Public View vs. Guest Access to Work with Clients in ClickUp

So you use and love to use ClickUp, and you're trying to get your clients to feel the same way because for many reasons, it would be great for you to have them have some visibility into the stuff you're doing inside ClickUp. But when it comes to figuring out how exactly to invite your clients into ClickUp, you're kind of stuck on the question of should my client be a guest in my ClickUp account, or should I share a public view with them? In this video, I'm going to break down what public views are and how that's different than guest accessing ClickUp. But also at the end, make sure you stick around, because I'm going to talk about what is generally the best practice when it comes to working with clients in ClickUp, and it might surprise you. So if we're going to spend today explaining the difference between whether your client should be a guest or get a public view, we should probably understand what these two things are. Let's start off with the Guest access. What is being a guest in ClickUp? Well, basically a guest is a free extra seat you can add into your ClickUp account that will allow someone to log into ClickUp, view your workspace only in the areas that you choose. Guests have multiple layers of permissions. You could choose to have a guest be able to do pretty much everything, give them full access. You could allow them to edit things that are assigned to them, comment on tasks, or simply view whatever it is you share with them. You can invite a guest into a folder, a list, a task, a dashboard, a doc, any of those places inside ClickUp, and once they're invited in, they can do pretty much anything you allow them to do inside the account. Guests are free up to the limits of your account, but the important thing to remember is even though guests log in just like a full user, a full member like yourself in ClickUp, they see slightly less features and they only see the areas that you specifically choose to share with them. Even though your client is joining out as a guest, they control all of their own settings. So things like notifications, what sidebar layout, all those kinds of funky things your client is going to have to manually adjust on their own. There's no way for you to do it for them. With guests. You can choose to hide a few you select features based on the settings and permissions area that you can see here, and you can even choose to hide certain custom fields from all guests. This is not a per guest permission, but for all guests you could say choose to hide the budget custom field because you don't want your guests to be able to see that you can do those kinds of things. When it comes to guests, it's not possible to hide things like standard fields. One common request I see people do is that they want to invite their client as a guest in ClickUp, but they don't want their client to be able to see the comments the team has back and forth. Unfortunately, there is no way to hide comments from your guest users in ClickUp unless you use a public view, which you know, let's just dive into what a public view is and you'll see the difference here. A public view in ClickUp is what you might call link sharing. It's the ability for you to give view only permissions to a certain section of your ClickUp account and share it with anyone, no login required anywhere on the Internet. So I could just go to any view like this one, share that view publicly and and send that link to anyone. I want to be able to see that view. Most areas in ClickUp with the exception of Dashboards, don't ask me why they're not compatible right now. But all areas besides Dashboards are compatible with these public views, which I could then send via email or a text or whatever else I'd like to do to whoever I want to have be able to see this public view. Inside these public views. I have a lot of restrictions I can put in place. I can hide things like standard fields, custom fields, or even comments, which I know is a common request to ensure that the people who see the public view only see exactly what I want them to see. If at any point I want to take away that public view, I can just go into the view and turn off the public link sharing. Or if I'm on an enterprise plan, I can go and manage all my centralized sharing inside settings. With a public view, the interaction is view only. So if I share that link with somebody and they want to send me a comment saying, you know, that task is approved, or hey, I have a revision on this, they need to somehow contact me to let me know about that change. So one common technique I'll see people do is they'll take a public view from ClickUp and embed it in a client portal or embed it in their notion client dashboard. They'll embed it somewhere where the client is able to interact. So the client has view only access to ClickUp but has some other kind of outlet in order to reply. Or, you know, if you want to be simple, take that public link and email the client using ClickUp. By sending the email from ClickUp, any reply that customer has is going to end up in ClickUp as well as a comment. So from the client's perspective, they're just responding to an email, but you and your team are seeing the comment inside the ClickUp email feature, which is a really powerful feature that if you don't know what it is or you don't understand what I'm talking about from the idea of being able to send and receive emails from ClickUp, definitely check out this video here because it is very, very cool. So these are the two main options when it comes to inviting your clients into ClickUp. Ooh. And before we go into the final conclusion of which I would recommend for you, I'll do that at the end, I want to highlight that there is a hybrid option here. So when you invite someone as a guest in ClickUp, you might share a dashboard with them, share some lists with them. They're only going to see what you share with them. I know I sound like a broken record. So if you have a dashboard with a task list widget, they're only going to see the tasks in that widget that they have access to in the vertical hierarchy. I know that sounds like a foreign language here, so let me break it down. That task list widget shows a report of all tasks that match your search criteria. That makes sense. But if the guest viewing that widget does not have access to those tasks, the task list widget will show up blank. So if you're trying to use a dashboard with your client, make sure you're also sharing the actual task location. The other option, if you don't want your client to be able to see all of that stuff, is to actually invite your client as a guest in ClickUp, if that's, you know, how you prefer to do things. And instead of a task list widget, take that public view link, remember the link we just talked about as that other option, and embed that into a ClickUp dashboard. So now you have a public view and a guest access, and you can actually take that public view, which can be restricted in more severe ways as to what people can edit. You can throw in a chat widget inside ClickUp directly, and yes, your clients will still have to log in, but now you've given them restricted view only access to just what you want them to see without having to share the actual list with them. And you've paired it with a chat widget for them to interact with, say, your sales rep. This is kind of the in between option. If you want the benefits above a public view, but you really want someone to be able to interact with you or your team directly inside ClickUp. If you're looking for some examples about how to use a dashboard for this kind of application, as well as many others, I actually have a video here diving through a bunch of different dashboard examples that might be helpful to you. But of course your client is still going to need to log into ClickUp and go through that whole hurdle in order to use this kind of structure. So in conclusion, which way should you do it? Should you have a public view? Should you invite your client as a guest? Or should maybe you invite them as a guest with just a public view in a dashboard, what is the right choice? Well, generally speaking I find that it is best to just share public views with clients if you have a standard service delivery. If you are an agency most of the time, it's going to make more sense for the style of service to just send clients in a link that they can view at any time to see the status of a project and give them some outlet in order to communicate with you. That could be email, that could be, you know, client portal that you have a chat area in that by far is going to be the best fit for most client services because it allows you to put kind of a wall between your internal collaboration and the client while still letting them have some limited amount of transparency. I would not suggest implementing a ClickUp based system unless that client is going to be in that System more than three times a week. Because there's a learning curve to ClickUp as we all know, and it's generally not worth it to have your client go through that whole learning curve if they're only using ClickUp for a temporary application that your your team is requiring. And the only exception is if you have a very involved service, a very long term service, or if you have a reason to teach clients ClickUp because of the nature of your services. So if you are trying to decide if your client should be involved in ClickUp, should just get a view only access to ClickUp? I want you to ask yourself what is the best solution for the client? What do they actually need? Is it going to be helpful for them to actually get into Click, learn how ClickUp works and be able to have that really deep connection and collaboration with my team? Or would it be better for the client to just see a high level overview, maybe a public view I share with just the key milestones that they know they can always go to to get an update, but they're not getting inundated with notifications or having to log in every day. That decision is ultimately up to you, but you can tell I'm a little bit biased in the link direction. If you have any questions about this content, or you have your own situation you'd like to run through, go ahead and leave a comment below. And while you're down there, be sure to and subscribe, because those kinds of things feed the hungry YouTube algorithm, which in turn shows this video to more people. So help me out here and just engage with this content in some way. I will see you guys back here with another video talking about process work inside ClickUp next time. Until then, enjoy the process.