user-friendliness, agencies interested in a true end-to-end platform might find ClickUp disappointing. The lack of integrated budgeting and invoicing affects many other features on the platform, such as resource allocation and reporting.

At its heart, I can appreciate what ClickUp is trying to do, but at the end of the day, the continuous performance issues have been beyond frustrating (…) All that said, the main reason for us leaving, is its lack of meaningful resource management features.

Compared to Teamwork, ClickUp features are more limited, outside of its solid task management tools and core project management tools. What is there, such as the workload view for resource management, is also handled by more robust replacements to ClickUp.

For example, Productive’s Workload view helps managers visualize and manage task distribution across projects, with visual capacity indicators and comprehensive availability insights (including weekends, national holidays, and personal time off).

This feature is separate from resourcing, which you set up to add a financial component to your planning (more on that in Productive pros&cons).


BALANCE EMPLOYEE WORKLOADS WITH Productive’s Workload view

Simply put, by using ClickUp, you’re not getting all of the support and data you could on a comparable solution. For more info, you can also check out our exhaustive resource on Trello vs Asana vs Monday vs ClickUp.

Productive – An End-to-End Platform for Professional Services

Productive is a comprehensive platform for agency management. It was created by industry veterans to improve performance and streamline workflows for businesses of all shapes and sizes (marketing, design, consultancy, development, and more).

A screenshot of a project management software displaying a timeline for blog posts under the "Plan and Estimate" section, showing tasks such as visual direction, explore concepts, and create moodboards, for comparing teamwork vs ClickUp.


Manage your project timeline by switching between various views 

Productive Features:

  • Robust project management with Gantt, Kanban, and Workload views
  • Integrated time tracking and invoicing with accounting integrations such as Xero, QuickBooks, and Exact
  • Built-in resource planning with time-off management and utilization insights
  • Project budgeting and profitability forecasting (and more than 50+ agency-focused report templates)
  • Integrated sales pipeline for deal management and quotes
  • Additional features include: Docs with AI, custom permissions, automations
A screenshot of a project management software displaying a rebranding campaign's budget, time, and invoicing details with bar charts and line graphs for comparing teamwork vs ClickUp.


Provide your client-facing teams with in-depth business insights

Pros & Cons (With User Reviews)

Productive’s most notable benefit is its robust finance in project management capabilities. If you’re looking for a tool that can help you build and manage budgets and expenses more efficiently, Productive is the best pick.

The feature that blew my mind about Productive was the financial reporting/forecasting and speaking with a COO who implemented it, the way he built out his process library was quite inspiring.

Source: Reddit

One of its most powerful features is financial forecasting, which gives you a real-time overview of your project budget, revenue, and profit margins across time.

If you update or change your scheduling, this will be reflected immediately in your metrics. This lets you eliminate guesswork by providing real insights into how changes to project scope and allocation truly impact your finances.

We’ve always known, on a monthly basis, how we’re doing as a company. But knowing on a per project level, in real time—we never really had that visibility. You guys do a good job of providing that. If you look at it on a yearly basis, it does give us the ability to look, per client and per project where do we really stand.

Orion Jensen,
CEO at Clear Launch

Learn how Productive helps a software development agency reliably predict future work.

Productive can be a bit more complex to learn compared to streamlined team collaboration solutions, but its highly-rated customer support team is there to facilitate implementation and business-wide adoption.

Why Consider an Alternative

When comparing ClickUp vs Teamwork to Productive, the biggest differentiator is that Productive doesn’t offer a free version. However, user reviews have stated that Teamwork’s free option isn’t too generous (only up to five users), so this is not a huge downside for most mid-sized to larger businesses.

Additionally, Productive is best used as a solution for professional services agencies. While it can be useful for generalized work management, the tool achieves its full potential as an end-to-end management platform for agencies.

Businesses Choose Productive

Productive is a powerful project management tool that helps business leaders manage their agency, from collaboration tools to financials.

