ClickUp pricing 2025: A full breakdown of plans and hidden costs

ClickUp sells itself as the one app to replace all your other work apps. It’s a big promise, and the idea of having tasks, docs, chat, and goals all in one place sounds pretty great. But as many teams are finding out, that "everything app" dream can come with a complicated and, frankly, frustrating price tag.

Recent billing changes have left some teams staring at bills that have jumped tenfold, causing a lot of confusion and anger. The goal here is to give you a clear, no-fluff breakdown of ClickUp pricing for 2025. We’ll walk through the features, the real-world limits, and the hidden costs you should know about before you sign up.

What is ClickUp?

ClickUp’s tagline is "the everything app, for work." At its heart, it’s a productivity platform trying to pull your team’s entire workflow into one spot. It mixes together task management, document creation (they call them ClickUp Docs), chat, goal tracking, whiteboards, and a whole lot more into a single tool.

While having one place for all your work sounds powerful, this one-size-fits-all approach also makes things incredibly complex. The sheer number of features can be a lot to handle, and that complexity bleeds right into its pricing model.

Breaking down the plans for ClickUp pricing

ClickUp has four main plans: Free Forever, Unlimited, Business, and Enterprise. You can also bolt on an AI add-on to any of the paid plans. Let’s dig into what you actually get for your money.

The free forever plan

• Best for: Individuals, freelancers, or tiny teams who are just dipping their toes into project management software.

• Key Features: You get unlimited tasks and can add unlimited members, which is pretty generous. It also includes collaborative docs and basic Kanban boards to get you started.

• Limitations: This is where the free plan starts to feel, well, free. The limits are tight, and you’ll probably hit them fast. You’re stuck with a tiny 60MB of storage, a maximum of five "Spaces" (ClickUp’s word for projects or departments), and a 60-use limit on important features like Custom Fields and Gantt Charts. It’s really more of an extended trial than a plan to run a business on.

The unlimited plan

• Best for: Small teams that have outgrown the free plan and need more room to work.

• Pricing: $10 per user/month if you pay monthly, or $7 per user/month if you pay for the year upfront.

• Key Features & Upgrades: The big wins here are unlimited storage, unlimited Spaces, and unlimited use of Gantt charts and custom fields. You also get more control over guest permissions.

• Limitations: Even though you’re paying, you’re still boxed in. Things that growing teams really need, like advanced automations and workload management, are locked away in the next tier. The plan also caps your usage of mind maps and certain views, which can be a real pain when you’re in the middle of a project.

The business plan

• Best for: Mid-sized teams that need better controls, security, and automation.

• Pricing: $19 per user/month on the monthly plan, or $12 per user/month on the annual plan.

• Key Features & Upgrades: This plan gets you Google SSO, unlimited "Teams" (which are just user groups), better automations, workload management to see who’s swamped, and advanced time tracking.

• Limitations: It’s a solid step up, but it’s still missing true enterprise-level stuff like HIPAA compliance, a dedicated person to help you succeed, or advanced user permissioning. The per-user cost also starts to add up fast, making it a hefty monthly expense for bigger teams.

The enterprise plan

• Best for: Large companies with serious security, compliance, and support demands.

• Pricing: You have to get on the phone with their sales team for a custom quote.

• Key Features & Upgrades: This is the "everything" plan. It includes all the Business features plus white labeling, advanced permissions, a more powerful API, a dedicated success manager, and HIPAA compliance.

• The catch: "Contact Sales" is usually code for "this is going to be expensive and take a while." It’s not a great choice for teams that just want to sign up and get going without a few weeks of demos and back-and-forth negotiations.

The AI add-on

• Pricing: It costs an extra $7 per user, per month, and you can only add it to a paid plan.

• Functionality: It gives you an AI Knowledge Manager, an AI Project Manager, and an AI Writer. This add-on is a perfect example of what frustrates so many users: ClickUp seems busy launching shiny new features while core problems with confusing billing, bugs, and slow performance are still there.

The hidden costs of ClickUp pricing

The price on the website is just the beginning. The real cost of using ClickUp can be buried in the fine print and the platform’s own complexity.

