How to replace Slack with ClickUp ( Template Tour )

I've worked with a lot of teams who are trying to set up ClickUp, and for almost every single team that uses both Slack and ClickUp, the challenge of figuring out what to use when is, well, a challenge. So while there are a lot of great sops or standard operating procedures or rules we can just create for our team to help them know when to post in Slack and when to post in ClickUp, one of the easiest solutions might just be a little too obvious that we sometimes overlook it. And that is actually replacing Slack with with ClickUp. And so that's what I'm going to be showing you inside this tutorial, how exactly you could rebuild Slack in ClickUp if you wanted to. But this isn't going to be truly rebuilding Slack. We're going to get some of the features, but we're going to be compromising a lot of them in order to get it all in one place. In general, whenever you're trying to get one tool to do many things, you tend to compromise on functionality in an attempt to have less tools to log into. So in the same way, this video could also be called why not to to replace Slack with ClickUp because there's trade offs. Now that's all I'll say about the general and specialist software strategy. If you're someone that would like to learn a little bit more about the idea of building a stack of best in class tools versus getting a few tools that do a lot of different things, you might want to check out this video above where I talked about how I'm moving away from generalist tools into a specialist tool stack for the reasons we've already defined here. So you can check that out if you'd like. So I think that's enough disclaimers, let's just go ahead and dive into today's template which is this Building Slash Slack in ClickUp template. Now to give credit where do this idea and this concept was something that was originally designed by Vincent at ClickUp and actually presented in in the December 20th ClickUp level up Summit, which if you guys weren't around for when that summit happened back in December 2020, you can watch my recap. But all that to say Vincent, someone who works at ClickUp, did design and kind of prototype this template as part of his demo during that all day long ClickUp Summit. And I've been referencing this video a lot whenever folks ask me about how to build Slack in ClickUp, you know. Yet for some reason it's just not quite clicking for folks. So following Vincent's lead Here I'm just going to create my own video, walking you through exactly how you would build this out. So hopefully it makes a bit more sense. So you too can build out your Slack structure inside ClickUp. So here you can see our modified template inspired by what Vincent originally presented. And what we have going on here is basically one folder. It's called Slack and ClickUp. Pretty straightforward. And we have three lists in that folder. So if you wanted to go ahead and replicate just the structure piece that I'm showing here, you want to start off by going up and creating a folder, calling it Slack or something like that, maybe Slack in quotes. Then we want to have lists for each of the categories. Now, as you are probably going to see as we dig into this, the lists or categories that we're using here, they're not really essential. They're more so just for us to have better organization. They're not really having much of a functional purpose at this point. So inside here, let's just go ahead and let's have the same thing that we currently have, public channels, topic channels, and direct messages. Again, these are just categories to have in there. I'm going to create the folder. And there we go. We created a Slack like template, basically ready to go. Now, yes, we have some structure which makes us start to feel like we're getting close. But I want to take a step into Slack to at least compare what else we need in order to make this really function like slacks. So here we are, we have Slack kind of running on top. And let me just say that these channels are categories of conversation which you can post into. And anyone who's involved in that particular channel gets notified. All right? And that's a pretty easy functionality for us to build into ClickUp. All we need to do is to create a venue for conversations to happen. So if we were in here, we have a few choices for where we want to have that venue. We could have it as a view, as a dashboard, as anything else. But to keep it really simple, why not just use the tasks themselves? So just like in Slack, where we have the another, the general, the Scrum channel, we can create tasks for each of those conversation topics. So here we have general. We can even give ourselves some channel information or basically general info about what we're talking about here. Then on the right side of the task, we have the actual discussion area. This works as the main forum inside Slack. So if I go ahead and move this divider here to the left side just so we have a bit more room, we can Post messages just like we would inside a Slack form. So here we go, here's Slack, just to do a test. Bam. Very similar experience. Just like we can do reactions inside Slack, we can do reactions inside ClickUp and we can even thread responses in Slack, just like we can inside ClickUp. In this way, the task almost becomes just a container for the collaboration to happen. Now, where this