Book a demo

ClickUp vs Teamwork or Productive: Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Collaboration

For collaboration purposes, the three tools are roughly equivalent, so it will mostly come down to preference. For example, Teamwork doesn’t offer to-dos, which can impact how granular you can go with task management.

ClickUp offers additional features for agile workflows, such as sprint and backlog management, and widgets for agile-based reports. However, it suffers from frequent bugs that can make parts of the platform crash and lose progress: “At this point, it’s more efficient to use Google Docs because that doesn’t crash every 10 minutes” (Source: Capterra).

The only major differentiating factor is Productive’s built-in CRM or sales management feature, which can be great for managing your sales team in a cross-functional environment. You can set up your funnel with custom stages, schedule team capacity, send quotes, manage performance insights, and more.

While Teamwork does offer Teamwork CRM, it’s a separate app, which increases your costs.

A screenshot of a project management software displaying deals categorized under lead, prospect, and proposal stages with details on project names, values, and completion percentages, for comparing teamwork vs ClickUp.


PRODUCTIVE SUPPORTS project scheduling and sales management on a single platform

Budgeting

For budgeting, Teamwork offers a basic solution for setting up cost rates and managing billable hours. However, when we compare Productive vs Teamwork, Teamwork features for creating a budget are fairly limited, including only minimal information.


source: teamwork

Whereas, in Productive, you have the option to specify various additional categories, such as:

  • Service type being sold
  • Quantity of services being sold (numbers, days,…)
  • Discount
  • Markup
  • Non-billable expenses

You can also use a simplified version of the editor if you don’t need to use the extra parameters — the choice is yours.

All of this makes your financial management and data more reliable and flexible, leading to improved decision-making and streamlined workflows. Additionally, Teamwork provides a QuickBooks integration for accounting, while Productive offers Xero, QuickBooks, and Exact.

ClickUp is the least suitable option in this category, as it has no built-in budgeting and financial management.
 

Usability

Teamwork and Productive are fairly stable and intuitive platforms. Some users might prefer the one, others the other. However, ClickUp performs the worst in this category, as users largely report issues with bugs, slow loading times, crashes, and more: “I wish ClickUp wasn’t as buggy, and had smoother integration and quicker live updates” (Source: Paraphrased from Capterra).

Integrations

  • Teamwork’s most popular integrations include Slack, Google Calendar, Harvest, and HubSpot. However, the only accounting integration provided is QuickBooks, and there are not many HRM options.
  • ClickUp offers a large variety of integrations with collaboration tools, project time tracking software, and CRMs. Some of them include Slack, Google Calendar, Figma, GitHub, and HubSpot. However, there are no accounting integrations.
  • Productive offers a good variety of third-party apps and integrations. Notable ones include Google Calendar and Slack for collaboration, Xero and QuickBooks for accounting, BambooHR and Breathe for HRM, HubSpot, and more (learn more on Integrations).

Pricing

  • Teamwork pricing tier for free users is fairly limited. It offers access for up to five users, and has no retainer management, resource scheduling, or timesheet approvals. There are two paid plans, and a custom enterprise plan.
  • ClickUp provides a free plan for unlimited team members and tasks, though there are no advanced features, such as time tracking, workload management, and advanced automations. For paid plans, there are two options (Unlimited and Business Plan) and a custom enterprise paid plan.
  • Productive offers three paid plans (learn more about Pricing). The Essential plan offers all of the core platform features (such as time tracking, expense management, project & tasks, reporting, and time-off management) but is scaled down. There’s no free version of the tool, but you can check out a 14-day free trial.

Which Project Management Software to Choose?

To summarize our software comparison, each of these tools can be suitable for a certain level of business needs.

If you need to keep track of your project updates and make routine tasks easier to manage, ClickUp is a fair choice. For more advanced options, you can consider Teamwork, as its range of tools includes improved resourcing and budgeting.

Finally, for a true end-to-end solution to business management, consider Productive. It provides comprehensive financial management and forecasting to help you predict and plan out your agency’s future.

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Lucija Bakić

Content Specialist

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