ClickUp vs. SmartSuite: Detailed Review of the Best Features, Pricing, & Design

Hello and welcome to the channel. We are going to be doing a review today between newcomer SmartSuite and the giant of the work management space, ClickUp. A little David and Goliath action happening here on the channel. If you guys have never watched one of our comparison videos in the past, I want to give you a bit of a warning here. This video is going to be going in depth. We're not going to be looking at topical stuff you could just find online. We're going to be going inside the tools, looking at research and hopefully saving you a few hours of time because we've done the legwork for for you to help you see the difference and the best fit for each of these two softwares. If you find this video a little too in depth, go down below the screen here. Check out the description where we have a skimmable blog post and chapters. So for if you have a short goldfish attention span, I respect that, go ahead and use those tools to help you get to the information you need at the pace you need it. Ooh, and a quick disclaimer. This is an unsponsored video about SmartSuite and about ClickUp. We're not being sponsored by either of these to say we have affiliates links for both below though, if you want to check them out. What I'm telling you today is my opinion based on using both of these tools, doing as much research as I can and trying to give you the information you need. So if you have questions about our perspectives or opinions, I mean, if you think there's something I missed, just drop it below in the comments. I'd be happy to hear it. All right, back to the video. Now, to start up our conversation about ClickUp versus smartsuite, I want to start off with a bit of both biographical information. I know you don't think it matters, but I think it does in this case. We're going to compare the behind the scenes of the two companies so you can understand why you've probably never heard of SmartSuite yet. ClickUp has been in your ear constantly. First up, let's talk about the giant first. So for Goliath, Here we have ClickUp. ClickUp's basics are as you see on the screen here, they have raised funds. 537.5 million over five rounds, including two which came from the founder. So really three rounds. They're just finished their series C in October 2021. They're a team of 500 to 1,000 people, probably towards that higher side at this point they are still privately held at this point, and they are indeed considered a unicorn, meaning their valuation is over 1 billion. Based on the funding that they've raised, they have a significant series of investors. Play on words there. They have outside investors involved with the company. ClickUp was also founded back in 2017. I know in the days of old and in the initial days of ClickUp, it was funded by the independently wealthy CEO who had made their wealth from previous business sales. And this origin story has a lot of parallels with what we see over in SmartSuite land. SmartSuite, similar to ClickUp, was funded privately in the early days, although for a much longer period of time than what ClickUp experienced. And SmartSuite is also based in the great state of California here in the United States. But that's about where the similarities end. From there, we look at SmartSuite's details and as you can see from this quick glance on Crunchbase, SmartSuite is still a private company. It is not having any venture funding that we can see here, although there are rumors that that's going to be happening soon. So this is a huge difference. Just from the onset, Click up just finished their series C in 2021. SmartSuite hasn't even raised their Series A yet. Another interesting difference here is the founding date. So SmartSuite was founded in 2019 according to Crunchbase here, whereas ClickUp is in 2017. Big time gap there. But what's interesting about what happened since the founding is when ClickUp was founded, it was pretty much, hey, look what we got. Come check it out, come try it, Come be our beta testers. We're a SmartSuite. From 2019 until this year, 2022, there was pretty much nothing you could find out there about SmartSuite. They purposely developed a clandestine organization of developers and creators to build the product in secret and trying to build an almost finished product before even introducing it to the market. Very, very different approach when it comes to this first piece of which company kind of has the leg up. I think it goes without saying that the winner of this category who has the better legacy coming into this is by far ClickUp. So they're in better position to win this overall competition. ClickUp has won this battle. So for this design tour, we're going to start off with a quick glance of a tour at SmartSuite, how it looks, how it feels, that kind of stuff. First up, when we get into SmartSuite, we see this homepage here, which kind of shows us visually our day. It also shows us what workspace or Team, we are working on what organization we are part of. And on the left hand side we've got a bottom bundle of resources and webinars to push things further below that we have almost an airtable esque categorization of our different workspace solutions. These solutions are where we can actually find the content of our account. We can change how these appear if we so choose. But once you go inside, that's where the real smartsuite action happens and where the real interface starts to show up. Once we're inside the actual solution here, we can start to see what the real body of smartsuite looks like. Up at the top we have our solution and then we've got these things called apps which are categorized all across the top of our screen. From a design perspective, I really like