ClickUp vs. Monday.com | Detailed Review of Features, Complaints, & Support (Round 1)

If your team is trying to decide between Monday.com and ClickUp, you know by now it's a complicated choice. The two are often compared side by side, but there are a ton of big differences between these two platforms throughout this video. Today I'm going to be taking you inside both tools and do a step by step comparison of all of the key components you might need to know when it comes to Monday versus ClickUp. But before we get into the step by step review, I want to give you the context of of why this review is so important to me. My name is Layla and I'm a ClickUp consultant, which tells you a little bit about my perspective here. I've been using ClickUp for almost as long as it's been around and at the time of starting my YouTube channel here, I had a pretty clear choice as to whether my YouTube channel would cover ClickUp or Monday. And at the time I chose ClickUp. But based on questions from you guys in the audience here and also my own reflection, the question now is should my YouTube channel stay focused on ClickUp or Monday or Pivot to incorporate or switch to Monday. Com? So I'm making this video as much for myself as I am for you. And just like many of you, I have a lot riding on this being a helpful review and a detailed comparison. Because just like many of you, the decision here matters. Hello future day Laila in a different outfit here jumping in to say as we are editing this video together, it is far too much, far too comprehensive for one YouTube video. So we are going to be breaking this in half. You are watching part one here today. So in part one we are going to be talking through pricing, design and ease of use and getting started in Monday versus clickout. We'll do a comparison based on that Phase one decision here. We're back in the part two to break down the more detailed nuances of the two tools for those of you who aren't decided or can't make up your mind just based on these three topical features. So let's get back to the video. Let's start off our journey by talking about the elephant in the room pricing. Back in the day, ClickUp and Monday used to have a big difference in the price of each tool and pricing used to be the go to reason why one would choose ClickUp over Monday. Because back in the day ClickUp was significantly cheaper. Taking it to modern times though, at the time of recording this video, pricing between ClickUp and Monday has started to level off. Previously, ClickUp was the only one that had a free plan. Since then, Monday has introduced its own free plan, limited at two users going up from there, the pricing is pretty comparable. The main difference between the pricing models between ClickUp and Monday is that ClickUp tends to include more features on lower plans. And to really get the complete ClickUp experience, you start to experience that on the business plan. However, when it comes to Monday, to really get the complete experience of Monday, I would argue that you don't really see that until you get onto the Pro plan. That's where the majority of really essential features become open to you, which is a little bit strange considering it's their highest plan before enterprise. The other odd thing to keep in mind around pricing and how it's calculated between ClickUp and Monday is the minimum number of seats. So if you are a team of one, ClickUp is going to be significantly cheaper for you because you pay per user. With Monday you pay based on a minimum number of seats. And even if you have one user, you are paying for three seats. And that can kind of throw off the math for folks, especially if you are a smaller team not fitting nicely into the brackets. They have here. Two other features to note when it comes to Monday versus ClickUp and pricing is that the yearly discount on both tools are significantly different. So when it comes to monthly versus yearly, on Monday you're saving 18%, or when it comes to ClickUp you do save 45%. So that is a pretty significant reduction there. When you compare it to something like Monday, the last piece, and this is probably the weirdest one, which is a Monday specific quirk, is that at this time Monday actually has products as well, which is something I think is quite opposed to what ClickUp has positioned itself for. But with Monday you can get their main platform, which is comparable to ClickUp, for these prices. However, there are certain features you do not get in this main platform and there's no option to get all of the features. Instead, Monday packages things up into pre made bundles of bonus features. So rather than having a bunch of extra features added for all pro users or added for all standard users, they started sectioning them off by use case. So, for example, version control features are only available on promarketer. If you go into Monday CRM, only then will you get the Google Calendar sync. And there's a bunch of other odd things like this that are bundled into these four standalone products that Monday has added. These products are at a higher price point than the standard core Monday feature. And when I asked Monday's support team if there was A way