Monday.com vs ClickUp: The Best Project Management App for Freelancers
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More and more people in the content creation business are starting to see the benefits of utilizing project management apps to keep track of their workflow, issue invoices, and even communicate with trusted customers. These apps serve as hubs whereby you can handle various business-related processes without the need to rely on an entangled quagmire of conflicting standalone programs.
Monday.com and ClickUp are two of the most comprehensive apps of this kind for freelance writers, editors, content creators, and writing businesses alike. However, both satisfy in slightly different ways (more on this later).
Benefits of Using a Project Management App
If you are a freelance writer, you can keep track of all your writing projects easily. For example, if client X says they need a piece written by next week, you add this task to the calendar and set the priority, deadline, and current status so as to track the progress. This helps when you have various clients asking you for content at once.
If you own or manage a writing business or editorial, you’ll likely be working with a content writer, an editor, and a designer. These apps allow you to assign tasks to all of them with specific deadlines and to-do lists. You can also use templates for this purpose, saving you considerable time.
To give an example, the content writer has the task of drafting the core writing (e.g., article, post, advertisement, etc.) When they’re done, they let the editor know via the app (by changing the status of the assignment or posting a comment) so that the editor can review the writing.
After the editor is done, they can tag the designer, who gives the content its final form. Next, the person in charge of dealing with clients can notify them that their project has been completed (often via an internal email tool). They can also generate the invoice without having to install separate invoicing software. Your team can do all of this without resorting to an external communications tool!
On top of that, a lot of these apps offer marketing tools, like automated email marketing for landing potential clients. With tools like these, you can meet all your marketing needs without requiring a specialized program. In a nutshell, they are your enterprise’s all-in-one business solution!
Monday vs ClickUp Comparison
In this comparison, we’re going to look at the key differences between two leading project management tools: Monday and ClickUp.
What Is Monday.com?
Monday.com (or simply Monday) is a cloud-based workflow management software capable of integrating the tasks of various departments, including marketing, sales, customer relationship management (CRM), SEO management, and many others. It’s a perfect tool for keeping up with the rest of the team and making teamwork more synchronized.
Monday is, by and large, designed for entrepreneurs and small- and medium-sized businesses, though freelancers like independent writers and editors can also benefit from it.
The service is great because it easily integrates with tools such as LinkedIn, HubSpot, Facebook, Shopify, WordPress, Zapier, and even Google Calendar, among many others.
What Is ClickUp?
ClickUp is primarily designed with project management in mind.
With it, you can organize your delivery schedule better when managing various projects simultaneously. Its handy (and highly customizable) dashboard gives you a detailed outline of your time reporting, financial data, sales pipeline, and many other elements. You can take advantage of these functions even as a sole freelancer, especially if you handle heavy workloads by yourself.
ClickUp has a sizable host of integrations so you can link it with big platforms and applications like Google Drive, Outlook, Dropbox, Buffer, YouTube, and many more.
The calendar view is one of the app’s biggest highlights. It’s pretty self-explanatory, and freelancers will definitely appreciate how tasks are color-coded according to their urgency, so you can have the visual aid needed to quickly prioritize your writing work and even manage time off.
Let’s now compare both apps side-by-side. But before remarking on the distinctions, we’ll first point out all the things they have in common:
Similarities
Both Monday and ClickUp share a wide array of similarities, including:
- Customizable dashboards
- Time tracking and CRM solutions
- Desktop and mobile apps
- Integrations with the most popular calendar services, such as Google Calendar
- Invoicing software, which is essential to ensure client satisfaction and tax compliance
- Platforms to help you manage your team’s workload
- Marketing campaign management, which is crucial for every writer wishing to have a broader reach and generate leads
- Email marketing (a quintessential tool for freelance writers and writing companies that are just starting out)
- Easy client communication
So which one should you choose? Let’s start with Monday.com.
Why Choose Monday.com?
As said earlier, Monday is ideal for businesses and organizations that simultaneously handle work via various teams.
The first aspect to admire about Monday is its ease of use. While you don’t need coding knowledge for either app, ClickUp can be a bit complicated for beginners. Organizations with little training time can appreciate the straightforwardness that Monday offers.
Ease of use is critical when evaluating an app’s worth, especially when implementing it for collective work. In that sense, Monday shines. Moreover, the generous number of templates Monday offers makes the user experience even better.
Monday also gives a bit more leeway in task management thanks to its unique approach to sub-tasks. ClickUp bounds all sub-tasks to their parent’s properties. But Monday grants more versatility here, giving users the ability to set different parameters than those on the parent item. This feature can be a blessing or a nuisance, depending on how organized you are.
The features included in Monday are more than enough for most small businesses. Some of the additional features found in ClickUp are useful, but many can be classed as “gimmicks” that hardly boost the experience.
Why Choose ClickUp?
While Monday is ideal for small writing businesses due to its usability, ClickUp helps in a number of other ways.
One incredibly helpful feature that ClickUp offers and that Monday lacks is the Chat View feature. With it, team members can interact in real-time as they undertake their collaborative tasks.
The chat functions might not be as fleshed out as those of Microsoft Teams, but they’re surprisingly functional. You can share links, files, and embeds, which is what most business chats are for, anyways. This is a neat replacement for external communications services and applications.
Another feature absent in Monday is the mind map, which is a neat alternative to the usual boards and lists typical of all other SaaS. For example, you can use it to better outline all the stages of a writing or video project, especially as they involve various departments or teammates.
On another note, whereas Monday comes with a bundle of dedicated products, ClickUp strives to blend all the functionalities of a program suite into one single unit. In a sense, it’s the go-to app for every single management tool you need, so you don’t have to open multiple processes to manage your business.
ClickUp’s CRM is a bit tricky to operate, but you won’t need to incur extra charges to enjoy CRM-related features as you would with Monday. Monday’s CRM is sold as a standalone product.
This segues into ClickUp’s most prominent attraction: Its Free Forever plan. Individual freelancer writers may cherish all the returns they get with ClickUp without having to disburse a penny. Conversely, Monday no longer offers a free plan, only a 14-day free trial.
Pricing Comparison
Both products have relatively comparable prices. ClickUp’s pricing structure is a bit more streamlined than Monday’s, and its cheaper plans offer a wider variety of features. In addition, as mentioned earlier, it proposes a beefier free plan, with in-app video recording and time tracking included.
As of this writing, ClickUp’s cheapest plan (“Unlimited Plan”) is currently $5 per member monthly, while the most affordable Monday.com plan (called simply “Basic”) is valued at a total of $10 per seat (with a minimum of three seats/members).
Monday vs ClickUp: Which One Is Better for Freelance Writers and Small Writing Businesses?
The winner of this showdown is ClickUp.
ClickUp’s pricing, in proportion to the features that consumers obtain, is much more enticing, especially for freelance writers. Also, while Monday does have the upper hand in usability, it’s not overly complicated for small writing teams to get acquainted with ClickUp’s design after some brief training sessions.
Lastly, the lack of a chat feature on Monday – similar to ClickUp’s Chat View – is another big letdown, along with the need to add the CRM feature as a separate item on the order list.
Even though both are close competitors, we’d have to give ClickUp a slight leg-up.
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