How to Choose the Best ClickUp Pricing Plan For You

So you’ve decided to go with ClickUp. Great choice. Now which plan do you actually need?

What do you really need vs. what’s just nice to have? And is there a plan that’ll magically solve all your problems? (I can answer that last one quickly - no.)

ClickUp shook up its plans in October 2026. Unlimited got renamed Core, AI got baked into every plan, and there’s a new Max plan at the top. Business Plus disappeared from the public pricing page too… but it’s still around, and I think it’s still a good option for a lot of agencies.

We’ve been doing this since 2018 (we were ClickUp’s first Solutions Partner), and the “which plan?” question comes up with pretty much every team. So here’s how I’d answer it right now.

If you just want the answer:

• Business ($17/user) is the bare minimum for an agency
• Most agencies will need at least Business Plus ($28), Enterprise (quoted), or Max ($100)
• Enterprise is where most of our clients are
• AI is in every plan now, so you’re paying for some of it either way
• You can buy any of them through us at ClickUp’s official rates (annual terms, packaged with our services)

Alex Rizea and I walked through all of it on ClickUp Weekly if you’d rather watch:

ClickUp Plans and Pricing at a Glance

Six plans, cheapest to most expensive:

$0

Free Forever

$9 /user/mo

Core

Bare minimum

$17 /user/mo

Business

$28 /user/mo

Business Plus

Most of our clients

Custom

Enterprise

$100 /user/mo

Max

Purple: Where most agencies end up

And the actual numbers, per user per month (from ClickUp’s pricing page and the upgrade page inside a Workspace, November 2026):

One note on Business Plus: it’s not on clickup.com/pricing anymore. You’ll only see it on the upgrade page inside your Workspace (or we can quote it).

Which ClickUp Plan Do You Need? Take the Quiz

Five quick questions. It’s no substitute for actually talking through how your team works, but it’ll get you in the right neighborhood.

What Will ClickUp Cost Your Team?

Plug in your seat count. Also keep an eye on the AI credit pool - that’s the number that decides whether you end up buying extra credits.

Agency Features by Plan

ClickUp’s full comparison is huge. These are the rows I’d look at if I were running an agency:

Feature	Free	Core	Business	Business Plus	Enterprise - Most of our clients	Max
Capacity and time
Workload view	Trial	Trial	✓Included	Custom capacity	Custom capacity	Custom capacity
Timesheets	No	No	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included
Timesheet approvals	No	No	No	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included
Advanced time tracking	Trial	Trial	Trial	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included
Building your system
Custom Fields	Trial	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included
Required Custom Fields	No	No	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included
Tasks in multiple Lists	No	Trial	1,000 uses	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included
Conditional logic in Forms	No	No	No	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included
Automation actions / month	100	1K	10K	100K	1M	1M
Folders per Space	100	200	400	1,000	Unlimited	Unlimited
API calls / minute	100	100	100	1,000	10,000	10,000
Permissions and security
Custom permissions	No	No	No	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included
Restrict guest invites	No	No	No	✓Included	✓Included	✓Included
Custom roles	No	No	No	No	✓Included	✓Included
Limit public sharing	No	No	No	No	✓Included	✓Included
SSO	No	No	Google	Google	Google, Microsoft, Okta, SAML	Google, Microsoft, Okta, SAML
Audit trails	No	No	No	No	✓Included	✓Included
White labeling	No	No	No	No	✓Included	✓Included
AI and support
AI credits per user / month	500 total	1,000	1,500	2,000	3,000	10,000
AI Notetaker	Credits	Credits	Credits	Credits	Unlimited	Unlimited
Priority support	No	No	No	No	✓Included	✓Included

Now the plans one at a time, and when it makes sense to move up.

The Free Forever Plan: What’s Included (and the Limits)

If you’ve already decided to implement ClickUp for your team, you probably already have a Free account set up.

Yes, ClickUp’s Free Forever plan really is free: no time limit, no credit card. You get enough to try the core functionality. A lot of tools give you a short trial and then lock you out until you pay. Not so with ClickUp.

