If you're looking for a project management and collaboration tool for your team, Lark and ClickUp both offer robust features that cater to a wide variety of industries. Both apps offer features such as chat, document collaboration, task assignment, and project management functions. In this blog post, we will compare Lark vs ClickUp, and explore the benefits they bring to collaboration and project management.
Lark vs ClickUp: Pricing
Lark and ClickUp both offer different pricing plans depending on the specific needs of organizations. But it’s not just about the price listed on the pricing page — it’s about what you’re actually getting for that price. To get all the functions your team needs, for example, the actual bill you need to pay to get ClickUp up and running can be larger than what's showcased on their pricing page.
With Lark, the free forever plan offers a robust feature set that can get a team started right away. It includes essential tools such as Calendar, Email, and Approval as well as collaborative document management apps such as Docs, Sheets, and Wiki. What’s more, you get a powerful no-code data management app called Base that has diverse use cases, from project management to CRM. In 2025, ClickUp’s free plan, on the other hand, only offers 100MB of cloud storage and limited features, so it is only suitable for personal use.
For paid plans, Lark’s pricing is also better than ClickUp when the total cost of a typical team’s tech stack is taken into account. With ClickUp, your team may still want to subscribe to a video calling tool or a spreadsheet app. All these costs quickly added, not to mention, that the user experience is also negatively impacted, having to constantly toggle between apps. For example, if you have 100 employees in your company and are paying for ClickUp, Google Workspace, and Zoom, you can save at least $25,200 per year if you switch to Lark.
Lark vs ClickUp: Purpose
While Lark and ClickUp offer comparable features, the two platforms differ in their scope and comprehensiveness. ClickUp specializes in project management, excelling in task management, deadlines, and project tracking. However, it falls short in supporting other areas of collaboration. Lark, on the other hand, goes beyond project management by integrating key features like video conferencing, multi-language support, approvals, and more—all within a single platform. These tools empower teams to work more efficiently and complete all their tasks in one streamlined workspace. For project management, Lark Base can be easily picked up by users of any technical level. For more complex projects, Meegle is also available as an alternative.
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 team 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, you can schedule meetings, start video calls, receive 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 the main project management functions of 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, monitoring 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 offer real-time translations for remote teams across different time zones and regions. It also boasts some practical in-meeting collaboration features, including:
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: Set aligned objectives and effectively break down goals into actionable key results for teams to pull in the same direction. It also makes the objectives and key results of team members visible to each other, creating a transparent culture and providing more context for cross-team collaboration.
Lark vs ClickUp: Suitable teams
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 selected and where to look. Users experience speed issues with ClickUp as well, which can lead to a frustrating 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 remote work and agile teams. 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 it is just as easy to use on mobile, which makes it more suitable for a wide range of businesses. For instance, teams who work in the field usually need to rely on phones to submit reports, raise issues, or check on the latest numbers. Using Lark Base, they can share such information in a few taps via a 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. And with a rich library of templates, any team — no matter the industry — can get started quickly and customize them to fit their unique needs.
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 at the same time without switching apps, minimizing the user flow. The voice-to-text transcription also enables users to take notes and communicate with their team without having to type. Mobile work has never been easier — edit documents, input data into a database through forms, or present documents in video meetings, all can be done through your phone.
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.
Lark vs ClickUp: Global collaboration
It can be challenging to collaborate with coworkers who do not reside in the same time zone as you or speak the same language. Lark is designed to tackle these challenges in mind, with auto-translations and time zone information for scheduling. ClickUp, on the other hand, supports only 7 languages for its UI, none of which are from Asia. It also doesn't show the time zones of colleagues in other locations.
Lark's integrated approach to collaboration and communication makes it easy for global teams to stay connected and work seamlessly with teams. Some examples include:
Calendar: when scheduling meetings, team members can see their colleague’s time zone and availability, eliminating the need to calculate the time difference.
Multi-language support: The platform supports 15 languages for its user interface, along with real-time chat, meeting, and document translation in 24 target languages, breaking down language barriers and fostering seamless collaboration across diverse teams.
Lark vs ClickUp: Security compliance
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.
Image source: clickup.com
ClickUp and Lark are both SOC 2 compliant, which is a set of standards for managing customer data. SOC 2 compliance demonstrates that both products 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.
Lark vs ClickUp: Final verdict
When it comes to Lark vs ClickUp, the verdict is clear. Lark comes out on top for helping teams to work smarter, faster, and more cost-effectively.
While ClickUp is a capable project management software, its focus is narrow — primarily centering around task and project tracking. Lark, on the other hand, is not simply a project management tool, offering an all-in-one workspace that empowers teams to communicate, collaborate, and manage projects without having to constantly switch between tools or pay for multiple subscriptions.
From a cost perspective, Lark delivers unbeatable value. Many of the tools that teams would need to pay extra for when using ClickUp — such as video conferencing, emails, spreadsheets, and advanced data management — are already included in Lark’s paid plans. And for growing businesses, the savings add up fast. By consolidating your tool stack into Lark, companies can cut down on unnecessary software spend while also improving user experience and productivity.
Not only does Lark include project management essentials, but it also gives teams options depending on how simple or complex their projects are. There is Lark Base for building custom workflows, tracking tasks, or managing projects in a flexible way — and Meegle for teams that need more advanced project management power.
With chat at the heart of the platform, Lark brings all your work — from meetings to knowledge management to document management and file sharing — into one seamless, connected experience. Instead of juggling between disconnected tools, everything happens right where your conversations are already happening — making it easier to share ideas, stay aligned, and turn talk into action.
Whether you’re a startup looking to scale efficiently, an enterprise looking to consolidate your tools, or a business with frontline teams that need mobile-friendly solutions, Lark is designed to support every team, in any industry, from anywhere.
