AI has taken the world by storm over the past few months, promising to overhaul our productivity both at work and in our personal lives.
Although artificial intelligence has been on our radar for years, the launch of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022 has created a giddiness (and anxiety) about the infinite potential for using AI in our daily workflows.
Software companies like ClickUp and Notion have snapped up the potential to incorporate AI into their own platforms allowing users to ask questions, generate text, and execute commands to shave hours off repetitive, and time-consuming tasks.
But what does this natural language processing look like in action, and does it actually improve your productivity?
This guide gives a detailed comparison of both ClickUp and Notion, including the latest AI-integrated features you’ll want to try out for size.
What is ClickUp?
ClickUp’s tagline is “one app to replace them all”—the idea being that you’ll use the same platform to handle your tasks, dashboards, documents, brainstorming, communication, and goals.
The all-in-one workspace has a highly customizable interface, allowing users to configure their data from every imaginable angle, whether presenting a different view or adding a new filter.
With that comes a learning curve to get used to the system, but once you do, it’s super powerful.
Some of ClickUp’s use cases include:
- Project management: ClickUp is primarily a space where teams can create, track, and manage projects of any size, or complexity using features like sprint planning, burndown charts, and custom workflows.
- Time tracking: ClickUp bakes a time tracker directly into the platform, so there’s no need to hop around to different apps to find out how many hours to bill a client for or estimate task completion time based on previous work.
- Goal-setting and OKRs: Users can set and track objectives and key results (OKRs) in ClickUp to align team and company goals.
- Client or third-party collaboration: ClickUp’s guest access and sharing features make it easy for teams to collaborate with external clients or stakeholders.
- Campaign management: Users can customize ClickUp to track tasks, plan campaigns, and collaborate with organizers and stakeholders.
Best for: Larger teams and professional audiences with the time to configure a bespoke project management app to handle cross-functional workflows.
What is Notion?
Notion is a workspace app that helps you organize notes, tasks, and data from one centralized location.
Originally marketed as a flexible tool for note-taking, Notion has blossomed into a full-body productivity platform for handling pretty much anything.
Its modular design enables you to create different types of blocks, such as text, media, or tables, then customize them at will.
Best of all, it’s no code, so you don’t require any technical chops to craft the workspace or solution you need.
Some of Notion’s many use cases include:
- Knowledge management: Notion excels at organizing and storing information. Users can create comprehensive databases, internal wikis, and documentation to manage their information effectively.
- Note-taking and documentation: The platform provides a clean and efficient user interface for all types of writing, such as jotting down notes, taking meeting minutes, or drafting lengthy articles.
- Publishing content: Notion integrates with third-party providers like Potion and Super if you want to publish your Notion pages as a website.
- Team collaboration: Notion’s workspace can be shared with team members, facilitating real-time editing of collaborative docs, assigning tasks, and feedback.
- CRM: Notion’s databases can manage customer relationships, track sales, and collaborate with a sales team.
Best for: Thanks to a free personal plan and a simple interface, Notion is perfect for individuals or small teams who want to build a customized solution to suit their needs. (Side note: Notion has recently added advanced project management features to appeal to larger teams handling more complex projects.)
ClickUp vs. Notion
Even though ClickUp and Notion are designed for slightly different audiences, they’re both popular platforms for productivity and project management and share some overlapping features. As both have recently launched AI functionality, it’s worth pitting one tool against the other to determine the best fit for your business.
ClickUp vs. Notion: Community
Software communities allow users to come together and share their knowledge, tips, and bounce ideas around.
They’re a lifeline to both new users who need fast answers to questions and for experienced users who want to maximize their experience of a product.
Notion’s community is more robust and interactive than ClickUps.
For example, Notion is in the top 1% of Reddit communities in terms of size, attracting 293k+ followers at the time of writing.
This is considerably higher than ClickUp’s Reddit community which attracts 7k+ followers.
Their company Twitter profiles tell a similar story—Notion has 435k followers compared to ClickUp’s 68.5k.
It’s no surprise that entrepreneurs and small businesses have seen the opportunity to make money out of Notion’s popularity.
Notion template creators are making thousands of dollars selling Notion templates; for example, Hunter Bohm, Founder of Profit Pilot, turned his passion for Notion into a successful productized subscription consulting business.