Some things that are useful for agencies right out of the box:

• Unlimited tasks and subtasks, and unlimited Free plan members
• Collaborative Docs
• Kanban Boards and Calendar view
• Sprints and SyncUps video calls
• 24/7 support

Unlimited tasks and members means you can test the platform pretty exhaustively. But the free plan only gets you so far. Here are the limits that matter most:

• Storage: 60MB total
• Spaces: 5
• Custom Fields, Gantt charts, Workload, and Timeline: trial use only
• Automations: 5 active rules and 100 automation actions per month
• AI: a Brain² trial and 500 AI credits for the whole Workspace

Why we don’t recommend the Free Forever Plan for agencies

1. If you plan to upload assets (especially creative ones) for reviews and approvals, you’ll hit the 60MB storage limit fast. A single Photoshop file could do it!
2. Custom Fields are trial-only, and they’re the building blocks of any professional ClickUp system.
3. Workload is trial-only. That’s the feature that tells you whether your team is overloaded.
4. 100 automation actions a month is about three a day.

Once you’ve decided to run your agency on ClickUp, don’t stay on Free. You’ll hit the limits fast.

Does ClickUp Have a Free Trial?

There’s no trial button on ClickUp’s pricing page. ClickUp leads with the Free Forever plan instead: $0, no credit card, no time limit. The pricing page also advertises a 100% money-back guarantee on paid plans.

ClickUp does run trials of paid plans on some Workspaces. When one ends, you don’t lose your data, but you can’t edit or add data using the paid features you were testing. To check whether your Workspace is on one, open Settings and click Billing (or Upgrade). Your trial details show on the plan you’re testing. That’s from ClickUp’s Upgrade your plan help article (November 2026).

Some paid features also come as trials on lower plans. On Free Forever, Custom Fields and Workload are trial-only, and Brain² comes with a one-time trial of 500 AI credits for the whole Workspace.

The Core Plan (Formerly Unlimited)

At $9 per member per month billed yearly ($12 month to month), Core is the cheapest paid plan. It’s what Unlimited used to be, with a new name and a $2 price bump. Here’s what you get over Free:

• Unlimited storage and unlimited Spaces
• Custom Fields and Custom Task Types. We’re huge fans of structuring work and views with Custom Fields, so this is a big deal.
• Unlimited Gantt charts, Goals, and Standard Reporting
• Guests with limited and view-only access - great for your part-time freelancer or the clients you invite into ClickUp
• Email in ClickUp (one email account)
• Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive integrations

Core is great if you’re a very small team and need to keep a close watch on every expense so you don’t end up with software bloat (it’s a real thing). Cash flow is king for young companies, so it could make sense to park your team on Core for a while.

Why we don’t recommend the Core Plan for agencies

If you pick Core, you’ll be missing some features we consider essential for running an agency in ClickUp:

1. Workload and Timeline are still trial-only. You can’t see who’s overloaded and who has room, and that’s the reason most agencies come to ClickUp in the first place.
2. No Timesheets.
3. 1,000 automation actions per month works out to about 33 a day. Automate handoffs and status changes across a few client Lists and you’ll hit that quickly.
4. Tasks in multiple Lists is trial-only, and that’s how we build client approval workflows (more on that below).
5. You’re capped at 200 Folders per Space. (Funny, given this plan was called Unlimited until October. It always had limits.)

99.9% of the time, we don’t recommend agencies use Free or Core.

So let’s get down to “Business” (pun intended).

The Business Plan

If you work with us on a ClickUp implementation, Business is non-negotiable. At a bare minimum, your team needs to be on Business.

That’s the minimum, though. Most agencies end up needing more (keep reading).

Business runs $17 per member per month billed yearly, or $25 month to month. (It was $12 and $19 before October.)

