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5 Reasons to Consolidate Your Business Tools and Save With ClickUp

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Does it feel like the number of tools in your tech stack keeps growing, but actual work is getting harder to complete?

It’s more common than you think—the 2020 Blissfully SaaS Trends Report found enterprise companies use an average of 288 different business tools in the entire organization.

Currently, the average enterprise company pays for an additional 7.6 business tools with the same functionality. With so many SaaS subscriptions and communication tools dispersed across the entire organization, there’s a serious and unnecessary amount of money wasted.

In fact, the number of duplicate online business tools skyrockets by 80% year over year. 🤯

More likely than not, your small business or enterprise organization could financially benefit by consolidating your tech stack. But you don’t want to get rid of things just to save some cash. Instead, you need business tools that save money and improve workflows, so your team accomplishes more in less time! ⚡️

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We’ll just go ahead and say it—there are serious justifications for how your business can save with ClickUp.

It’s not just about reducing the number of business tools. With ClickUp, you give your teams the space to collaborate, assign tasks, and keep projects moving with an easily-customizable platform tailorable to everyone.

And for most, nothing impacts the bottom line quite like productivity!

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Why Fewer Business Tools Is More Than Saving Money

Security firm STANLEY Security found themselves siloed across multiple online business tools before adopting ClickUp. As a virtual organization, STANLEY needed to take a bottom-up approach to improve processes and collaboration anywhere. 

Stanley Security Internal Survey for ClickUp
STANLEY Security surveyed its internal employees to understand the impact of ClickUp

“As a technology innovation team, we need to stay organized and flexible to adapt to changing project requirement,” said Connor Nash, Global Experience Analytics Manager at STANLEY Security.

“We use a variety of project management techniques to reach our goals, and ClickUp has been central to that,” Nash added. “We’re able to customize and automate ClickUp to suit each specific initiative, and it has allowed us to streamline and simplify our workflows, which has increased our team’s capacity exponentially.”

The results of moving to a centralized productivity workspace were impressive:

  • 8+ hours saved each week on meetings and team updates
  • 50% decrease in time spent building and sharing reports
  • 80% increase in improved teamwork

So, how else can businesses save with ClickUp? 

Check out five reasons why ClickUp is the most cost-effective collaborative hub to bring work together, across all teams, in one place.

1. Teams work better together under one roof

Jumping back and forth between online business tools is tiring.

When information is trapped inside your various business tools, employees get burnt out searching for what they need to get their work done. Research shows 45% of employees believe context switching makes them less productive.

That’s why it’s imperative to get your entire team working together under one roof that’s specifically designed to help teams collaborate from start to finish. A single space makes it easier for teams to reclaim their day and for leads to see real business growth. 🌱

Custom automation in ClickUp
Use pre-built automation recipes or customize them based on your business needs, so your team can focus where it matters most

It’s why so many small businesses and large companies find ClickUp to be a real money-saving solution. Business owners quickly discover how ClickUp cuts down the number of tools that overlap with our numerous features.

Don’t just take our word for it—Nick Foster, Director of Product Management at Lulu Press, the self-publishing book company, explained how his team immediately saw a 12% increase in work efficiency when using ClickUp as the source of truth.

And in the process, the publisher replaced two of its project management tools with one!

When we were using Jira, our developers were updating platform code that wasn’t associated with Jira at all. Then they would have to spend time going back into Jira and manually make a status change. We spent too much time trying to determine feature statuses rather than focusing on delivering them.

Nick FosterDirector of Product Management @ Lulu Press

Lulu Press centralized its team with a single workspace hub and significantly expedited product releases by eliminating duplicate tasks across multiple platforms like Jira.

With ClickUp’s powerful GitHub integration and robust Automation feature, Lulu’s web development team cut the repetitive manual work and saved 8+ hours a week with one app. 🧑‍💻

Learn more on how ClickUp can reduce the number of duplicate apps in your organization with better features at a much lower price

2. Unleash knowledge-sharing within a central workspace

Have you ever experienced the pure chaos of trying to locate a document or piece of information when someone is unavailable to help?

It’s not fun.

And what’s worse is how time-consuming file management can be across different business tools. The previously mentioned market research shows employees spend on average 59 minutes a day just searching for information hidden in organization business tools.

