ClickUp vs Notion: the AI add-on costs more than the plan

What the record says

Both pages open on their annual rate, which is worth knowing before you compare anything. ClickUp shows $7 and $12 per user per month; Notion shows €9.50 and €19.50 per seat. Flip both switches to monthly and the figures become $10 and $19 on ClickUp, €11.50 and €23.50 on Notion. Neither page is hiding anything — but a reader who compares two untouched pages is comparing two discounted numbers, and the size of those discounts differs more than the prices do.

That is the first real finding. ClickUp's annual saving is 30% on Unlimited, $84 a year against $120, and 36.8% on Business, $144 against $228. Notion's is 17.4% on Plus, €114 against €138, and 17.0% on Business, €234 against €282. Committing to a year is worth roughly twice as much on ClickUp. If you are the kind of buyer who pays monthly to stay flexible, ClickUp is the one where that flexibility costs you most.

ClickUp's own header understates this, which is a pleasant change from the usual direction. It reads 'Save up to 30% with yearly'. That is exact on Unlimited and wrong on Business, where the real saving is 36.8% — nearly seven points better than advertised. We have spent a lot of this site's time catching vendors whose discount labels overstate their arithmetic; this is the first we have found rounding against itself.

The AI question is where the two diverge sharply, and it is the single most expensive detail on either page. ClickUp does not include AI in any plan. Brain AI is an add-on at $9 per user per month. On the Unlimited plan that is more than the plan itself: $7 becomes $16, so switching AI on more than doubles the per-seat cost. There is a second meter beneath it — AI Super Credits at $10 per 10,000, or $0.001 each — which is a usage charge on top of a seat charge. No separate AI add-on price appeared on Notion's plan cards in our read. We are not claiming Notion has none; only that none was published where these figures were read, and that is a difference in what the pricing page commits to.

Both have a genuine free tier and they are shaped differently. ClickUp's Free Forever is capped on storage rather than on people — 60MB, but unlimited tasks and unlimited free plan members, with two-factor authentication, docs, Kanban boards, sprint management and 24/7 support included. Notion's Free is €0 per member per month in the same table as the paid plans. Neither is a countdown trial, which puts both ahead of most tools we have compared in this category.

A note on currency, because it limits what the headline comparison can tell you. ClickUp returned US dollars to us and Notion returned euros, both localising by visitor from the same connection. We have not converted between them and neither should you — the $7 against €9.50 comparison is directional, not exact. What is exact, and currency-independent, is the discount structure: 30% and 36.8% against 17.4% and 17.0%, computed within each vendor's own two published rates.

One figure on ClickUp's page we are deliberately not naming. A tier at $28 per user per month appears marked 'RECOMMENDED', but which plan it attaches to was not unambiguous in our read, and guessing at it would be the same error we have criticised elsewhere. It is recorded and unattributed. Notion likewise carries an Enterprise tier with no published per-seat figure we could read.

The honest summary: on published price and billing structure ClickUp is the cheaper and the more generous to anyone paying yearly, and Notion is the more predictable. If your team will want AI inside the tool, run the ClickUp number again at $16 a seat before deciding — at that point the gap closes and then reverses.