If you're interested in investing in a project management and collaboration tool for your team, Lark and ClickUp have emerged as two popular platforms as they both offer similar features such as chat, document collaboration, task assignment, and project management functions. In this blog post, we will compare the differences between Lark and ClickUp, and explore the values they bring to collaboration and project management.
Plans: Pay less and get more with Lark
Lark and ClickUp both offer different pricing plans depending on the specific needs of organizations; however, in order to get all the functions your teams need, the actual bill you need to pay in order to get ClickUp up and running for your team can be larger than what's showcased on the pricing page.
On Lark, your business does not need to buy multiple tools to fulfill the growing needs and IT management can be simplified with just one paid plan. However, for ClickUp, you are highly likely to purchase another platform and spend time figuring out integrations. If ClickUp is your main platform, the costs quickly add up when you need to fully run a business beyond project management and accommodate a larger team.
For example, in order to get a basic stack for a 100-employee company, a business might need to pay 208% more if they buy business plans for ClickUp + Google Workspace + Slack, compared with if they go ahead with Lark's pro plan to still get all the functions the teams need. While the cost of each platform depends on the specific needs of the organization, Lark's pricing model for what each plan offers makes it an affordable, simple option for businesses looking for a comprehensive collaboration platform.
Purpose: Lark is more than project management
To overview, let's go over a brief side-by-side comparison of ClickUp and Lark's overall features:
Lark and ClickUp have comparable features, but the two platforms differ in comprehensiveness. ClickUp is focused on project management, going into the depths of task management, deadlines, and project process tracking. However, ClickUp does not cover other scenarios of collaboration, and hence is missing key features that Lark has chosen to build into the app, such as video conferencing, multi-language support, approvals, and many more — all of which boost teams to become more efficient and finish all their work in just one place.
ClickUp centers around building a "workspace" for each project, allowing users to create "spaces" within each workspace to organize specific tasks and deadlines. In each space, users can also create chats, tables, task lists, and visual maps (Kanban boards, Gantt charts, whiteboards, and mind maps).
While ClickUp revolves around spaces, Lark centers around chat. In Lark, schedule meetings, start video calls, send out automated reminders, and create docs within your chats with coworkers — which means no hopping around various apps to complete your work.
In addition, Lark takes the different facets of collaboration a team needs for work into consideration. Not only does Lark have all of these main project management functions like ClickUp, but Lark also enables the team to choose how they'd like to collaborate - in real time, or asynchronously. For example:
Base: build tools and workflows that adapt to any need of your team project, from a store inspection system for frontline employees, to a dashboard for sales, or a timeline for project managers. It's proven as a solid ClickUp replacement when helping teams integrate chat with dashboards, witnessing sales trends through transparent monthly targets and goals among sales, customer success, and marketing teams.
What further sets Lark's Base as the better option is the connection with Lark's Messenger, where project progress, reminders, and alerts can all be delivered to the same chat feed that the team use for day-to-day work communications, so that they can stay on top of updates and act conveniently.
Meetings: schedule and create video meetings that can translate in real-time for remote teams across different time zones and regions. Some in-meeting collaboration tricks include:
Magic Share: share documents with others for multi-user collaboration, real-time commenting, and editing. Browse the content freely or follow the presenter's pace during a presentation
Minutes: automatically transcribe video meetings into transcripts that you can view, search, and collaborate on
OKR: build aligned objectives and effectively break out goals into actionable key results for teams to march forward in the same direction; make objectives and key results of each team member visible, creating a transparent culture and providing more context for cross-team collaboration.
Suitable Teams: Lark is intuitive and friendlier for teams in both front and back offices
80% of the world's workforce do their job without a desk; thus, it's important to use a collaboration platform that is friendly for both front and back offices. A simple user experience and interface also play a significant role in how easy it is to onboard your teams. An unintuitive platform can lead to a challenging experience and if teams can't get aboard with a collaboration platform, companies are wasting their IT budget by buying a tool that employees won't use.
