Valentina Akpan — Founder, Rellatech
Every other week a business asks me which one to pick. The answer is genuinely "it depends," but the way it depends is predictable. Here is how I decide.
Notion: a thinking tool that can do tasks
- ●Great for: SOPs, knowledge base, client portals, content planning, anything writing-heavy
- ●Loved because: it is beautiful, flexible, low-pressure, and pleasant to be inside
- ●Watch out for: weak recurring tasks, no real time tracking, automations are still limited
- ●Best for businesses whose brain lives in docs, not Gantt charts
ClickUp: a project tool that can do docs
- ●Great for: client work, recurring tasks, time tracking, dashboards, team handoffs
- ●Loved because: it can do almost anything, with serious automation built in
- ●Watch out for: feature overload, the learning curve is real, can feel heavy for lean work
- ●Best for businesses who actually deliver client projects week to week
A 30-second decision rule
- ●Mostly thinking, writing, planning, content? Pick Notion.
- ●Mostly delivering client projects with recurring tasks? Pick ClickUp.
- ●Business doing both? Notion for the brain, a simple Trello or Asana board for the work.
The best tool is the one you will actually open every day. Beauty matters more than features for lean work.
What I recommend most often
For most businesses I work with: Notion. It loses on power features but wins on the only metric that matters when you are alone, "do you actually use it?" If you are running a team, an agency, or repeatable client deliverables, ClickUp earns its complexity.
Want help picking and setting it up?
I build clean Notion and ClickUp workspaces for businesses. SOPs, dashboards, client portals, the lot. We can scope it on a free 20 minute call.
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