how we are using kind of the top half of the screen and giving us the max width to actually see our data set. Especially because SmartSuite has this little bit of a databasey bias. It feels more like Air table than it does like Monday.com and because of that, I mean, I like that they're giving us that space and not cramming us in with these chunky sidebars that we're used to seeing everywhere else here. In addition to that, we see that there's some kind of user friendly icons up in the top corner. But overall at this level, the design that we're seeing is very airtable or Monday esque. It's very chunky, it's very spacious, there's a lot of white space. And if we click inside one of these records or items that we have here, we can see that this extends into the item itself. One of the features I really like about how SmartSuite has gone about designing their cards or their pieces of information are these guys inside your areas, inside your items, you're able to create collapsing sections. This is done by going inside an area and adding sections into the text. This allows you to collapse and expand the data inside your records themselves. And again, an example of how minimal but also thoughtful the design inside SmartSuite is. It's very big, it's very clear, it's very uncluttered. And what you see is what you get. There are very few hovery icons and that's kind of the look and feel of smartsuite. So if I head back to the main thing, that's our overview. Let's do a quick comparison with ClickUp. Here we are inside ClickUp inside a sample CRM that I built using one of their CRM Templates. When you look at this template here, you immediately see there's a pretty big interface switch, right? With ClickUp, we have a lot of small fine text. We do have a good amount of white space, but. But we also have a lot of small fine text. With ClickUp, everywhere you hover, there's new information that's popping up as you hover over it. There's menus that you only see once you click on them, such as this little gear here. I always point out the look and feel of ClickUp is quite different. If we pop into the home view of ClickUp, which is the comparison of the SmartSuite home that we saw previously, there's much less color here. There's definitely more of a focus on data, information and context. Context, context. With ClickUp, it seems that there's an emphasis on saving you clicks. So you are seeing everything you could possibly need, always visible and always available to you, which could be a good thing or could be a bad thing. If I go inside one of the tasks in ClickUp, which is what they're called here, we see that we've got a fixed set description. We've got this kind of stuff going on here at the bottom. These are our custom fields, which cannot be collapsed once empty. And we've got an opportunity to add subtasks, checklists and relationships here, which can be collapsed. On the right side of a ClickUp task, we have a chat area where we can type information in. We can do similarly on the SmartSuite side, but by default it is not expanded. I'll give you a quick comparison there to make sure I'm giving you apples to apples. Let's go into SmartSuite. We'll go inside a task here. Let's say we want to have a comment. It expands a right sidebar similar to ClickUp, but again, it's only visible if you go and seek out the comment feature at this point by default. Quick reminder here. If you're enjoying this video, please do like and subscribe back to the video. So that's kind of what the ClickUp look and feel is. However, with ClickUp and with SmartSuite, there are obviously other areas beyond the core tasks and kind of home view. There's dashboards on both, there's calculations on both, there's bar charts on both. So for now, let's just do a quick preliminary assessment on the design sense. You've seen both tools at this point, you've done a quick click around and even though we'll be showing you more of both of them in the following sections. I think it's safe to say that for most people the preferred design of these two tools is going to be SmartSuite. The reason being SmartSuite has just kept it very simple, very open, it's very aesthetically pleasing, whereas ClickUp feels like it's a little bit raw, which for some people is going to be appealing. But for the vast majority of users, particularly end users, like those people who are on your team who just need to get their work done, I think we're going to find SmartSuite to be the more accessible and generally appealing layout. So when it comes to the design piece, we're going to give this one to SmartSuite. Next up, we're going to talk a bit about features. Now this is something I could and have gone on about for hours. I could go through the detailed feature by feature comparison between these two, but what I want to just highlight here is the types of features, the common threads that will allow you to see whether one is going to be better suited to you for another to let our newcomer go first again, we're going to start off in SmartSuite land and I just want to highlight a few of the features that are really stand out and surprising in this space. Now for the first feature that makes SmartSuite really stand out, it is right up here in the top right of our screen. New Record. This magical button is SmartSuite telling us that it does not have an opinion on what kind of data you store or use to SmartSuite to manage. This allows us to say things like Account name. This title of our record could be changed to anything we could want. We could have this be our dog name. We could have this be our book name. We could have this be our expense name. We can redefine what each item means inside of SmartSuite because it allows us to have the flexibility of editing pretty