ClickUp provides a range of project views to help teams organize and track tasks, and includes tabs like chat, doc, and Wiki to consolidate contexts about a project. While this helps teams focus on each project, some users may find it difficult to toggle between multiple spaces and quickly locate specific documents. With an upper menu bar, along with a left side bar, it can be confusing to understand what is offered at each one. ClickUp experiences speed issues with users as well, which can lead to a disappointing user experience.
While ClickUp is mainly built for knowledge workers and project teams, Lark centers experience around collaboration and makes it easy to navigate for all teams. Despite all the features built into one app, everything a team needs is immediately accessible and displayed in the sidebar on desktop and at the bottom on mobile, making it intuitive for users to navigate and collaborate wherever they are. Project teams can still easily focus by creating project-specific chat groups, where project timelines, docs, boards, and more can be pinned as tabs for instant access.
An easy-to-use collaboration platform suitable for both desktop and smaller devices is essential for helping those who need to work from any device as needed. Lark's Base, a proven alternative to ClickUp, can not only help those in the office manage projects efficiently with custom views and automated workflows, but also incorporate mobile-friendly elements to cater to more project types and more kinds of businesses. For instance, teams who work in the field usually need to rely on mobiles to submit reports, raise issues, or check numbers. Using a form view in Lark's Base, they can share such information in a few taps via the form, making it easy for frontline teams to stay connected and suitable for businesses with deskless teams such as retail stores, construction sites, or warehouses.
Plus, Lark has features specifically made to help with mobile work — for instance, Picture-in-Picture mode allows you to attend meetings and also write in docs within one app at the same time, minimizing the user flow. The voice-to-text transcription also makes it easy for users to take notes and communicate with their team without having to type. Mobile work has never been easier - edit all of your documents on your phone, input data into Base forms, or share your documents while taking video meetings through your mobile device with Magic Share.
ClickUp also has mobile apps available for iOS and Android devices like Lark, but the app's functionality is limited compared to the desktop version. For example, the mobile app does not support certain features such as custom fields, which can be crucial for project management. In addition, users are still required to also download multiple other apps to complete all work online: to conduct video meetings, users might need to download the Zoom app, making it challenging to take notes from going back and forth between apps.
Global Collaboration: Lark's a winner for collaborating with global teams
It can be challenging to collaborate with coworkers who do not reside in the same time zone as you or speak the same language. However, Lark makes it easy for you to communicate without having to worry about sending out messages at the right time or overcoming language barriers unlike ClickUp, which only supports English and doesn't display various time zones.
Lark's integrated approach to collaboration and communication makes it easier for teams to work together seamlessly, regardless of language barriers and different time zones. Some examples include:
Calendar: when scheduling meetings with coworkers, automatically view their time zones aligned with yours side-by-side, so you don't need to worry about manually calculating the difference in hours and getting the time wrong.
Multi-language support: Lark supports real-time chat and document translation, including English, Chinese, Japanese, and more, while ClickUp only supports English. This helps team members who speak different languages to communicate effectively. While ClickUp does offer third-party integrations with translation services, additional time and cost might be needed in order to get them up and running.
Security: both meet industry standards
Lark and ClickUp have strong security measures in place, including end-to-end encryption and strict data privacy policies. Both Lark and ClickUp are compliant with industry standards and regulations: they are ISO 27001 certified, which is a globally recognized information security standard, and also comply with GDPR, CCPA, and other data protection laws, ensuring the platform is secure and protects user data.
ClickUp and Lark are also SOC 2 compliant, which is a set of standards for managing customer data. SOC 2 compliance demonstrates that ClickUp has implemented measures to ensure the security, availability, and confidentiality of customer data.
Lark also complies with SOC 3 standards and has secured multiple certifications across information security, privacy information management, cloud security, and cross-border security, and Lark's data is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). More information on Lark's data security and compliance can be found in Lark Trust Center.
In Conclusion
Overall, Lark is a better option for businesses looking for a reliable and cost-effective productivity and collaboration platform. It not only replaces ClickUp's features on project management, but also incorporates flexible ways of collaboration to make the project management piece more powerful and efficient. In addition, Lark empowers employees to collaborate and work from anywhere, whether it's at a desk, on-the-go, or on the frontline.
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