Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
ClickUp
Score 8.6 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ClickUp is a productivity platform that brings together work apps, data, and workflows. Also presented as a Converged AI Workspace, ClickUp eliminates work sprawl to provide context and a single place for humans and agents to work together. The platform currently boasts over 20 million users worldwide.
$0
per month per seat
Pricing
Azure DevOps
ClickUp
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
There are some very powerful task management apps out there, but they are complex to configure and quite heavy-weight (not mentioning expensive), so probably the team will need to spend time to familiarize, and the person managing the task management tool has to spend …
Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.
ClickUp is well suited to organize projects and communicate internally with teams members and externally with clients or vendors. If you need to track emails, any emails responded to from an email sent within ClickUp is automatically tracked within the task where it originated. It also works great for storing document files within projects and tasks and tracking multiple versions of documents created or copied within ClickUp
Customization is huge for us! We do not have the aspects of standard project management, so having the ability to customize basically everything in ClickUp is amazing.
An outstanding free version of the software! We are a small nonprofit organization that cannot afford the robust levels of other software, so having access to SO MUCH for free is incredible.
The layout and organization of tasks, Spaces, folders, etc. is perfect. I love how I can see which task all of my subtasks belong to on my dashboard. And the option to change colors and icons for everything also really appeals to my obsessive brain.
I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
It has been a game-changer in terms of project tracking, as animation is a demanding product that requires multiple layers of analysis, revisions, tracking, scheduling, etc. ClickUp simplifies many approvals as anyone can easily add items, and you can tag the people who need to look at them.
It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).
Because for me, working with teams, ClickUp has provided a service that we longed for. Something that is non-complicated and easy to maneuver. We understand the learning curve can be steep, but we are willing to give the software a chance because it is everything we hoped it would be. However, leadership found the project works for our organization at this time. Moreover, we can customize to our needs.
For over a year ClickUp was unavailable to us just twice for a couple of hours. I would say for a system this big and working globally that was a minor issue. They managed to fix all the issues within a couple hours and then it was back up and running perfectly fine.
The speed of ClickUp is average to be honest. This is one of the biggest flaws of the system, sometimes it's also lagging a little bit but we also have a lot of documents, lists etc. on our workspace. However, with the next version of ClickUp I've seen they are planning to increase the speed by almost 500%, probably by changing the technology, so I am more than looking forward to it.
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
I started using ClickUp when it was what most would consider a baby company. There were the occasional bugs that made working in ClickUp a little bit of a headache, but the support feature allowed me to chat with a real persona and communicate my issues. I would always get prompt support and someone willing to really help me, not just point me to FAQ pages. Not feeling like a number really makes a difference.
There are multiple guides on literally all of the functions you can find within the system, therefore it's easy to learn anything you'd really like to use, starting from project and people management, down to Gantts, mind maps, time tracking, inviting Clients as guests to work with you on the projects and so much more.
Start small. Don’t try to build the most elaborate plans first. Resist the urge to get into Gantt charts if no one is used to them. Just get work written, add dates and assignees, and start getting used to it. If you did not use a work management tool before, you need to be gracious with yourself about the fact that you likely do not have the muscle memory for working this way yet. But you will get there.
And leverage people who know it if possible. Look for ClickUp experts and vendors. They can really supercharge your effectiveness at building the tool out and speed up the process.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
I used Salesforce at my last job and would recommend ClickUp if utilizing the product for more than just sales. My last company tried using Salesforce for a number of other actions, such as department project tracking, client documentation, and outbound communication which did not work well. ClickUp is far better at managing multiple levels of organization within a company.
Scaling with ClickUp is superb. If you create a workflow best suited for your organization then it's all about creating new accounts and teaching the new employees the workflow you're using. It's that simple. There is no black magic when it comes to Clickup.
We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
