ClickUp Chat: Everything You Need to Know in 2025

So What’s Actually on Offer?

Chats and Channels

Chats are where the majority of your communication will take place. Chats can either be associated to specific locations in your workspace, or exist untethered, allowing you to zero in on specific workflows, or chat more broadly.

Direct Messages

Want to message someone privately? With direct messages, ClickUp Chat makes this easy. Instead of discussing sensitive information on a public chat, ClickUp Chat allows you to create chat channels with your fellow workspace members.

Threads

With threads you don’t have to worry about lengthly conversations clogging up your chats. Instead, workspace members can reply to messages in threads, consolidating space and making it easy to locate important conversations

Voice & Video Calls

Activity Feed

The Activity Feed ensures you never skip a beat. You’ll be able to see messages where you've been mentioned, messages that have been assigned to you from Chats, and reactions to messages you've sent. What’s more, the Activity Feed allows you to filter for the type of activity you would like to see.

Push Notifications

Custom Sidebar

The Custom Sidebar enables you to organize your chats to your liking. With the ability to pin Chats, you can now prioritize important conversations. You can also create sections, helping you to group related chats.

Draft & Sent

Task Linking

Connected tasks take ClickUp Chat to a whole new level, seamlessly integrating communication with task management. Whether you’re creating tasks directly from insightful conversations, or linking tasks to conversations to add context, connected tasks are sure to save you time while making sure your conversations remain focussed. ClickUp Chat also allows you to update the status, assignee, and priority of connected tasks without leaving the chat!

AI Features

Eager to remain on the cutting edge of innovation, ClickUp have incorporated ClickUp Brain into their new chat feature, with a host of exciting benefits. Leverage the power of AI to create tasks, produce insightful messages and chat summaries, locate related tasks or chats. Finally, with AI agents available on the chat level, ClickUp’s AI will help you answer questions, create and connect tasks, and create automations. 

ClickUp Chat centralizes workflows by taking integration one step further. With a dedicated ClickApp, ClickUp Chat lives in the sidebar, offering easy accessibility and allowing for effective communication. What’s more, with an interface that mirrors its competitors, enabling you to create chat channels, message team members directly, reply in threads etc, the new ClickUp Chat feature makes transitioning easy. You’ll feel at home right-away! 

Perhaps the biggest drawcard of ClickUp Chat is the opportunity to create a unified workspace for communication, task management, and project tracking. Beyond the obvious benefit of having your communication housed in the same ecosystem as your tasks, ClickUp has introduced several features to ensure that your tasks and communication are interwoven—the perfect recipe for effective collaboration.

Real-Time Messaging and Task Integration

A major benefit of ClickUp Chat is the ability to communicate in real time, alongside task management. Team members can quickly fire off messages in relevant chat channels as they interact with their tasks or workflows. Because ClickUp Chat allows users to create chat channels on the Space, Folder, and List levels, users can decide on how granular they want discussions to be, and enjoy contained areas for discussions at different levels of the hierarchy. For example, in a digital marketing agency workspace, where each folder in the client space represents a particular client, team members might create chat views on the Folder level to discuss and collaborate on a specific client, while creating a chat channel on the client space to discuss account management across all of their clients. 

Real time messaging is made even easier by ClickUp Chat’s comprehensive integration features. Users can link tasks in messages, providing clear visibility on the work associated with a corresponding line of discussion. Team members can also assign messages as action items, ensuring accountability. Finally, users can turn messages into tasks, allowing for a truly seamless flow between communication and task management.   

The recently introduced ClickUp Brain—ClickUp’s version of Chat GPT— is yet another time-saving feature. With the ability to create tasks, search Wikis for important information, and produce complex automations, the introduction of AI serves to further streamline your workflows. ClickUp have incorporated this exciting new feature in their Chat ClickApp, to deliver some amazing outcomes. Perhaps one of the most powerful of these, is the “Catch me up” or summary feature. With the “Catch me up” feature, ClickUp Brain summarizes chats you’ve missed, saving you loads of time scrolling back and forth—guaranteeing you don’t miss any important information. ClickUp Brain can also help you create messages, find specific information contained in your chats, or create tasks in chats. Finally, with the ability to create automated responses you’re able to provide real time feedback without the stress of relentlessly checking your messages.

Notifications & Mentions

When it comes to online messages, an important aspect of effective communication depends on notifications. ClickUp Chat notifications are customizable, allowing you to dictate when you would like to get notified. You can also decide where you would like to get notified, from your inbox to email, mobile, and browser. 

Grabbing the attention of your fellow team members can be done in two ways; @mentions, and assigning messages. Mentions are perfect when you want to get a team member's attention. On the other hand, assigning a message to someone as an action item is the best option when you want to clarify accountability and indicate that something needs to get done. 

The team at ClickUp know that it’s easy to become overwhelmed and inundated with new messages. They also know that this is when key information starts slipping through the cracks. To help you stay on track, and reduce the clutter, the Chat feature includes a number of chat channels dedicated to filtering your messages so you don’t have to. With channels for replies, posts, follow ups, general activity, and ‘Drafts & Sent’ you’re able to get easy access to the messages you need to see. 