You get Workload, Timeline, Timesheets, Advanced Reporting, Time in Status, required Custom Fields, Custom Task IDs, webhooks and advanced automations, 10,000 automation actions a month, Google SSO, and Brain² with the premium AI models. Two of those are the real reason to be here:

Workload Management

For agencies, nothing in ClickUp matters more than the Workload view.

At ZenPilot, we’re pretty prescriptive and opinionated about how teams run on ClickUp. Part of the reason is that one of the most common complaints we hear from agencies is that they have no visibility into who’s doing what, when, and who’s accountable for it. (If you’re curious what’s changed recently, check out our ClickUp 4.0 review.)

With our methodology and ClickUp’s Workload view, you can see the number of tasks assigned to someone on a given day and the total of their time estimates (as long as you follow our rule: every task gets an assignee, a due date, and a time estimate).

That gives you a real picture of your team’s committed work, and it makes it a lot easier to spot when someone’s overloaded.

That’s all great and dandy, but why does that matter? Because it lets you staff your team properly. No more guessing whether your team is actually overloaded or just slow. A lot of teams are overburdened and understaffed. But the opposite happens just as often: teams are overstaffed and carrying way more overhead than they need, because nobody’s tracking the team’s workload. (Our Workload guide goes deeper.)

Tasks in Multiple Lists

This used to be a Business Plus feature. Under the new plans, Business gets it, with a limit of 1,000 uses. Business Plus and up have no limit.

It lets a single task or subtask show up in more than one List. That sounds small, but it can change how your workflow runs.

The big one for agencies is client approvals. Say you have a subtask in your process template that’s assigned to a client, but you don’t want the client seeing everything else in that List. Our approach: create a Shared Client List that the client can access, and restrict access to every other List. Then add that subtask to the Shared Client List too. It lives in both places, and the client only sees what you want them to see.

Or take sprints. If you have several sprint Lists and a master backlog, subtasks can live in multiple Lists so you can see them at the sprint level, the client level, the work category level, etc.

One more: company goals. If your goals are set up as subtasks, you can show them by department, team lead, or individual contributor without duplicating anything.

The Business Plus Plan

Business Plus is $28 per member per month (billed yearly). ClickUp pulled it off the public pricing page, but it’s still on the upgrade page inside your Workspace, and we can quote it.

Honestly, I think Business Plus is the right plan for a lot of agencies. It’s where a bunch of agency-friendly stuff shows up without making the jump to Enterprise:

• Custom capacity in Workload (huge if you use freelancers)
• Conditional logic and your own branding on Forms
• Custom permissions, plus control over who can invite guests
• Timesheet approvals and advanced time tracking
• Unlimited tasks in multiple Lists
• 100,000 automation actions a month (10x Business)

Custom Capacity in Workload

If you’re a growing agency, you’re probably using freelancers and contractors who don’t work a normal 40-hour week for you. That’s good for the books, but bad for workload management on a lower plan.

With custom capacity, you can set exactly how many hours someone is available in the Workload view, even day by day. So if a freelance designer works 8-hour days Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and nothing the other days, you can set that.

That makes it a lot easier for team leads and resource managers to spot when work has been assigned to the wrong person, or when a part-time freelancer has more work than they agreed to.

Conditional Logic in Forms

This is the feature that lets you drop tools like Typeform or JotForm. A lot of teams use those because of conditional logic. I’ll admit Typeform forms are a thing of beauty (we use their other tool, VideoAsk, for video surveys). But if you’re trying to make ClickUp your team’s single source of truth, you don’t need a separate forms tool anymore.

Conditional logic lets a form branch based on how someone answers.

For development teams, one form can capture both Feature Requests and Bug Reports, depending on what the person picks. That means fewer forms to manage for incoming work.

It works for client work request forms too. Instead of rambling emails from clients asking for random assets, point them to your Work Request Form and route the request from there.

Custom Permissions

Business Plus also gets you more control over who can do what: custom permissions, and the ability to restrict who can invite guests into your Workspace.

The guest piece is a bigger deal than it sounds. Guest seats have pretty specific use cases, and the agency operator should be the one deciding who gets one (not anybody on the team). Restrict that access!