ClickUp Whiteboards for adding Docs and visual cues for team collaboration
Easily customize your Whiteboards by adding in Docs, tasks, and more

Without an extensive and searchable knowledge-sharing hub, your team wastes time and money looking for the things they need to get their work done. ClickUp is the right business tool to help teams unleash knowledge with its granular search function! 🔍

Also, within the List view, you can use the filter and search features to view, find, or organize tasks in a breeze. You can use the Slapdash integration to get low-latency universal search power in ClickUp.

And with commands, you can create tasks and navigate through your Workspace with keyboard shortcuts. This gives your team an even faster way to access the information they need.

ClickUp Commands example
Create commands to further personalize and unleash the knowledge

Advanced features like search and filter allow organizations to improve file management and file sharing, so everything stays in a single space. Whether you’re storing social media marketing copy or building a calendar for email marketing outreach, ClickUp is one of the best online business tools to create and share assets.

In fact, asset organization is essential if you want to keep your business processes flexible and employees absorbed in their work. That’s why small business owners have to give teams a centralized place to work and quickly find what they need.

ClickUp Docs organizes information in one space for better file sharing, so teams provide easier access to documents across the entire company. Users can connect Docs to workflows and never worry about having to leave one business tool for another or lose information in random Google Drive accounts.

clickup docs feature
Easily insert a Table view to give more context within your ClickUp Docs

3. Get the full picture with extensive and useful features

Teams just aren’t as efficient using dozens of similar business tools instead of the same one. The good news is small business owners and large companies alike are catching on to the decentralization issues of business tools and marketing tools across teams.

In fact, the 2021 Market Guide for SaaS Management report expects half of the organizations will significantly centralize their SaaS applications by 2026. On top of disorganization and expensive duplicate business tool lists, business security risks are another can of worms with the rise in business tools—and subsequent—password sharing. 🌎

ClickUp views
Visualize tasks, projects, and workflows the way that works best for you with ClickUp’s 15+ customizable views

The problem with most productivity platforms is that they only do a few things really well. Now, compare that to ClickUp’s massive suite of features that help businesses see the full picture of a project.

Chances are you’ve heard of ClickUp. And maybe you’ve compared it to standard project management software. But what many don’t realize until they’re in ClickUp daily is that this productivity platform and online business tool does so much more.

So, to give small business owners, large companies, and team leads a better look into its capabilities, we’ll dive into three of the lesser-known ClickUp advanced features helping teams get the complete picture of their work:

Feature 1: Whiteboards 

Convert shapes into tasks in ClickUp Whiteboards
Convert shapes into tasks on your ClickUp Whiteboard to instantly put your ideas into action

While there are other similar products available from popular companies like Miro and Mural, ClickUp Whiteboards is the only virtual whiteboard tool that can take your teams’ ideas and turn them into coordinated actions. 🎯

Whether small business owners need to brainstorm, strategize, or build agile workflows, ClickUp Whiteboards can do it all! Unlike other whiteboard business tools, ClickUp can move an idea into a specific project faster with built-in task management capabilities directly from your Whiteboards. 

It’s a breeze to add context to your workflows with embedded tasks and rich formatting. And anyone across your organization can access and collaborate in real-time as if you were all in the same room!

Feature 2: Annotation and proofing

ClickUp Annotation Features
Assign comments on files for faster collaboration with ClickUp’s Annotation feature

Social media marketing, graphic design, content marketing, website owners, and product marketing teams review various documents, files, and assets daily. Many of these teams use marketing tools like Prodigy, Filestage, and Annotate. But ClickUp’s Annotation feature takes it a step further. ✍️

With the annotation and proofing features, project contributors and stakeholders no longer miss important approvals in their inboxes and create longer bottlenecks. Here’s what you can do to expedite feedback and reviews in ClickUp:

  • Upload popular file types like PNG, GIF, JPEG, WEBP, and MP4 as task attachments
  • Preview all unresolved proofing comments in the To Do section of a task
  • Open a comment from the playback bar to proof video content faster
  • Use comments to talk about updates directly on the files

Feature 3: Dashboards

Instantly find the data you need with Widgets in ClickUp Dashboards
Organize the data you need with custom widgets in ClickUp Dashboards

This is no ordinary dashboard. In fact, ClickUp’s Dashboard helps a team close to home, the San Diego Padres, run more efficiently!

Ken Kawachi, VP of Baseball Operations for the Padres, explained how ClickUp helped his team track and manage project progression, budgeted vs. actual spend, costs, and invoicing—all within a single glance in custom reports.