much every field that exists. Nothing is set in stone in smartsuite. It does not have a strong opinion as to how you use it, so you can really make it your own. Number one feature here is that ability to define your record meaning and to create records based on data you find important. Now the second feature I think is going to make people a little bit surprised to see in such a new tool is SmartSuite's linked record field. You've also heard this called Relationships and many other tools. This linked Record fields allows us to to select apps from any solution in our account in order to connect them together. So here I could connect my account Summary My CRM to the features that I have over in my Agile setup. I'm going to click Add field and I can now connect these two pieces of data together. I'm going to connect the features over here with the CRM data over here. This relationship feature is one that we always look for here at ProcessDriven inside any work management tool. The fact that any don't have it is crazy to me, but the way that it is implemented inside SmartSuite is really nice. It's really reliable and it's really smooth to set up. Now why am I showing you a feature that both of these tools have in common? Because disclaimer Teaser ClickUp also has relationships. The reason I'm highlighting this as a standout feature is because this functionality allows us to do more than what I would expect to see in pretty much any other tool. Way to see this would be looking at the formula field. You're like what? What does formula have to do with this? Trust me, it has something to do with it. Once we are inside the advanced editor, we can actually select our linked field and not only calculate or use formulas based on this value, in this case the name of the feature, we can actually use the period symbol to go inside inside the link to features area, the actual features area we can put pull data from that destination. So for example, the product manager of the feature we can report and look up and calculate based on that data. Not just the thing we've connected, but the things connected to what we've connected. Okay, this ability to go a layer deeper inside a relationship is awesome to see. It's hugely helpful for doing a more advanced approach to rollups and reporting if you are someone that is into the more technical stuff. So that would be my next standout feature of SmartSuite is this ability to go one layer deeper with our relationships. Now the next standout feature I want to highlight on the SmartSuite side is actually the permissions features and kind of instructive features SmartSuite has sprinkled throughout their platform. This is one as a process geek I am really excited to see someone taking seriously. If we go inside the size column, this category we have here and modify field settings, look what we have available to us. First of all, normal options, right choices, display format to show it as different things, which is nice to see but maybe not essential. If we scroll down though, we've got some options that are built into every field. Yes, we can require an entry which is a normal feature we've seen in other places, but we also have the option to prevent new option creation, which is pretty cool. Additionally, we have the option to set a default value on these, so by default every new record will have this value without having to use an automation. Additionally we have the option to have help text explanation of what things are, and this allows us to define some help text to explain what a particular value means for us. Like what does an opportunity mean? How do we use company HQ address? What if there's two addresses? We can address these things inside this help text which is built into every column, which is really, really nice. So these are just a few of the features coming in here that I think really stand out. I mean, we've got some of the standards too of views and the ability to convert your views into other types. We've got the ability to create custom dashboards and things like that, but none of those are particularly surprising and shocking at this point. I think the ones I've hit on here are the ones that to me really make SmartSuite something that I'm like, oh, interesting. More than what I would have thought before. Now let's transition over into ClickUp land and let's talk a little bit about some of the standout features there inside of ClickUp. Some of the standout features I think are really, really nice to see is the ClickUp hierarchy. I've talked about this countless times, so I'm sorry if you've watched the old videos and you've seen this, but what makes ClickUp really cool is how they have it organized. For an example of this, look at this personal life area here. I've got a document in here, I've got birthdays I need to remember, I've got a grocery list. And in most tools to see this information we'd have to click on the relevant list. We'd have to click on tasks to see tasks, and so on and so forth. But with ClickUp their hierarchy is nested. So if I wanted to see everything that was inside this folder, I can click on the folder. If I want to see everything that's in this entire collapsing space here, I can click on the whole space. That hierarchy is really, really interesting. It makes it easy and helpful to see an overview of how one area of your organization is doing at any given point in time. This is particularly helpful for business users or larger teams in my opinion, because it gives you that reporting. Yes, you can get to the same outcomes in the smartsuite hierarchy in many ways, but I like how this is all pre built and right in there. While I'M on this topic here. Let's just do a quick review of what the ClickUp hierarchy is similar to SmartSuite