ClickUp and Notion often butt heads in the project management space. Both apps market themselves as all-in-one tools that can do everything for you — from task management to storing important docs.
After intensive research on both tools, writing a ClickUp vs. Notion article feels like comparing apples to oranges. Those who prefer Notion would think ClickUp is holding them back, and others who love ClickUp would pull their hair out setting up Notion.
Which tool is better? It depends on what you need and which features are important to you. Neither ClickUp nor Notion is perfect for all users and teams.
The short of it: Notion is a Swiss army knife for individuals, solopreneurs, and small teams if they don’t mind building everything from the ground up. ClickUp is a better choice for larger teams, bigger projects, and people aiming to get things done effectively without the bells and whistles.
ClickUp vs. Notion: Comparison at a glance
Notion’s free plan is better for solo use, but ClickUp’s cost is more reasonable for small teams
Both Notion and ClickUp are reasonably priced, but Notion is slightly better for entrepreneurs and personal use, while ClickUp is superior for small teams.
Notion used to have a Personal Pro plan for solo power users, but it has since changed its pricing to Plus and Business plans.
Notion’s free plan would suffice for most knowledge workers, but super users might find ClickUp’s free plan limiting. As you move up the paid plans, ClickUp becomes slightly more affordable and has more package options than Notion.
Notion is more customizable, but ClickUp is more streamlined
The primary difference between Notion and ClickUp is the setting up process. Notion lets you set everything from the ground up, while ClickUp is more streamlined.
For instance, everything on Notion is a page, and if you want to create a new database, you have to start from its blank canvas. Everything — from adding custom properties to choosing a view — has to be done manually.
In contrast, on ClickUp, everything is a list. When you create a task, ClickUp automatically collates it into your choice of list with different views and property fields.
Sure, the thousands of Notion templates are here to help, but setting up Notion is still more labor-intensive than ClickUp.
There isn’t anything that’s “better” here, it all comes down to preference:
- Do you want to have high control over your workflow and customize everything imaginable? If yes, go with Notion.
- Do you get overwhelmed and stuck trying to make things pretty and need a tool that does the heavy lifting of setting up workflows for you? If yes, go with ClickUp.
But remember, setting up is a one-time task. If you tie the flag in Notion, after the workflows are in place, you only have to maintain it to keep it running like a well-oiled machine. Don’t settle for ClickUp if you need the customizations just because the initial setup daunts you. Notion has awesome communities and tutorials to help.
Related: Get organized with these daily planner Notion templates
ClickUp has superior built-in automations
An area where ClickUp is far superior to Notion is the automations. Let’s say you want to add a comment of “ready for review” for your manager every time you change a task’s status from “to do” to “complete.” On ClickUp, setting up this automation is a breeze.
On Notion, setting up these automations is possible through API, but I had to grit my teeth to find the right formulas to set it up. Sure, Notion’s pre-built automations help, but it’s still too cumbersome compared to ClickUp.
Notion is more aesthetic (and even better with Plus)
It’s hard to beat Notion when it comes to making things look pretty. Notion’s friendly to the eye with its cover images, emojis, icon, and UI. Because it’s a blank canvas, the possibilities of making it as aesthetic as you like are endless. Look at what Jayson Brady did with his Notion to create a master dashboard:
At ClickUp, the features can be a bit overwhelming, and while there are options to create a customizable dashboard, it looks like an eyesore compared to Notion.
What’s even better: Plus enables you to embed live Snapshots (think of a screenshot that is self-updating) of any app or website in Notion (or any other productivity tool) with a simple browser extension.
Whether you want to…
- embed your Google Calendar in Notion for work, or
- embed your Spotify playlist in a Notion page for personal use, or even
- embed ClickUp’s tasks in Notion (if you want to get the best of both worlds)
Plus can help you do it all in a few clicks.
Related: Best Notion widgets to power up your workspace
Aesthetics may look like a silly feature to care about for productivity, but glance value information is crucial for easy navigation. Because of Notion’s emojis and cover images, it’s easy to land in the right place without back-and-forth — especially when you’re finding your way inside a large database.
Note: While Notion is more beautiful than ClickUp, the latter has more options for color. On ClickUp, you can customize colors (with a sliding scale!) for drop-downs, tags, labels, and more. The font color also adjusts depending on how dark the color you chose for the background is. Notion has fewer colors, and there’s no sliding scale, making it hard to add visual cues.