The Enterprise Plan

Enterprise is the plan most of our clients are on. There’s no list price - ClickUp quotes it based on your team size and what you need.

It used to be the mother of all ClickUp plans (Max took that title in October). But for a lot of agencies, I think it’s still the sweet spot. You get the permissions and security stuff without paying Max prices for AI you might not use yet.

The big adds over Business Plus:

• Custom roles (beyond Admin, Member, and Guest)
• Microsoft, Okta, or SAML SSO, plus SCIM
• Audit trails, data residency, and HIPAA support (with a BAA)
• White labeling - your logo and colors on ClickUp
• Limit public sharing and make new Spaces private by default
• Priority support
• 1 million automation actions a month and 3,000 AI credits per user
• Unlimited AI Notetaker

Two of those are worth digging into for agencies.

Locking Down Sharing and Access

Have you ever had a ClickUp Doc or view shared publicly by a team member (accidentally or on purpose, no judgment here) that shouldn’t have been? On Enterprise, you can limit public sharing across the Workspace. No more accidentally sharing internal SOPs or meeting notes.

You can also make new Spaces private by default, so nothing new is visible to everyone until you decide it should be.

And custom roles let you control things like who can delete what. We’ve had clients lose entire knowledge bases and SOP libraries because someone “accidentally” deleted them. We’ve also had clients whose team members “accidentally” deleted over half of their live tasks. (I’m still not sure how that accidentally happens, but such is life.) Tighter roles can save you hours of headache. Restrict that access!

Automation and MCP Limits

If you’re moving to ClickUp, you’re thinking about productivity. If you’re thinking about productivity, you’re thinking about automation. And NOTHING is worse than hitting your automation limit and having automations quietly stop running (missed work, deadlines, follow-ups, the list goes on).

On Enterprise, you get 1 million automation actions a month. Business Plus gets 100,000, Business gets 10,000, and Core gets 1,000.

There’s a newer limit to check too: MCP calls. If your team works in ClickUp from Claude or ChatGPT, those calls count, and ClickUp now caps them per day on everything but Max (100 a day on Free, up to 25,000 on Enterprise).

One automation that doesn’t fire can mean a missed deadline (or worse, a frustrated client). Don’t move your whole agency to ClickUp and then skip the small details like this.

For a lot of agencies, the security features and limits make Enterprise worth it, even on a smaller team. Not every team needs it, though, and we’ll tell you if yours doesn’t.

For pricing, you can talk to ClickUp’s sales team, or let us quote it for you. Same official rates either way.

The Max Plan

Max is the new top plan: $100 per member per month billed yearly ($120 month to month). It’s basically everything ClickUp makes, with most of the limits pulled off.

On top of Enterprise you get:

• 10,000 AI credits per user per month (vs. 3,000 on Enterprise)
• The heaviest premium AI model usage
• Unlimited AI Fields, image generation, AI Dashboard Cards, Autopilot Agents, and Custom Skills
• No daily cap on MCP calls

Max is great. If your team is truly going all in on AI (agents running work, AI Fields everywhere, people living in ClickUp through Claude or ChatGPT), it’s probably worth a look.

Just be real about it. $100 a seat is a lot more than $28. If the AI stuff is still more of a plan than a habit, start on Enterprise or Business Plus and move up when you’re actually running out of credits. And if you’re mostly after permissions and security, Enterprise already has that.

AI in Every Plan

AI used to be an add-on (and it was all or nothing - every user in the Workspace, or nobody). Now it’s in every plan, and each plan comes with a monthly pool of credits:

Credits are pooled, so a couple of heavy users can draw on the whole team’s allowance. Run out and you can buy more ($10 per 10,000).

If you were already paying for AI, you’re basically getting a discount. If you never wanted it… you’re paying a little more now.

My take: AI is a lot more useful once your Workspace is clean. AI on top of a messy hierarchy just produces confident nonsense faster. I’d watch your credit usage for a month before buying more. (Our ClickUp AI guide goes deeper on what it actually does.)