The ability to tether chats to the ClickUp hierarchy using the ClickUp Chat view, provides the perfect opportunity to create focussed discussions. With the chat view, chat channel members have the ability to click across to the different List, Folder or Space views, giving them instant access to the relevant tasks. This ensures that conversations are focussed around the relevant workflows, allowing users to hone in on specific areas of discussion. Additionally, because channels are linked to the hierarchy, team members can chat at length about granular issues, without the stress of getting in the way of more overarching discussions. 

Enabling ClickUp Chat

As with all ClickApps, you need to navigate to your settings to enable ClickUp Chat. In order to do so, select your workspace icon on the top left of your screen, click on ‘Settings’ > ‘ClickApps’ and then toggle on ClickUp chat to ensure that it is enabled.

Accessing ClickUp Chat

ClickUp Chat Channels

The ClickUp Chat sidebar groups all of your messages into different categories. At the top you have compulsory groupings: Replies, Posts, FollowUps, Activity, Draft & Send. These groupings sort your messages into relevant categories, allowing you to get caught up quickly without the hassle of having to find the right channel and search for your messages. For example, The Replies grouping, filtering for all replies to your messages, categorizing them as ‘read’ and ‘unread’. This centralized location saves you time and unnecessary scrolling by collecting all of your replies and consolidating them into one single location. 

Beneath these groupings lie your chat channels. These channels can be location-based (ie, they are tethered to a location in your workspace. Whether that be a Space, Folder, or List) or they can exist untethered. Important Chat channels can be pinned, sending them to the top of the list. The remaining Chat channels are ordered chronologically. Finally, at the bottom of the sidebar, you have Direct messages, where all of your direct message chats are stored.

Interface Features

ClickUp Chat has a host of cool features to help you communicate effectively. Threads allow to consolidate conversations and reduce clutter by containing message replies. ClickUp Brain simplifies things, summarising chats, sifting through conversations to find you relevant information, and helping you draft messages. Task integration features allow you to form relationships between messages and tasks, assign action items, and turn messages into tasks. 

In a bid to achieve continuity, ClickUp Chat has borrowed many of its formatting options from Docs. A forward slash reveals a plethora of formatting options, allowing you to create tables, docs, banners etc. Several other helpful features are housed at the bottom of the message bar. Here you can select to add a file, mention a task, record a clip, or voice message, create a whiteboard etc. Finally, the @ sign can be used to mention people, @@ for tasks, @@@ for docs, @@@@ for whiteboards, and even # for chats. 

Another powerful feature is SyncUp. Much like Slack’s “Huddle”, SyncUp allows you to meet with teams on the go. The feature, evident in the top right of your screen, allows you to make quick-and-easy video calls, enabling teams to collaborate effectively—even when they might not be in the same location.

Managing Notifications

Your notification settings are customizable, allowing you to filter out unnecessary distractions and focus on relevant messages. In order to adjust your notification settings, select the “View Chat Detail” Icon beneath your workspace avatar, and alongside the SyncUp icon in the top right of your screen. Scroll down to notification settings and decide on what kinds of information you would like to be notified about.

So what does this all mean for intradepartmental communication and team collaboration?

Real-time communication, dedicated chat channels, and extensive integration with task management all work to make teamwork easy. With task management and communication in the same place, gone are the days of waiting for hours for a team member to see your message. Instead, real-time messages will ensure that task updates coincide with communication and collaboration, boosting productivity. Team members can then effortlessly create tasks that result from collaboration by leveraging the power of ClickUp Chat. ClickUp Chat supports teams by allowing them to communicate easily, and in real-time, effortlessly creating tasks, and assigning action items as they arise.

ClickUp Chat Vs Slack

We’ve already touched on some of the similarities between ClickUp Chat and Slack, but let’s dive deeper into these and compare both options. In many ways, ClickUp has done a great job of imitating their successful competitors. With channels, direct messages, the ability to record clips, or send voice messages, and the option to meet virtually using ClickUp Chat’s SyncUp, this new chat feature has many of Slack’s best features. With ClickUp Chat, you get the added benefit of seamless integration between your task management and communication. Moreover, built-in task creation and project linking make it ideal for turning discussions into actions. The inclusion of ClickUp Brain in ClickUp Chat is another huge differentiator between the two tools. The Chat ClickApp is natively integrated with AI, providing a host of time-saving benefits. In essence, ClickUp goes above and beyond Slack’s capabilities delivering never-before seen cohesion between task management and communication. 

One area in which ClickUp Chat might be lagging behind its competitor is the lack of an API. For businesses that rely on message automations and Bots, API’s are incredibly important in facilitating their workflows. Many businesses utilize Slack’s API’s to create comprehensive automations that streamline their messaging workflows. While it is a feature request, ClickUp is yet to release a Chat API, which may discourage some businesses from making the switch.

ClickUp Chat Pricing

ClickUp Chat is far more cost-effective than its communication counterpart. Available on all ClickUp plans, no additional expenditure is required to utilise this powerful feature, in contrast to Slack’s pricey paid plans, which become more and more costly as your team grows. This positions ClickUp Chat as a no brainer for teams already using the project management tool. Instead of spending loads of money on additional tools every month, businesses can migrate their communication over to ClickUp and enjoy the added benefits of a centralized location for all of their work.

ClickUp Chat API