Best for: Small teams that want lists, boards, Gantt charts, automations and AI in one free workspace and do not mind a busy, heavy app
ClickUp passed every step of our project-management test on the free plan: all the views, a working automation, dependencies, recurring tasks, a 500-row import and an AI that got the facts right and asked before changing anything. It is heavy, though: the Windows app needs about 14 seconds and up to 2 GB of memory, and the import and setup make you do more by hand than they should.