What Happens at Renewal

If you’re on one of the old plans, here’s what will probably happen (Alex covers it in episode 26):

• You’ll probably get moved to the matching new plan right away at your current price.
• At your next renewal, you’ll pay the new list price unless you talk to ClickUp’s sales team first.
• On Business Plus or Enterprise, talk to your account executive before you renew.

Before you renew, check two things: your MCP call limit and whether anything you rely on moved plans. The feature table above has the big ones.

Also, I wouldn’t expect this to be the last increase. I think prices will keep going up, so plan for it.

And yes, you can (and should) negotiate. But getting more out of a well-trained team is way, way easier than squeezing another discount out of ClickUp - and the upside is a lot bigger.

Buying ClickUp Licenses Through ZenPilot

You can buy any of these plans through us instead of directly from ClickUp (we’re an authorized reseller). Same plans, same official rates. The difference is who you call when you’ve got a question.

Licenses are on annual terms and packaged with support, implementation, or ZenPilot Reports, because seats only pay off when your team actually uses them well. Full details are on our reseller page.

FAQ: ClickUp Plans and Pricing

Is ClickUp free?

Yes. ClickUp’s Free Forever plan costs nothing, has no time limit, and includes unlimited tasks and members. The catch is the limits: 60MB of storage, 5 Spaces, 100 automation actions per month, trial-only Custom Fields and Workload, and a Brain² trial with 500 AI credits for the whole Workspace.

Does ClickUp have a free trial?

Not on its pricing page. ClickUp leads with the Free Forever plan ($0, no credit card) and advertises a 100% money-back guarantee on paid plans. It does run paid-plan trials on some Workspaces. When a trial ends, you keep your data but can’t edit or add data using the paid features.

How much does ClickUp cost per user?

Billed yearly, ClickUp costs $9 per user per month for Core, $17 for Business, $28 for Business Plus, and $100 for Max. Billed monthly, it’s $12 for Core, $25 for Business, and $120 for Max. Enterprise is a custom quote.

What happened to ClickUp Unlimited and Business Plus?

Unlimited was renamed Core and went from $7 to $9 per user per month (billed yearly). Business Plus is still available at $28 per user per month billed yearly. It’s just not on the public pricing page anymore. You’ll see it on the upgrade page inside your Workspace, or we can quote it.

What’s the difference between ClickUp Free and Core?

Core removes the biggest Free plan limits: unlimited storage and Spaces, full Custom Fields and Gantt charts, guests with limited and view-only access, and 1,000 automation actions per month instead of 100.

Is ClickUp AI included in every plan?

Yes, as of October 2026. Every plan includes ClickUp Brain² (a trial on Free and Core) and a monthly pool of AI credits, from 500 per Workspace on Free to 10,000 per user on Max. Extra credits cost $10 per 10,000.

Which ClickUp plan is best for an agency?

Business is the bare minimum. Most agencies will need at least Business Plus, Enterprise, or Max. Enterprise is where most of our clients are, usually for the permissions, SSO, and automation limits. Business Plus is a good option for a lot of agencies, especially if you work with part-time freelancers.

Can I buy ClickUp through a partner instead of directly?

Yes. ZenPilot is an authorized ClickUp reseller. You pay ClickUp’s official rates, with no markup, on annual terms. Licenses are packaged with support, implementation, or ZenPilot Reports, and you get a partner who helps you pick the plan and puts licenses and services on one invoice.

Next Steps

Pick too cheap a plan and you’ll usually pay for it in lost time. Once you’ve picked, the next step is setting up your ClickUp hierarchy correctly.

Want to keep up with the next round of ClickUp changes? Subscribe to ClickUp Weekly. And if you’d rather have ClickUp consultants who’ve implemented ClickUp thousands of times (literally) walk through this with you, book a call with our team. We’ll help you pick the plan and quote it at ClickUp’s official rates.