to just get all of the features for one price, much like you would have in ClickUp. They first were confused and finally told me no, not really smart. So very strange choice on Monday's part, particularly because most teams contain marketers, a CRM, projects and devs. However, the main argument for these products is that they come pre set up for that use case, which is a huge time saver when you compare to the blank slate that Core or even ClickUp will come with. So when it comes to the question of who wins the pricing battle, I would give this one to ClickUp hands down. Just because it is per user pricing, which is really nice. You don't have the minimum number of seats and to get the features that a normal user would really want. With ClickUp, I would say the business plan is where most people will end up, whereas on Monday I really think people are going to end up at the pro plan until they get all the core features they would need to really take advantage of the tool. So on that front, when it comes to pricing, ClickUp wins the day. All right, so that's the overview of pricing. Let's go inside the tools now and compare the actual meat and of each software. So here we are inside both tools. We've got ClickUp on the right, Monday on the left. From the get go I've got them both in a doc view. And one of the standout differences you're going to see right off the bat is the fact that ClickUp has a lot more stuff. It tends to be feeling a little bit more cluttered, there are a lot more options right off the get go and there's always more things appearing when you hover over stuff. Whereas Monday is a little bit cleaner, a little bit simpler. And when you hover over, there's not a lot of activity happening on your mouse, whereas with ClickUp there is a lot of bouncing around. Both tools have a sidebar collapse option. Once you close it in ClickUp it is completely disappeared, whereas Monday has a consistent navigation bar on the far left. When it comes to iconography, I would say Monday is definitely a little bit cleaner, more consistent across the platform and easier to identify where you can actually interact. Whereas ClickUp is known for having a lot of hidden features. For example, this cog gear up here to change your sidebar settings is one that most people don't notice for months by default. When it comes to the complexity in the hierarchy here, ClickUp is a little bit more word based and does have a very expansive hierarchy even on the sidebar that can become very cluttered, whereas Monday's is very it's just cleaner by default. If we flip both tools over to Dark View, you can see a comparison of how both look in that light. ClickUp has a little bit less contrast, I would say, than Monday. And Monday also has a nice night mode, which is closer to ClickUp's dark mode, but just some more options on the Monday side than on the ClickUp. Now of course docs aren't where you're going to be spending most of your time in a task manager, so let me show you the task sides of both of these tools. By default, when it comes to Monday, you are set up with some pre made statuses, a date field and a person field to use as your assignee. With ClickUp things have a little bit firmer of a definition and we've got assignee, due date and priority there by default. Default when you go to look at more details about an item or a task, you can open it in Monday and it appears from the right sidebar. Whereas with ClickUp we see a overlay modal appear. Pros and cons to both of these for sure. Inside the item details we have different options in terms of what views you want to have in Monday. You can even choose to have any of their other view templates in here, such as the item card, which is the closest comparison to what we have in Clip ClickUp. With ClickUp on the other hand, things are more fixed. We have the task name, description and the ability to add subtasks right there. But nothing about this area here can really be adjusted other than incorporating more fields, just like you would in Monday. Now just to flip this back to light mode here you can see kind of the aesthetic differences between the two tools start to pop out here. Now, when it comes to user experience and navigating the tool, Monday's sidebar approach, which is more similar to tools like Asana, is very helpful, I gotta admit it, because it helps you see where you're at and if I move my mouse from one side to the other, I still have context for where exactly I'm creating this task here. Oh, I'm on the task list. Okay, I can type in with ClickUp, you still have some of that context hidden in very small text up at the top, but it just doesn't tell you as much. And it's definitely more destabilizing than this kind of sidebar approach. The inability to have that context like you can in Monday when you're actually working on a task is a Big difference between the two tools. So just to show you a few other points of comparison here we have the activity log in Monday, which is comparable to the activity log on the right side of ClickUp's area here. Both are filterable, both allow you to adjust what you're looking for, although Monday's filtering might be arguably a little bit more intuitive, if a