gets a little weird is that all the other stuff that tasks have in them are. All of this stuff basically gets ignored, okay, including status, all of these things. You just kind of leave them there, try to ignore them, try to not mess them up, and just focus on using the conversations area, a general notes kind of description, the title of the discussion, and very important, the watchers up in the top. Right now, inside Slack, you have permissions around who has access to each channel that comes down to private and public channels, which or even DMs that you can do inside Slack. All that comes down to who gets notified and who has access. Kind of two layers of the same question. Well, in ClickUp we know we can also do that. The first option is right here. Because we are in public channels, we're going to assume that everyone that we have working in our workspace should have access to this. So we're going to leave this as public to the whole folder. Everyone can access the public channels list, but who do we want to have notified when something is posted into this? Well, that's where Watchers comes in. Just because someone has access does not mean they're going to be notified. Only Watchers get notified. Just like if you like a Facebook post and you're notified when more changes happen to that post, it's the same thing. Watchers are like the followers of a particular task, and in this case it's like the followers of a particular channel. So as I post in here now, everyone who's a watcher is going to get notified. Now, of course, watching and notifications aren't the only thing that we want to keep an eye on here. We also want to keep an eye out for privacy. So that involves going into one more setting. Here, just like elsewhere in ClickUp, we can adjust permissions at the space, the folder, the list or the task, not the subtask, unfortunately. But this is really all we need for this application. So for the public channels, one, since we want all of these channels, AKA all of these tasks to be accessible by everyone, we're going to go in here to list settings, go to permissions, and make sure that it is set to public for the whole folder which it currently is. So if it was private, it would look like just this. If I made it available to everyone who's in this folder, I would click on that. If I click on the permissions, I'll open the granular details of how people can interact with this. In this case, I'm going to change all permissions to allow for comment only access. This will ensure that tasks are not marked complete unless the person is assigned. And remember, we're not really using tasks as tasks here, so status isn't really important. So by locking this down a little bit, we make sure that things aren't accidentally marked complete when really they're just an ongoing conversation. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to make sure everyone is in comment only access and we are going to move on for the next one. Topic based channels. I think I'm going to default this one in the same way to be accessible to the whole folder, which it is. And for each individual task I might cut down the permissions if I wanted to. Now if I was on a team where I wanted everyone to know everything, great. But maybe for this one, since it's a client related discussion about our client, Acme Inc. I want to go in here, go to Sharing and permissions and adjust it to be private unless I am specifically invite someone to it. So that would involve going to these settings and naming exactly who I would like to have see this. So in this case let's invite the other Layla and there we go popping out of that one. Similarly team executive. That seems like something I want to make sure I have cut down. So I'm going to go to Sharing and permissions, make it private and invite only the executives I want to have invited to that discussion. Just like elsewhere, we probably want to cut these down to be comment only access so that things can't accidentally be marked closed and. And there we go. Finally we have direct messages. In this particular one I'm going to default to things being private unless proven otherwise. So I'm going to take this entire list and make it private and then I'm going to go one by one in inviting just the people I want to invite to each individual pair. So in this one I'm going to invite Layla and other Layla sharing your permissions. Just me invite the other Layla. Great, I can pop down to the next task. Also, that's a pro tip. If you didn't know there's those little carrots, you can skip to the next task in line without having to leave. It's kind of handy. So for this one, we were to go in here, go to sharing permissions, and we want to make sure that we're just inviting these individuals who I don't actually have in my account. One note I will make about this system is because I'm the person that created the task, no matter how I adjust permissions, I'm always going to have access, which is not really ideal if we truly want to create private messaging. So the workaround here would create a DM template and have the actual individuals create the task on their own. So that way they are the owner of the task and they are the one that sees it. And you can again, if you want true confidentiality, you probably shouldn't be prying on people's private DMs. So. So there you go. Now, the three additional columns that you see inside