Reviewed by Francesco D'Alessio
Upbase Review (2024)
Best Features, Pricing, Alternatives & Verdict
Upbase has been on our radar for sometime as productivity software reviewers, and maybe even yours, but is it worth it for planning you and your team's work schedule ahead.
What is Upbase?
Upbase is a project management software for small teams and a daily planning app too.
Used by over 100,000 teams worldwide — Try it now for free / No credit card needed
Run all your work on one platform with customizable products that scale with your needs.
What does Upbase do?
Upbase wants to help you and your team manage projects and tasks in a daily planner like experience, but also your own personal productivity.
Upbase is a strange one, for many reasons. It combines tasks, calendar, daily notes for yourself and then allows you to plan team work in lists that give you docs, links, calendar, chat, files and more. Good, but strange to see this combination of features work together.
Upbase Notable Features
Here's the positive bits we adored about Upbase to start things off:
1. Personal Daily Planner
Managing your tasks and daily schedule in Upbase was actually appealing.
Upbase is a good example of a daily planner app that helps you plan out your day in a time-blocking method and planner system that many people will like for solo use. You can add tasks to your day, or people can assign them to you, then you can drag them into your schedule which is going to be popular for the time-blocking concept.
From the main panel you can add daily notes, use notepad as more of a scribble ideas, use the pomodoro timer for focused work (with music too) and recent to find stuff fast. If you buy Upbase premium then you'll get the ability to 2-way sync the Google Calendar events and tasks into Google Calendar.
Overall, we were impressed with the personal productivity features.
2. Chat with Team
A feature that we weren't expecting in Upbase, Upbase chat.
You can send DMs and chat messages connecting them to a list or project you and the team are working on. This will be popular for a-sync work and managing the per project conversations that can be managed much easier with chats per lists.
3. Team Projects
Project management was okay, but nothing amazing in Upbase.
There's a view for tasks which has board and list view, filters and tags here too. Upbase docs, files, links felt a welcomed feature, but not completely finished as a product. The documents experience offered the basics, but nothing too complex, probably all you need for a small team scenario.
Your team's place to plan is okay, but had a lot of potential. For managing the tasks, calendar, chat this was good to get started and allow your team room to co-ordinate.
Used by over 100,000 teams worldwide — Try it now for free / No credit card needed
Run all your work on one platform with customizable products that scale with your needs.
Upbase Cons
Let's unpack the bits we didn't like about Upbase:
1. Feature Dense
There's a lot going on in Upbase. Not as much as say Notion, but at least Notion's features are hidden under the abilities and the block building command bar. Features like documents, tasks and calendar (and which view to go with) felt a bit disjointed.
With Upbase everything is out to show and this might be overwhelming - although the features are pretty extensive, we actually found that for the average joe it might too much.
2. Lacks Desktop Apps
For a well-designed desktop, landscape experience, Upbase lacks the ability to really make that space useful with no macOS or Windows apps sadly. This app would be one that translates very well to desktop too, but you can only use Upbase on web.
Some elements of the experience on webOS weren't amazing, like the ability to add the task to a calendar lacked a modal for adding more detail to the schedule view. Maybe a bug, but some elements of the experience felt 80% finished.
Upbase is an independently developed application.
How much does Upbase cost?
Upbase is free with an $8 per month upgrade for unlimited access. Updated January 2024.
Features like Google Calendar, guests unlimited lists are locked under Upbase premium.
Verdict: Is Upbase any good?
Upbase is an interesting option if you're hunting for something to organize your team.
We wouldn't recommend Upbase for a team larger than say 20 people. But for lower than 20 people it combines chat, task management, personal productivity features and features like notes and daily notes to keep your team more organized for their day ahead. Upbase has a lot of potential, you can see. They just need finish off some features to team's to truly use it to the standards of other major apps and continue to upgrade the application.
Upbase is most likely ideal if you want a base to plan your personal work and a small team of people with tasks, chat discussions, calendar and notes in one home. It wouldn't just be good for small teams, but solo users too that want to handle this work in one place.
We'd probably recommend this for solo users now more so than small teams.
Upbase Alternatives
ClickUp, Notion and Taskade are all alternatives to Upbase.
Used by over 100,000 teams worldwide — Try it now for free / No credit card needed
Run all your work on one platform with customizable products that scale with your needs.