bit more simple when it comes to adding messages in both tools. With ClickUp you can add it onto any task in the main task view on the right side, and when you select text you can format it. This can throw new users off a little bit because by default you don't see any formatting options, whereas with Monday you do have that kind of set formatting bar which is a little bit more comfortable for new users. One thing to note, when it comes to writing messages in either tool, keyboard commands such as giphy and formatting are far less common in Monday across the board, whereas ClickUp is very hotkey centric and so once you know your way around, the ability to add other notes is a big win. Either way, once you submit an update or a comment, depending on what tool you're using, this is about what it looks like in ClickUp. You also have the option to interact using other emojis and reply using threaded replies or not, and it's an option people can turn off. Monday is very similar. Both tools allow you to have reminders for these updates, and Monday have a few other features when it comes to formatting and pinning different comments, which is kind of nice. Let's go through a few different views. In case you are not a list view person, let's go to Board View Kanban Here we can see what it kind of looks like in each of these tools by default. Monday.com is definitely a bit more colorful versus ClickUp. ClickUp is a little bit more concise and again that small text here, but that's our board view. Let's look at Gantt just to give you a comparison. On that front, this is what the ClickUp Gantt view looks like here. If we expand and put these on a chart when you have a ClickUp Gantt view but you don't have any tasks scheduled, it doesn't look very interesting, but once you actually schedule the tasks, you are able to connect them together and have all the options you would expect to normally have with Gantt with Monday. Because they start us off with some default tasks, we can also see how a Gantt chart would look. Both of them allow us to change dates and accordingly our Overall project timeline will adjust. I will say that dragging things around on Monday is a little bit easier, however selecting items I found easier with ClickUp with Monday, I find myself often trying to click on an object but accidentally clicking on the overall grid. That could just be me though. However, the options that you have around Gantt Chart with Monday are definitely more powerful than the options you have around Gantt Chart with ClickUp. So if this is a feature that really matters to you, keep that in mind. Moving beyond Gantt View let's look at a chart view. These are the charts available by Monday. There are far more options than what we've seen in ClickUp, particularly because we can set axes, bubble size and all of these other settings based on the chart type. Whereas if we Compare this to ClickUp, ClickUp's options around charts are extremely limited and aren't framed in that x y axis very, you know, clear cut way. ClickUp's ones are all more pre made and you just choose where your data is. So when it comes to charts, you're probably going to have a better time in the Monday arena. But that's kind of the differences functionally beyond those we both have form views let's go back to our ClickUp forms. The Monday form view allows for a little bit more customization, the ability to adjust things with your own colors and a bunch of settings here over on the right side, particularly one about submitting another, which is nice. Whereas the ClickUp form view starts off very simple and it allows you to add your fields in. And the options around ClickUp forms are much more simple and much less customizable. And our options are also more limited and we could go through all of the other views as well, things like the gallery view that's in Monday, or the mind Map or whiteboard views that are in ClickUp, but that gets into more of the feature side of things. However, I hope that this tour at least demonstrates what the overall interface of each tool looks like. Even if you just compare the home views of each tool, what you see in Monday and kind of the aesthetics of everything is definitely quite a bit different than what you would see in ClickUp at the same time. Which is better? Which is worse? It is a bit of personal preference. However, I would say in general people are going to find the user interface of Monday a little bit more appealing, simpler, less overwhelming, and easier to find what you need. However, as you can tell by this quick tour, the limited amount of features in Monday also make it easier to look not so overwhelming. So kind of a Double edged sword. Ooh, and before we move on, I should actually highlight the fact that that ClickUp does have multiple layouts available, for better or worse, but you have the ability to actually change how ClickUp looks to look more or less like Monday, really, if you have that preference. So while this doesn't meaningfully change the overall user experience that we've already talked about, it does change the main navigation flow. So if you wanted to get something that looked just like Monday, more or less inside ClickUp, the