How confusing user roles affect ClickUp pricing

One of the biggest gripes you’ll see from ClickUp users is about the confusing difference between "members" and "guests." This isn’t just a small detail, it’s the reason people get hit with huge, unexpected bills. One user on Reddit shared how their bill shot up from $150 to nearly $1,200 overnight with no warning.

Our bill went from $150/year to $1188/year with zero notice. What in the actual f*ck. Did this happen to anyone else? We use ClickUp for our internal wiki, and to collaborate with a large number of contractors. We can't use ClickUp anymore.

Reddit

The problem is that a simple, everyday action, like assigning a task to a contractor, can automatically flip that free "guest" into a full-paid "member," adding another seat to your monthly bill. There’s no pop-up, no confirmation email. You usually don’t realize what happened until the invoice arrives. A pricing model that punishes you for collaborating feels broken.

How feature bloat impacts the value of ClickUp pricing

There’s a feeling among long-time users that ClickUp would rather launch new features than fix old ones. AI tools and new views look cool in marketing demos, but in the real world, users are struggling with a platform that can be slow, laggy, and buggy. One person mentioned that the time tracker, a basic feature you need for billing clients, would just randomly delete hours of logged time.

This video explains the critical difference between guest and member roles and how it can unexpectedly affect your ClickUp pricing.

When you can’t rely on your project management tool to do the basics, it doesn’t matter how many shiny objects it offers. An "everything app" can easily become a master of none, causing more headaches than it solves.

Is an ‘everything app’ the right home for your knowledge?

A lot of teams, like the one in that Reddit thread, move years of documents and company knowledge into ClickUp to build a central wiki. It makes sense on the surface, but this approach has some big downsides.

The problem with wikis inside a project tool

When you build your knowledge base inside a project management tool, that information gets stuck there. It’s trapped inside ClickUp, making it hard for your support agents to quickly find answers while they’re working in their help desk (like Zendesk or Freshdesk). As the tool gets cluttered with projects and tasks, finding the right doc becomes a real chore. More importantly, the knowledge isn’t set up in a way that’s actually useful for powering a customer-facing AI chatbot.

Unify your knowledge without replacing your tools

Instead of trying to cram all of your company knowledge into one massive, complicated tool, a better idea is to use a platform that’s built to connect your knowledge from wherever it already lives.

This is where a tool like eesel AI comes into the picture. Rather than making you move everything, eesel AI connects to the tools you already use, whether your knowledge is in Confluence, Google Docs, old support tickets, or even ClickUp itself. It works as a smart layer on top of your existing setup, giving you a few key benefits:

• You can be up and running in minutes, not months. eesel AI uses one-click connections to plug into your help desk and knowledge sources. You don’t have to "rip and replace" anything. You can set it all up yourself without ever talking to a salesperson.

eesel AI connects seamlessly with tools you already use, like Confluence, Google Docs, and Zendesk, to unify your knowledge.

• The pricing is transparent and predictable. Unlike the billing surprises you can get with ClickUp, eesel AI has a straightforward pricing model based on your needs, with no per-resolution fees. You’ll never get a bigger bill just because you had a busy support month.

• You have total control and can see how it works. Before you go live, you can run simulations on thousands of your past tickets. This shows you exactly how the AI will perform, what your resolution rate will look like, and where your knowledge gaps are. You can start small by automating just one type of ticket and grow from there.

With eesel AI, you can run simulations on past tickets to see how the AI will perform and identify knowledge gaps before going live.

Is ClickUp pricing right for your team?

ClickUp is a powerful platform, no doubt. But its "everything" approach brings a lot of complexity, stability issues, and costs. The pricing can feel like a minefield of confusing user roles and surprise charges, leaving you with a tool that might be making more work for you.

The idea of an all-in-one solution is tempting, but it’s worth asking if one bloated platform is really better than a handful of great tools that are each best-in-class at what they do. For something as critical as customer support and knowledge management, relying on a system that wasn’t designed for it can be a risky bet.

If you’re looking to actually use the knowledge scattered across your tools and automate support without the headaches and unpredictable costs, take a look at how eesel AI can help you launch a powerful AI agent in minutes.

This video provides a helpful overview of the different ClickUp pricing plans to help you decide which one might be right for your team.