The MLB team needed a single, centralized business tool to manage and track the progress of their suite renovation project at Petco Park. They looked to ClickUp to visually interpret the big picture of those costs, allocated budgets, business growth, and renovation spending in real-time through variance formulas in their ClickUp Dashboard. 📊

Operations is about finding ways to maintain organization. That includes leveraging technology like ClickUp to make work more efficient and collaboration easier. ClickUp is very clear and concise, yet it allows the end user to customize the platform as much as they’d like based on their preferences. It’s helped me immensely in my day-to-day work.

Ken KawachiVP of Baseball Operations @ San Diego Padres

4. Streamline workflows with advanced customization

Disruption is the bane of productivity. It’s why teams need convenient and easy-to-use business tools to focus on the most engaging work so folks can streamline workflows.

The best way to get there is by providing your team with a powerful business tool that can be tailored to their preferences. Avoid the countless onboarding sessions and ever-changing tools brought on by team leads that have come and gone!

ClickUp was built with customizations in mind so different departments aren’t boxed into workflows made for other teams.

Whether it’s IT tracking tickets, marketers managing content, or engineers implementing agile workflows, customization becomes crucial when employees are scattered across so many paid and free tools (especially with remote teams). 🌐

Customizing the Project Scope Whiteboard Template with tasks, Docs, and more
Easily customize your Project Scope Whiteboard Template by adding in Docs, tasks, and more

A team that needed help building more collaborative workflows was the Alumni and Donor Services (ADS) department at Wake Forest University. Morey Graham, Director of ADS Projects, explained how the department struggled to improve productivity because teams wouldn’t budge on their own collaborative efforts.

This had various departments at Wake Forest using online business tools like Asana, Jira, Trello, Notion, Workfront, and Google Drive to streamline workflows. Teams constantly moved between small business tools to find documents in Google Docs, store files across accounts, assign work, provide task updates, and add data. 

Then they decided to give ClickUp a try instead. 📈

The team immediately saw an improvement in cross-departmental alignment between team projects as ClickUp became the one true source of information. Dashboard customization let teams get exactly what they needed from an online business tool, so everyone worked from a single hub—something they missed with the various other solutions.

We can now collaborate within one system and have visibility into critical data. This allows our various teams to report progress, identify workload and capacity issues, and plan in a more accurate way.

Morey GrahamDirector of ADS Projects @ Wake Forest University

5. Save time with one of the most affordable options

Teams want to save time on the work that matters most, with the context needed to do it—all without the distractions that halt productivity. Business owners also want to do this without breaking the bank. There are a lot of free business tools out there—but what about the actual cost of ClickUp?

And how does it compare to the online business tools you’re already using or considering? You have options, but not many are as powerful and affordable as ClickUp. It’s easily one of the best free tools in the industry. ✨

See our breakdown of cost per user compared to the leading online business tools for productivity:

ClickUpJiraMondayTrelloAsana
10 Users$50/month
$600/year
$70/month
$840/year
$100/month
$1,200/year
$100/month
$1,200/year
$110/month
$1,320/year
50 Users$250/month
$3,000/year
$320/month
$4,200/year
$500/month
$6,000/year
$500/month
$6,000/year
$550/month
$6,600/year
100+ Users$500/month
$6,000/year
$700/month
$8,400/year
$1,000/month
$12,000/year
$1,000/month
$12,000/year
$1,000/month
$13,200/year

ClickUp continues to be the best-priced productivity business tool in the market, but that doesn’t mean it’s the weakest. Users get more features and customization abilities compared to most of the major online business tools in the industry.

RevPartners, a revops engine building platform, was in a similar situation as Wake Forest University—they had too many online business tools across the company that did the same thing.

Dane Dusthimer, Traffic Partner at RevPartners, explained how after adopting ClickUp, the team consolidated its productivity apps from three to one business tool, which resulted in a 50% cost savings for the organization.

With ClickUp, we can access all the functionality we need in one place, which is huge for us. We’re all about adoption, and without a really easy-to-use platform that can enable it, it would be impossible to drive adoption by all teams and clients.

Dane DusthimerTraffic Partner @ RevPartners
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The Best Online Business Tools Should Save You Time and Money

Is it time to empower your team with better online tools that can cut down your app spending at the same time? We sure hope so because we’d love you to get in the driver’s seat of ClickUp’s Free Forever plan to create a free account and see why ClickUp is one of the best free tools available.

ClickUp helps small business owners and large organizations keep all of their essential online business tools in one place. From documents to tasks to business communication—you save your team one day every week.

See what all the commotion is about and start saving money with the best-rated online business tool for collaboration and productivity!

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