we have our workspace in the bottom corner where we can swap things out. We then have spaces which are the equivalent to Solutions over in SmartSuite land. We have folders which doesn't really have a real equivalent in SmartSuite. And then we have our lists which are like SmartSuite apps inside of these lists which if I actually click on one that would help. We have views similar to what we saw elsewhere and the ability to convert and turn them into something else. Now all of that stuff is the same, but I want to just get that in your noggin so we can have that translation there. From here I want to talk about some of the standout features that ClickUp has done a really good job of. For this I'm going to go back into the CRM example, the demo template that we have installed from ClickUp's pre made templates. What I really like about ClickUp is its time. It's taken the attention it has given on the little details to save you time. So for example, I think ClickUp has done a really nice job right now on hotkeys. So the ability to hover over information and make things happen. They've also integrated command bar in a more effective ways than other tools I've seen where you're able to do things like change the theme which they recently highlighted in their stories, and to do things like create a task or create a doc or create a reminder. Many of these things also have pre built in keyboard commands such as r, but overall you're just really able to change the way ClickUp works with very little mouse work as long as you're comfortable with your keyboard. To me, as someone who's a little bit more in the power user side, this is really helpful and has made ClickUp in general faster to use for more complicated stuff than SmartSuite. Just on the data entry side, load times not necessarily faster, but beyond this, the second standout feature I want to highlight for ClickUp is this little bubble over here. ClickUp, unlike other tools we have, has a bulk action toolbar that is far more expansive. To be clear, SmartSuite has one of these too, but it's a little bit more basic and only does a few things at once at this point. But of course it's a newer tool. Let's give it time. But ClickUp on the other end has made great strides in building out a really nice bulk action toolbar to allow you to make changes to things like the status or the tags or the assignee or the watchers, all without having to leave this main menu. I could change, for example, the contract date or the contract information for all of these things in one click by writing hi, hi, hi. I don't know why that's my go to, but there you go. We can add that data in. I think that's a standout feature on the ClickUp side, and there's various other forms where that kind of bulk action comes in. The third standout feature of ClickUp is this little section down here. ClickUp has done a nice job of giving us a quick, consistent interface for commonly done actions. This Quick Create menu allows us to record video clips, which is a feature that is pretty unique to ClickUp, Track time, have reminders, notepad, new docs, everything that we need is going to follow us through the platform. No matter what we're clicking on, it's always right there and it's a hotkey or a few clicks away that is really convenient to me as opposed to having to go in to a specific area to put tasks in certain spots. For example, I could go right down here, create a task inside the personal life list of a new birthday and we'll call it Santa Claus's Birthday. And we can add that information in straight from this Quick Create menu without ever having to go in to the birthday list. That's something that is really nice, really convenient. Personally, I use all the time that we're not quite seeing on the smartsuite side of things yet. So to me that's a pretty standout feature of ClickUp. Now the last standout feature of ClickUp I want to highlight here, which is particularly effective when we're comparing ClickUp to some less task focused tools, is ClickUp's recurring tasks. Say what you will about ClickUp, say what you will about maybe their reliability or their features or whatever, but ClickUp has done some work with recurring tasks that is really fun, really nice for the work management space. It's really the leader when it comes to this recurrence stuff. Who knows how long that'll last. But right now to be able to come in here and have complicated recurrent settings such as four days after I close the task, or every two months on the third, we'll say fourth Thursday to be able to set up recurrences this sophisticated inside of ClickUp. This is a huge, huge help and this is something that we are not seeing equivalent quality in the other work management competitors. An additional feature here that is related to this recurrence that I want to highlight is that when it comes to ClickUp, we can even see future recurrences as long as they go through their main menu, which is a very nice way to make sure we know what's coming up. For anyone who's dealing with recurring tasks of which many of us are, this is a huge advantage. Not to say other tools can't do recurrences. They all can in some way shape or form. They all work, you know, it's fine, but they're not quite as nice and spiffy as this kind of recurring task method here. Now I could go on and on. As I warned at the beginning, I literally could talk for an hour about each of the features in each of these tools. How the dashboards in ClickUp are much more limited than the charts and SmartSuite, how the dashboards in SmartSuite give us more options, what we see in the dashboards in ClickUp, how we're able to introduce color differently in each of these tools, why a board view in ClickUp isn't quite the same as the card view in