modern view that I'm showing you right now would probably be a better apples to apples comparison. However simple is the default layout that all new users see. So that's what I'm going to be using for this tutorial. I just want to highlight that though, because I don't want you to get stuck up on this sidebar being the main difference, because it's really not. Next up, getting started. Which is going to be easier, Monday or ClickUp? Well, I think across the board you're probably going to find that Monday is a bit easier to use. There are just less options. So getting up to speed on Monday is generally easier in part because Monday comes pre set up either through one of their products or even in their default templates, which they push very heavily. You see that it comes with default information put in. You can kind of see what the default appearance looks like. If I were to create a new list in ClickUp and a new board in Monday, side by side, if I were to just keep everything default in ClickUp, we see this kind of thing. We basically start with a blank slate and some questions about some statuses which could be confusing to a new user. Whereas with Monday, when we create a new board, it defaults to some standard grouping, it has some tasks in there, and it kind of helps you get a sense of how things should look, which I think is a smart choice on Monday's part. And I do think that makes Monday a little bit easier when it comes to getting up and running. Because from the new board or the new list, same thing to anything else, Monday comes a little bit more pre built. The other thing I'll say is that the templates available in Monday just seem a little bit more powerful than the templates that we see inside ClickUp, these ones just feel a little bit more real world, a little bit more time saving and useful, whereas a lot of the ClickUp templates feel quite stock and a little out of touch with the function they're supposed to be doing. That's probably down to personal preference but that's just something to consider as well. Those templates and the value that they may or may not have. However, I should say, having been in the ClickUp world for a minute, there are ways to set up ClickUp to be less overwhelming from the get go. That's actually what we teach our clients to do. You can find out how we work with people in the description, but when it comes to setting up ClickUp, the default resources that ClickUp provides, you aren't great. So when it comes to setting up both tools out of the box, what's confusing about ClickUp is the fact that it has a nested hierarchy. So if I click on everything, I see the summary of all of this stuff. If I click on this thing, it shows me everything inside it. If I click on this thing, this folder, it shows me everything inside it. It's all nested inside each other like Russian dolls. Whereas in Monday, we don't have that kind of firm hierarchy. Monday, when you click on higher levels up, you do not see anything, it just collapses and expands. All of your data in Monday lives just on your actual boards or documents. Whereas with ClickUp, yes, you have your boards and documents you created, but you summarize them at every layer you click on, which can be quite destabilizing and confusing because each of these layers has their own views and settings. Whereas with Monday, because there is nothing happening at these overall container levels, you can focus exclusively on just these main lists and know that everything is there now before we wrap up and you kind of go away thinking that the hierarchy in ClickUp is terrible and therefore the Monday one is way more easy to use. I should note that this hierarchy comes quite a bit in handy when it comes to summarizing things, which is a limitation of Monday. The other thing I'll say is ClickUp is very simple. In their task details, it always looks the same, whereas Monday has decided to make these views on a per item basis. And so the customization here can actually be quite time consuming and can make setup take a bit longer. So even though the hierarchy in Monday is a bit simpler, the task details area or item details area here is a lot more complex, so they almost even themselves out. However, overall I would give the ease of use to Monday just because it is more pre made out of the box and there's less to learn. Okay, so Layla from the future back again to tell you we've wrapped up part one of this video. So far we have reviewed pricing, aesthetics and ease of use and 2 to 1 in Monday's favor is our current score. So based on where we're at right now, we would be making the decision to go with Monday.com but there is a part two to this video. So if you are kind of viewing this as a tie, if you're not sold one way or another, we have a part two video coming out. It'll be right here when it's ready. Or we'll be going through deep dives into specific features you might care about when it comes to either of these tools, as well as a review of language coverage and the companies themselves. We have so much information to cover, so watch this part 2 as soon as it's ready here we or stay tuned for its release next week. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.