I’m Shailesh Kumar, ClickUp’s SVP of engineering, leading our company’s efforts to rearchitect our infrastructure for reliability and performance. Over the past several months, I’ve shared updates on our platform journey, and now I’m excited to tell you that ClickUp 3.0 is here!
Today, at our LevelUp conference (check it out live or on-demand here!), we officially introduced this latest version of ClickUp. In addition to adding dozens of exciting new features — from AI to Universal Search — we’ve rebuilt our database and shifted to a service-based architecture to make ClickUp more scalable, maintainable, and fault-tolerant.
You said that performance enhancements were important to you and I’m happy to say we’ve delivered these in the core areas of the platform, with more to come. Redesigning ClickUp’s architecture has been my focus since I joined the company more than a year ago, and the enhancements we’ve put in place have prepared us to move forward with confidence.
Throughout this process, we’ve been laser-focused on ensuring the highest levels of uptime, a top-notch user experience, and snappier performance.
But how? To start, we hired more than 150 engineers over the past year and a half to help rethink our infrastructure from the ground up. We’ve focused the efforts of this talented team across three core initiatives:
Summarize this article for me pleaseWe Completely Rearchitected Our Database
Our database is where our customer data sits. Given the pace of our growth, this has been a bottleneck for us. Therefore, it was important that we re-architect our database before reaching the upper limits of our current architecture.
To do this, we’ve begun to shard our database. Think of it like a library where instead of having one giant section where all the books are stored, there are many different sections so you can go straight to the appropriate section and find the book you’re looking for more quickly and efficiently.
Our new database architecture will enable us to scale infinitely while ensuring the highest levels of speed and stability.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWe Shifted to a Service-Based Architecture
A service-based architecture is essentially a way of organizing different parts of our application so that each part, or “service”, is responsible for a specific function.
You can compare it to a factory, where each worker is responsible for a specific task and performs it independently of others. These workers collaborate to create a finished product, but any of them can be replaced, perhaps with a faster and more efficient worker, without interrupting the production process.
By moving to a service-based architecture, ClickUp is more scalable, maintainable, and fault-tolerant.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWe Rewrote Our WebSockets and Application Code
You need to see your latest data in ClickUp without refreshing your browser. To make this possible, we completely rewrote our WebSocket infrastructure and our application code so that our UI can seamlessly load real-time data. Simply said, the days of having to refresh your browser to see your latest data are over.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow 3.0 Will Change Your ClickUp Experience
What do all of these massive changes mean for you? Here’s what you can expect:
- Tasks: We’ve rebuilt tasks with layers of caching and modern frameworks to improve performance. As a result, our beta users have experienced an 80% faster Task View!
- Notifications: Expect notifications to load almost instantly! Everyone will feel the speed improvements; even those with thousands of notifications will see them load within seconds.
- Views: You will no longer have refresh issues when interacting with tasks in Table View. We’re also working on improving the performance of Table View, and users with more than 100 tasks will see speed improvements of at least 2x.
- Sprint Widgets: We overhauled Sprint Widgets. These changes helped improve the performance of the time tracking and resource reporting widgets by at least 3-4x.
- Sidebar: We’ve significantly reduced the amount of data we load every time you access your work in ClickUp, resulting in a ridiculously fast performance for our new Sidebar.
- Automations: We separated long-running automations to separate queues and introduced a multi-level retry for each failed automation. As a result, we’ve seen the success rate for automation improve by 20x, and reliability is almost 100%.
- Search: Last year, we acquired a company called Slapdash, and that state-of-the-art technology has revolutionized our data model. As a result, we’re seeing 200%+ speed improvements in search queries. And more importantly, the results are now personalized so you’ll find what you’re looking for faster than ever.
The best part is, we’ve only just begun. There’s always more to be done to save you even more time.
I want to personally thank you for your feedback and patience. A project like this unfortunately takes time, and every company that’s grown as we have has to go through it at some point. It means a lot to us that you’ve stuck by our side as we’ve worked to get ClickUp’s quality back to a place we’re proud of.
Select Workspaces will begin to transition to the new ClickUp architecture next month. We can’t wait to hear how much more productive it will make you and your team!
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