SmartSuite. I could go through each of these because really these tools are very different in the full stack of features. But what I would say when it comes to comparing the features between the two is to be very clear on what you actually need. Not you want, what you need to have, your team or your life or whatever feel organized. What are those features? And for most people, both of these tools are going to have both of them. But if I had to pick a winner based on the features alone, I am going to have to give this category to ClickUp. In general, they have more features with more variety than SmartSuite does. But I want to give a quick disclaimer similar to our video up here where we compared ClickUp with Todoist. SmartSuite is a tool with less features right now, fewer features, but the features that it does have are more stable. They're faster, they're quicker. In my experience at least, of using both of these tools, ClickUp has a greater variety of features, but the stability of them, the usability, the finesse of them, is a little bit more questionable. So if you're someone who's okay with things being a little wonky from time to time, I think ClickUp by far in the features category. But if stability is a huge concern of yours, the fewer features you have in SmartSuite, but the quality of them might actually make the winner in this category different based on your personal priorities. However, in general, just based on the number, I'm going to go with ClickUp as the winner of this category. All right. Ooh, quick reminder here. If you want to try out these tools for yourself, there are affiliate links for both in the description below. Doing so supports this channel, costs you nothing, and allows you to play around with these tools for yourself. So check those out. All right, back to the video. Our next category is Ease of Use and I'm going to make this one very quick because I think the interface that you saw might have already hinted to some of this. But the main areas I want to compare between the two tools on this category is the availability of templates. So if I go into SmartSuite, just to kick us off here and start with the template, we see the SmartSuite template gallery. This is something that I've heard in various interviews the founder has said that they're really proud of. And I've gone through some of these templates myself and I gotta be honest, this is a better template cookie cutter template area than I have seen in almost any other tool. These templates, while yes, they're templates, right, like that comes with some unease, they make a lot of sense. They seem like they were created by somebody who actually understood how a marketing campaign worked or understood how a client engagement worked. The templates are pretty high quality and because of the way SmartSuite is set up, the fact that you don't necessarily know there's extra features you're missing, they're not right in your face and required for you to understand them. The templates, plus the interface that SmartSuite has for me makes the ease of use of SmartSuite for a basic user very easy. The learning curve for me, like getting to know this tool felt very, very light. Power users, maybe there's a little bit more of a tilt, but for the day to day user, incredibly straightforward. Which was something that was refreshing to see in the work management space. Let's compare that just briefly over to ClickUp. ClickUp here. ClickUp also has a template galleries. I'm going to go inside the templates area. You can browse some of the community templates created by ClickUp here. There are, let's see how many? 812 and counting. Quite a few. But the challenge with ClickUp templates, as you guys have heard me talk about before, likely if you've watched this channel before, is that the quality of these templates are less than helpful. I mean, just look at the CRM template we have here, this is extremely, extremely basic and this is considered their intermediate level one from what I saw when I created it here in the account. And it doesn't really give us a whole lot to go off of. It's just a bunch of blank tasks and some custom fields. And I think that really speaks to the ClickUp onboarding experience in general. With ClickUp, there are a lot of features and unfortunately you need to know most of them in order to use the tool without breaking something. It's not exactly foolproof. If you go down the wrong rabbit hole, you could end up accidentally deleting something or breaking something. And so I think the learning curve on ClickUp is a little bit steeper, not only because the templates are not as useful, not as high quality in my opinion, there's just a lot of them. But the second issue is that with ClickUp, there's just a lot you need to know even to be that basic user, let alone an advanced user. But for even the day to day, you know, your client who might be in ClickUp, your new va, they need to know a lot of information. That's part of the reason people like me exist, where we spend our whole day just explaining ClickUp to ClickUp users. Hey, if you haven't checked out our channel, subscribe. But I just think the Learning curve on ClickUp is pretty tough. The ease of use here I think is going to be lower than what we're seeing inside of SmartSuite. Based on my experience on both so far and granted, I've only spent a few days playing around in SmartSuite, and I've spent a few years seeing the struggles with ClickUp. But I feel like I know enough to see the difference between these two. So I'm going to give this category to SmartSuite. Now the next category I want to compare between these two is language support. What are you able to see the interface in and actually work work in if you are not an English speaker or you just don't