ClickUp vs Asana for Remote Teams With Too Many Tabs Open

1. Interface behavior differences when switching between views rapidly

Inside ClickUp, if you swap between Board and List view too fast while someone else is editing a task, the scroll position resets and you get bounced to the top of the task list like it’s 2015 again. Not always, only sometimes — usually the worst kind. We were reviewing subtasks during a sprint retro call and two people ended up editing the same field in parallel because what we thought was expanded definitely wasn’t.

Asana weirdly handles this better. If you’re flicking between views (Board, List, Calendar), the UI retains position and edit state persistently unless you refresh — which Asana pushes you to do often with those little yellow banners. But even mid-change, it generally preserves local state way more cleanly than ClickUp.

The annoying part in ClickUp is that autosave can misfire during a view swap. If someone clicks into a task and changes a date, then you quickly switch to a different view before the green check appears, sometimes it doesn’t save at all — no error, no warning, just a quiet rollback.

2. Differences in recurring task logic under live collaboration

Recurring tasks in Asana aren’t exactly magic, but at least they trigger predictably. You complete one and bam, duplication. It appears instantly. Except when it doesn’t. There’s this one edge case where if you’re using the mobile app and you check off a recurring task while the desktop web client is open on the same account, it’ll sometimes generate two future instances. Not cool if that task includes integrations.

ClickUp handles recurrences inside the task modal. Which sounds nice — it’s visual — until you realize the recurrence is stored at the instance level. So when someone duplicates a task manually (which remote teams love because copying old tickets is faster than retyping everything), it copies the recurrence rule unless you remember to kill it. I once duplicated a “Weekly Draft Review” task and ended up with six phantom copies because someone completed one on the wrong day and the rule trip-wired itself.

“Always check the recurrence tab. Just opening the task isn’t enough.”

3. Multi-user notification behaviors during simultaneous assignments

This one drove our Slack channel insane. ClickUp tries to be smart about deduplicating notifications when multiple actions happen quickly — like if you assign a task, leave a comment, and change the status in under 30 seconds. But here’s the twist: if two users assign each other to the same task at nearly the same moment, only one assignment gets logged in notifications.

You’re left guessing who got pinged. Except when both notifications do fire. It’s inconsistent. We ran a test where two people clicked “assign” within the same second. Sometimes both got notified. Sometimes just one. We slowed it down to half-second offsets and it stabilized. So clearly there’s a race condition under the hood.

Asana doesn’t deduplicate that way. Which is worse, maybe? You get three separate pings for the same task if someone adds you, comments, and then updates a custom field — even if it’s the same person. So your inbox becomes a maze of stuttered history unless you’re triaging as you go.

4. How permissions behave when templates get applied across folders

This bug cost us a full afternoon. We built a meeting note template in ClickUp and set it to apply with private visibility. But when someone applied it inside a different folder that had inherited public permissions, the template didn’t override anything. The doc went fully visible. No warning, no override conflict. Just quietly accessible by far too many people.

Turns out, ClickUp lets folder-level permissions trump doc-level template settings. Even though the visibility toggle still says private. So in effect, you’re trusting that your team remembers what folder it’s in before applying the template. Not great.

Asana, meanwhile, has the opposite issue: templates carry their original visibility too aggressively. If you make a private template and then use it in a public project, you can be left with bits of it unnoticed because the new users can’t even see the fields. There’s no alert — the fields just seem to disappear for the wrong people. It creates a kind of phantom data syndrome where no one knows if it didn’t load or wasn’t there.

5. ClickUp versus Asana mobile behavior under poor connections

Had to submit tasks during a train ride once. Bad idea. ClickUp’s mobile app caches nothing effectively during network instability. If you open a task while mid-tunnel and change anything, it’ll give the illusion of success — new comment appears, icon changes — but the save collapses silently when the connection drops.

Asana’s app at least nags you. If you’re offline when editing, it puts a yellow bar at the top and queues the action. It’s still not perfect — sometimes the queue gets jammed and you have to force restart the app — but at least it doesn’t lie directly to your face.

• ClickUp’s app doesn’t retry syncs automatically — you have to reopen the task
• Asana can show upload errors in mobile inbox, but only sporadically
• ClickUp mobile attachments frequently fail to upload and vanish from history
• Asana mobile attachments auto-upload in background, but that fails silently on old Androids
• ClickUp shows mobile push notifications for comments you can’t read yet offline

It’s not that either app is bad. It’s just that neither is honest about failure under latency. And remote teams crossing time zones hit this often enough that you start relying on screen recordings just to prove something existed.

6. Custom field filtering quirks when data types mismatch slightly

In Asana, we made a team-wide status field with predefined text — Not Started, In Progress, Complete. Then someone duplicated a task from a project where the same status field existed but was set as a dropdown instead. Both fields had the same name, but one was a text field, one a dropdown. Filtering broke immediately.

Instead of failing with a type mismatch, Asana just silently excluded the mismatching tasks from view. Everyone thought the filter was working. It wasn’t. We had backlog items that didn’t show up for weeks because devs copied tasks from an archive project with mismatching field types.

ClickUp does even stranger things. It lets you create multiple custom fields with the same name in the same space, if they come from separate hierarchy levels. So if you filter “Status = In Progress” but the task’s field came from a parent folder, it might not show, even though it visually looks correct. There’s no warning — it just doesn’t match.

{
  "field_name": "Sprint Status",
  "value": "Review",
  "source": "folder-level",
  "visible_as": "task-level"
}

The nested field structure makes filtering more powerful technically, but less trustworthy casually. You have to know where your fields are “from,” not just what they say.

7. Automation behavior when bulk-moving tasks between projects

The moment someone drags 30 tasks from one ClickUp list to another, there’s a sharp CPU spike and then — unpredictably — automations fire in random order. We saw webhooks fire twice, then zero times, then retried five minutes later. Same tasks, same flow.

The culprit turned out to be two automations watching for status changes, triggered by the move. But depending on whether the destination list had a matching status, ClickUp either changed the status or preserved it — and then auto-updated it after the fact once sorting triggered. Which meant some tasks fired automations twice, others not at all.

Asana’s bulk move is more inert. It doesn’t fire automations unless you specifically tell it to, and even then, it queues them cleanly. But it has its own issue: dependencies get broken if the destination project doesn’t share the same dependent tasks. You’ll get no error, no conflict message — just missing links. We ended up with orphan subtasks because someone migrated cards from a kanban board without mapping the dependencies first.