Speaking on Nicks podcast, Hunter explains how he uses a repeatable Notion base template and customizes it according to his client’s unique requirements:
“They all start the same way in that everyone needs a project and task manager etc. But after you build a wireframe for them, that’s when you add things that are different and specific. Honestly, I’ve got good at it because I’m a lazy person. My view of productivity is getting more done in less units of time. I want to create the best system to help me do X and Y in the most productive time possible. So I built probably over a hundred different systems managing getting things done, and tasks, and projects, and the systems I built for myself worked well for clients."
ClickUp vs. Notion: Features
ClickUp is a feature-rich platform focused on project management and is a great fit for larger workspaces, while Notion has more of a clean, stripped-back feel to it. Nevertheless, both offer powerful functionality—here are the highlights of each:
ClickUp’s features
ClickUp offers:
- 15+ different views so that you can arrange your data in Gantt, Timeline, Kanban, Sprint views, and more
- A screen recording Clip feature to capture your screen, app window, or browser tab and share it with team members
- Whiteboards for brainstorming
- The ability to set advanced custom permissions and granular user roles
- Easy collaboration by quickly assigning tasks and tagging team members. The Chat view offers instant messaging, enabling users to brainstorm or communicate in a List or Folder without switching windows.
Notion’s features
Notion offers:
- Integrations with essential tech stack tools like Google Drive, Slack, and more
- Access to the Notion templates hub with 5,000+ templates built by community members
- Live document-editing to create a living bible where everything is in sync
- Shared team calendar for easy collaboration on both one-off and long-term projects
- Task management, prioritization, and scheduler: Notion also allows you to display your data in a variety of ways, including Kanban boards, task lists, calendars, and sprint organizers to keep your projects and workflows on track
ClickUp vs. Notion: Pricing
Budget is undoubtedly a huge part of your decision-making process when evaluating productivity software. The great news is that both ClickUp and Notion offer a generous free plan for you to test-drive before you commit to a premium team plan. Additionally, both offer the flexibility to pay annually to save money or pay monthly for flexibility.
Overall, ClickUp offers more affordable pricing for smaller and mid-sized teams, but it’s hard to argue with the value Notion offers individual users in its free plan.
ClickUp’s Pricing
ClickUp offers five different pricing plans, depending on your budget, your team size, and your project requirements.
- Free: $0: The plan is great for users' personal projects and offers unlimited tasks and free plan members, collaborative documents, and 100 MB storage.
- Unlimited: From $7 per member/mo, this small team plan offers unlimited storage, integrations, dashboards, Gantt charts, and custom fields, along with guest permissions, email, goals, and more.
- Business: From $12 per member/mo, this plan is best for mid-sized teams, offering Google SSO, unlimited teams, custom exporting, advanced dashboard features, automation, public sharing, and more.
- Business Plus: From $19 per member/mo, this extended business plan is great for cross-functional teams and incorporates team sharing, subtasks, conditional logic, custom role creation and permissions, and more.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing is available on request for multiple large teams who require white labeling, enterprise API, advanced permissions, single sign-on, unlimited custom roles, and access to a customer success manager.
Notion’s Pricing
Like ClickUp, Notion also offers a free paid plan, then three premium tiers on top.
- Free: This plan is aimed at individual users, who will receive unlimited blocks. It’s also a great jumping-off point for small teams exploring Notion’s functionality; however, teams only receive a limited block trial. The free plan offers a 7-day page history, ten guests, basic analytics, integrations with Slack, GitHub, etc., and a collaborative workspace.
- Plus: From $10 per user/mo, small teams will receive unlimited blocks, unlimited file uploads, a 30-day page history, and 100 guests.
- Business: From $20 per user/mo, cross-functional teams will benefit from private team spaces, SAML SSO, advanced analytics, bulk PDF export, a 90-day page history, and 250 guests.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing is available for companies who require advanced security features, an audit log, a dedicated success manager, workspace analytics, unlimited page history, and more.
ClickUp vs. Notion: AI
Generative AI accelerates the rate at which you can create copy, translate documents, produce tools, or a million other tasks you can hand over to the bots. Let’s explore what’s available in ClickUp and Notion.
ClickUp AI
ClickUp AI is available for $5 per member/mo on all premium plans.
It’s not currently available for guest users or free plan users, although you may take an AI trial as part of your free account.
What’s immediately interesting about ClickUp AI is that the company has built the software around roles.
