In the relentless pursuit of becoming the “all-in-one productivity platform”, the team at ClickUp have rolled out many comprehensive features. Cast your mind back to the introduction of Docs 3.0 in 2021, or Clips 3.0 earlier this year—the value these ClickApps have added is insurmountable. While these updates, alongside the introduction of other key features, have seen ClickUp evolve and improve, it has long been missing the addition of a comprehensive ClickUp chat feature. Although task comments have been a longstanding and valued element of the ClickUp ecosystem – fostering collaboration and communication – the tool has lacked a feature that enables team members to communicate efficiently across different levels of the hierarchy. The ClickUp chat view – ClickUp’s somewhat clumsy attempt to rival communication tools – failed to rise to the level of market leaders like Slack.
Until the arrival of ClickUp Chat.
This powerful new ClickApp mirrors the functionality of many of the leading communication tools on the market. It is easy to use, while facilitating greater cohesion and connection between workflow management, communication, and collaboration. No more inefficient swiping between tools, no more time wasted tracking down relevant tasks. With the ability to link tasks to messages, create tasks from messages, and enlist the help of ClickUp Brain, the all-new ClickUp chat feature is guaranteed to save you time by streamlining communication, fostering greater collaboration, and providing increased visibility.
In this ClickUp Chat review, we outline everything you need to know about this incredible new feature, from adding it as a ClickApp, to navigation and best practices. We’ve experienced firsthand the powerful effect this feature can have in streamlining workflows and enhancing collaboration, and we’re excited to share it all with you!
Many comprehensive communication tools exist in the marketplace. Apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams’ Tabs, have been lorded for their influence in furthering team collaboration, communication, and productivity. For all their success, without the features to facilitate task and project management, they have been unable to achieve seamless cohesion, resulting in disjointed workflows.
In contrast, ClickUp has struggled with the opposite problem-–sophisticated, comprehensive task management, without a robust, easy-to-use chat feature necessary for the kind of collaboration seen on apps like Slack.
Now, ClickUp Chat seamlessly marries these key business functions, serving to further centralise 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!
ClickUp Chat is a powerful, integrated messaging tool designed to keep your team connected and streamline communication right within ClickUp. It's not just a standalone chat app – it’s built to work seamlessly with ClickUp’s other features, allowing you to manage tasks, collaborate, and stay organized all in one place.
With ClickUp Chat, you can create channels for team-wide conversations or message individual team members directly. You can also reply to messages in threads, ensuring conversations stay organised and easy to follow. It’s accessible from the sidebar, so you can always be just a click away from important updates or chats without having to leave your workspace.
Overall, ClickUp Chat brings the best of task management and communication together, making collaboration smooth and efficient while keeping everything centralized within ClickUp.
More simply put, ClickUp chat helps you better communicate with your team by allowing you to generate tasks from messages, initiate SyncUps, and leverage ClickUp AI to summarize threads and create or suggest tasks.
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.
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.
With threads you don’t have to worry about lengthy conversations clogging up your chats. Instead, workspace members can reply to messages in threads, consolidating space and making it easy to locate important conversations
With ClickUp Chat’s new SyncUp feature, you no longer have to rely on third party platforms for remote team collaboration. Instead, you can easily start and join voice and video calls, making it that much easier to flesh things out with your team.
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.
Much in the same way, customizable push notifications help you stay on top of your messages. With the ability to configure your settings to suit your needs, you can ensure that you won’t be pestered by unnecessary notifications.
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.
The Draft & Sent page shows you all the messages you’ve created or sent, providing an easy-access catalogue of sent messages while keeping track of messages you’re saving for later. Living in two distinct tabs, drafts and sent messages are separated, reducing clutter and confusion.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once enabled, ClickUp Chat lives in your sidebar, underneath your workspace icon and amongst all of your other pinned ClickApps. Click on the ‘Chat’ icon to reveal the ClickUp Chat interface, allowing you to see all of your chat channels, messages etc. ClickUp Chat is also accessible on Spaces, Folders, and Lists. Chats can be found by navigating to the corresponding Space, Folder, or List and selecting the chat icon underneath your avatar in the top right of your screen.
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.
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.
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
While there is currently no ClickUp Chat API, it is a feature request—meaning that, should enough people continue to ask for ClickUp Chat API, we are likely to see it introduced in the future. In the meanwhile, tools like Zapier can be utilized to meet your automation needs when it comes to ClickUp Chat.
With further improvements to ClickUp brain a certainty, and ClickUp’s insatiable hunger to improve, ClickUp Chat is likely to see impressive updates in the future. The kind of Updates you’d expect to hear about at Dreamforce 2025, but that might be unlikely.
Already at odds with Salesforce after introducing ClickUp Chat to rival Slack (which Salesforce happens to own), ClickUp took it one step further, creating a face protest outside of Dreamforce 2024. In a genius marketing stunt, hired actors held up “Cut the Slack” signs, making ClickUp’s intentions—to become the market leaders in communication—very clear. With many suggesting that this bold move will lead to ClickUp being banned from Dreamforce 2025, we’re unlikely to hear anything from ClickUp at next year's event.
But, rest assured, this won’t stop them from innovating!
So there you have it: A deep dive into the new and exciting ClickUp Chat.
We’ve been using this feature since its rollout a few months ago and we’re inspired by what it’s done for us, and what it can do for you. The real magic lies in the seamless connection between communication and task management. It is incredibly powerful having your conversations located in the same ecosystem as your tasks. ClickUp has gone one step further, integrating tasks into the chat feature—allowing you to effortlessly reference and create tasks. This centralized location facilitates real time communication, doing away with wasted time waiting for replies. What’s more, with the ability to create channels at any level of the hierarchy, this feature is perfectly equipped for team collaboration – keeping your communication segmented and relevant. Thankfully, the easy-to-use, intuitive interface makes getting up to speed simple so that you and your team don’t have to worry about another laborious migration.
Here at Upficient we practice what we preach. That’s why, instead of just talking about ClickUp Chat, we’ve put it to use in our own business! Now, with a comprehensive understanding of this exciting new feature, and insights on how best to use it to improve visibility, streamline workflows and enhance collaboration and communication, we can’t wait to help you leverage this new chat feature to deliver the same incredible results.