prefer to work in English? Both of these tools being California based, they both do provide an English interface. I'm going to assume that is a given here, but when it comes to languages beyond English, the differences are pretty distinct. Even as the little baby, the newcomer in the space, the, you know, the new shiny toy, SmartSuite has prioritized global language support. So we see here the number of languages SmartSuite offers inside their tool. We also see that they have localization built in for things like their titles, their number formatting, their telephone Numbers, these kinds of details that make it so much easier for you to collaborate with an international team. When we compare this over here to ClickUp, unfortunately, ClickUp is only offered in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and the latter two are only in beta. This is for a tool that is two years older than SmartSuite. And so it's, I think it's safe to say the language prioritization has not been something that has been top of clickups list in their founding journey, whereas SmartSuite has clearly prioritized it far earlier than what I or most other tools would probably have expected. So if you are someone that has a team that prefers to work outside of the English language, unless they're French, I'm afraid we don't really have much of a competition in this category. If you are looking for support in multiple languages, SmartSuite is going to be the winner in this category for now. We'll see what happens in the future. Now, last but not least, I want to highlight pricing and I want to be clear that I'm comparing pricing between tools at two different layers of kind of the startup life cycle, if you will, two different points in their journey. So I do think this is a bit of a challenging comparison, particularly because the tools themselves are so different. But disclaimers out of the way, here's the current pricing for SmartSuite. They've got a free plan that is relatively new for up to three users. I know that's a pretty firm limit there. As well as their team professional and enterprise plan with refreshingly transparent billing, which is really nice to see. When we flip over and compare that to the ClickUp plan over here we see that ClickUp allows us to have free users with unlimited team members and then five 12, 19, three middle tier plans and then an enterprise plan that is contact sales. It's very ominous and old school in that way. So how do we really define a winner in this category? Well, I think it's going to ultimately depend on which plan you end up being on. In general, I would say if you are a smaller team or just a more hands off team, maybe to an extreme level, you're probably going to find ClickUp to be the cheaper, better option. You're going to get more features for your money, slightly less stable. Right. But your cost overall is going to be lower. However, if you are somebody who is needing higher features, getting them through the SmartSuite plans is going to be cheaper than trying to get them through ClickUp Enterprise. So if you are a small team who's A control freak or a larger team who needs those permissions? I think SmartSuite is going to be cheaper for you. I know that's a lame answer, right? Because it's kind of like both and. But it really depends on who you are. Larger teams, more control. I think SmartSuite is going to be cheaper for what you get a ClickUp. More features, less control overall, lower price, smaller teams. I think ClickUp is going to be the better bet for you overall. I'm going to say that the winner of this category is ClickUp because of the flexibility of that free plan and how open that makes the whole tool. But for anyone who wants those premium features, it really becomes more of an it depends on than a clear winner in this category. And I should just say, if you guys need help thinking this through, go ahead and drop a comment below. Happy to chat through your pros and cons list. This is just my quick take. All right, so that concludes our deep dive comparison of all of these categories of ClickUp versus smartsuite. Obviously there is a lot of stuff to talk about here. We've barely scratched the surface even in this pretty long video, and I'm hoping that you guys can help me out by continuing this journey in the comments below. So if you wouldn't mind, drop a comment below and let me know what you think. Which tool do you think is going to be right for you? What questions do you have? What's the deal breaker for you? Let me know. I know for my take, I am really fascinated by both of these tools. I see both of them serving different types of audience members we have on this YouTube channel. I think both have a lot of interesting things to offer. And to me, I don't. I don't think one at this point is a lot more interesting than the other. I'm kind of like, ooh, shoot. I want to explore both of these options and see how can we really see what will best serve each person in our audience. Because I think they serve a different avatar personally. So that's just my take. Let me know your thoughts below. Your comments, your decision making, what facts you found out. What I might have glossed over here, but for you was an important detail. Drop that in the comments below and while you're down there, locate the links below this talking head here and locate the affiliate links for both of these tools. Try them both out. The best way to see what you really like is to actually get in there and explore. So that concludes this quick comparison. Not so quick compare. This concludes this expansive comparison of SmartSuite and ClickUp. If you have more questions again, drop them below like and subscribe while you're down there. Thanks for watching and enjoy the process.