ClickUp AI is designed for 100+ use cases, so businesses can inject immediate value into specific teams without a steep learning curve.
For example, ClickUp AI knows how to write a case study for marketing teams, design a user testing study for your R&D team, or spin up a project timeline for your project managers.
Sounds impressive so far, but does it work?
I tested this out by searching for AI tasks for an HR department, opting to design a Performance Review for a fictitious sales professional.
ClickUp AI directed me to define the employee’s role, KPIs, core values, and preferred tone of voice (I opted for optimistic).
The output produced an average-looking template you could use as a starting point for a more comprehensive performance review. It wasn’t groundbreaking, but I could see it saving some time.
Moving away from role–specific AI features, I wanted to test out some of the more common tasks that ClickUp can handle.
For example, its ability to summarize text within seconds, which is handy if you want to condense meeting notes, project updates, comment threads, or any other chunks of text.
I tried this out by feeding ClickUp AI the content of one of its own case studies on Stanley Security and using the Summarize command. The result was a pretty accurate summary, including statistics from the page to add depth and context.
Of course, these examples are just touching the surface of what ClickUp AI can do, with other capabilities including:
- Writing and editing documents
- Generating action items
- Generating subtasks
- Summarizing tasks
- Updating task or project progress
Notion AI
Notion AI is available as an optional add-on you can attach to any paid plan for $8 per member/mo when billed annually ($10 per month for monthly billing or free plans).
Notion began testing its AI offering at the back end of 2022 and rolled the key features out to Notion account users in February 2023.
In a company announcement about the launch, Notion describes its AI as “a motorcycle for the mind,” with a simple focus on being more productive by spending less time on “work about work.”
Notion admits that its initial expectations were for users to lean on Notion AI to create whole projects, such as “Write a blog post” or “Write a sales email,” which is how Hunter Bohm has been using the software. He said,
“I have a client who is a seven-figure email marketing agency; they have 30+ brands, and it’s really hard to write copy for all of them, so I made a system with the new Notion custom autofill properties that writes campaigns that are exactly in the brand’s voice. It creates a great first draft—obviously, it’s not perfect, but it reduces hours of time spent writing copy.”
However, Notion’s alpha testing revealed that many users weren’t activating these prompts as frequently as thought partner commands like “Improve writing,” where users prefer to highlight existing text and receive a better version.
In this example, I selected a paragraph from Notion’s company announcement and used the “Improve writing” followed by the “Continue writing” prompts to tighten up the copy, then extend the message.
I wasn’t happy with the first output, but it’s easy to Discard and hit the “Try again” prompt to keep enhancing the content.
Notion AI can also whip up the following with its fast-text generation:
- Instant summary from a page of messy notes
- Text translation into languages including English, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, Indonesian, and Vietnamese
- Meeting agendas
- Social media posts
- Press releases
- Job descriptions
Is ClickUp or Notion the right AI productivity solution for you?
We’ve reached the end of our ClickUp vs. Notion review, which means it’s make-your-mind-up time.
Notion is a popular productivity app with bare-bones appeal, meaning you can use slash commands and building blocks to design any type of productivity system you need.
If you’re worried about the interface being too stripped-back, that’s where Notion’s aesthetically-pleasing templates come in as a solid starting point to customize for your business.
If you’re looking for Notion alternatives, ClickUp is a worthy contender aimed at larger organizations and armed with a wide range of advanced features to match this goal.
Some users may find the platform too complex for their needs, but if you can get used to its bells and whistles, it’s a truly powerful solution.
Unfortunately, G2 user reviews make it pretty hard to separate these two platforms.
Notion receives 4.7 out of 5 based on 4.5k+ reviews, achieving high results in the following categories: 8.4 out of 10 for Ease of Use, 8.6 for Quality of Support, and 8.4 for Ease of Setup.
ClickUp also scores 4.7 out of 5 based on 8k+ reviews and achieves 8.5 for Ease of Use, 8.9 for Quality of Support, and 8.2 for Ease of Setup.
The bottom line: Both Notion and ClickUp are fantastic tools aimed at slightly different markets. Notion is best known as a personal or small-team productivity tool, while ClickUp is undoubtedly aimed at larger organizations. Each platform has designed an AI solution to complement its core functionality, with ClickUp designing bespoke AI features for separate departments, while Notion AI is skewed towards content enhancement for individual users.