each of these lists are Assignee, Latest Comment, and Comments. None of these are particularly exciting, but I'll at least explain what they do. The Assignee field is showing who's assigned or the owner of the conversation. One of the reasons it's nice to have this kind of view is that it shows you who has access to it in a quick reference. So if I click on these, you're going to see that I'm the only name that shows up because I'm the only person that has access to it. If I were to make this public again and I click on that assignee field, you're going to see a bunch of names show up. And that's one reason it's nice to use Assignee, because it's always a quick gut check as to who has access. One reason not to use Assignee is people might confuse it with a task they actually need to do versus what it really is, which is just a reference. So if that's potentially confusing for you, there's really no need to use this assignee. It's just a nice little visual indicator of who's in the conversation if you need it. So that's the Assignee column. Next up is the Latest comment column. And just like assignees, this is housed under the plus sign and latest comments. If you have it unchecked, it's probably going to be scrolled down to the bottom. But this is just a column that shows you what is the most recent comment in a particular task. So here you can see we just got the assets from the photographer that is the most recent comment on this particular task. About this project from Latest Comment, you can click on it to actually look at the full context of the conversation. Or or you can use the comments column. So you might have noticed comments and latest comment are very similar. The main difference is latest comment is display only. To actually write a comment you have to click on it, whereas comments you can click on it and you can write a comment right from there without having to open the task. Which was actually a tip originally shared by Ben on this awesome collaboration video where I had a bunch of vetted ClickUp consultants share their favorite tips about using ClickUp more effectively. So if you haven't seen that already, pop up here and give it a watch. Although you certainly could create a column like Date, Updated or Other Information to help you keep track of other things related to these channels, there's really not much more we need to do here to make this an effective replacement for the Basics of Slack. Now I said the basics for a reason, because even though we are able to do the basic functionality of Slack inside ClickUp, we are missing a lot of the things that Slack has taken a lot of time to develop. This includes things like Slacks, action apps or ability to connect outside tools into Slack to have built into your messaging experience. While ClickUp has some of them, ClickUp is not really a messaging tool, so it hasn't invested in quite as many as Slack has done. That is one of the perks of Slack. We also have much fewer moderation features. So as an admin inside Slack, I can control a whole lot of things as to who's posting what, what are they able to connect to, what are they allowed to say, what happens when they write this word, what do their emojis look like? I can customize a whole lot more because Slack was built for this specific purpose, whereas in ClickUp what you saw is pretty much all you got, which is why it can be really great for smaller teams that don't need a lot of bells and whistles. But if you are someone who really loves Slack, what we built in ClickUp is not truly going to replace it for you. Another missing feature if you were to replace Slack with ClickUp is the fact that profiles in Slack are a lot richer than profiles in ClickUp. But if I go into a profile, I'm seeing pretty much basic information about how Layla is working. It's very work focused, whereas Slack is focused on who's online, what time is it for them, how do you contact contact them. It's more of a personal profile again built for that communication and collaboration space. Now last but not least, when we're switching from Slack to ClickUp. We have to keep in mind that ClickUp's mobile app is built for task management, whereas Slack's mobile app is built for messaging people. Go figure. When we are looking to replace Slack with ClickUp, that is another compromise we are making. So in conclusion, I would recommend switching to ClickUp from Slack. If you're someone that hasn't used a lot of the Slack features, maybe you don't need all those bells and whistles. Or maybe you're someone who's really struggling to decide if you use ClickUp or Slack for day to day messaging. Or maybe you're just worried that Salesforce now owns Slack. Any of those kinds of issues. Maybe it's time to consider bringing everything into ClickUp. However, if you are a Slack power user, if you're moderating a community, if you have a huge team, if you like to use things on the go, and if you'd rather use best in class tools rather than trying to contort one tool to do everything, I'd stick with Slack and just build some better policies and procedures. So the choice is up to you. I hope this was still a helpful exercise. Big shout out to Vincent, who for giving us this inspiration, and to all of you guys who are working on building out this Slack template, feel free to leave me a comment letting me know how it goes. Until next time, all enjoy the process.