ClickUp is better for task management (especially for teams)
Notion was built as a beautiful note-taking app before it expanded its wings to project management. But ClickUp was designed with organizing your to-do list in mind. It’s no wonder it’s better than Notion by manifolds for task management.
Apart from the automations, ClickUp can also:
- Set up recurring tasks for you (requires complex automations in Notion)
- Let you track your time for each task with its in-built time tracking
- Provide more views of your tasks than Notion
All these features make ClickUp a far better choice for organizing and managing your tasks than Notion — especially for teams. You can:
- Track how much time each task takes
- Filter tasks assigned to you and your team separately
- Hold brainstorming sessions through the whiteboard view
- See how spread out your customers are, using the map view
- Ensure each team member isn’t overloaded using the workload view
- Assign recurring tasks without wasting time in adding them again and again
- Create customizable dashboards based on metrics important to you easily (time-consuming to do in Notion)
ClickUp can fit every use case for project management, but the same can’t be said for Notion because it isn’t as intuitive, and its base isn’t built for managing tasks.
Notion wins note-taking and interlinking documents
Since note-taking is at the core of Notion, it’s no surprise it triumphs in this department. Whether you want to create company wikis or SOPs, Notion is the better choice. ClickUp is continually improving its docs, but right now, it’s nowhere near as powerful as Notion.
Plenty of companies use Notion as their primary knowledge hub — which is crucial to building a great remote-first culture. At Plus, we use it to create “employee user guides” and other necessary documents.
A related area where Notion shines is interlinking documents. Let’s say you’re writing meeting notes in a doc and want to link back to a separate client information document for reference inside the call summary notes. On Notion, interlinking these two files is smooth like butter. ClickUp also enables you to cross-link these documents, but its UI and UX are nowhere nearly as elegant as Notion.
What’s more: If you want to create a new document while writing, Notion enables you to do that without ever leaving the page and breaking your flow. You can’t do this in ClickUp — you can only interlink to documents that are already present in your database.
The blank canvas and the easy interlinking capabilities make Notion far more user-friendly for anything text-heavy than ClickUp. This interlinking feature is so strong that plenty of people use it to create their “second brain” in Notion (while few have their entire life organized in ClickUp).
ClickUp has stronger forms
Picture this: You want to create tasks based on survey responses you get. This might mean using the data from customer support forms or a manager’s task allocation to their team based on their bandwidth.
ClickUp allows you to create forms within the app. It’s a simple drag-and-drop to customize it, and there are configurations to add your company’s branding to it.
The best part? Not only can you assign, move, and update responses on your workflow, but also summarize and graph the response data. Forms aren’t just used by small teams. A solopreneur can also use forms just for themselves for journal entries, quick notes, action logs, and more.
Right now, Notion forms aren’t as strong (no options for branding and graphs) and expensive if you want to remove Notion’s native branding ($19/month).
Notion has AI to reduce manual tasks (ClickUp’s AI isn’t released yet)
Notion recently released its AI feature to automate the tedious tasks of summarizing meeting notes, writing call summaries, changing the text’s tone, and more.
I used it to brainstorm ideas on using Notion as a second brain, and it definitely came through.
The AI is still lousy when it comes to actual writing, such as sales emails, blog post outlines, and the like, but it’s pretty good for summarizing a wall of text and writing takeaways from meeting notes.
ClickUp is also on its way to releasing its AI, and it might be equally good (if not better) than Notion.
ClickUp vs. Notion: Do you need to choose one?
There are significant differences in how you use ClickUp vs. how you use Notion. No one tool is inherently better, and you don’t even need to choose one. Notion is better for documentation. ClickUp is better for task management. Many users tested both and ultimately decided to use them together for different purposes.
You can do that too and even more easily with Plus — let’s say you want to use ClickUp for task management, but Notion is your personal hub for organizing your entire life. Using Plus, embed your ClickUp dashboard in Notion, and voila! You’re using both seamlessly without compromising.
Still if you have to choose one…
Use ClickUp if:
- You need something quick and effective to organize your tasks
- You’re collaborating with a team for project management
- You’re looking to organize large (or multiple) projects
Use Notion if:
- You need something text-heavy to organize your documents
- You want strong interlinking capabilities within databases
- You’re looking to heavily customize your workflow
Either way, there’s no one app to replace them all (despite what ClickUp and Notion promise). The best alternative is to integrate all tools in your stack using Plus — and forever eliminate the headache of switching from one app to another.
