We've been evaluating ClickUp for cross-department project tracking, and the performance on large boards is frankly unacceptable. We're talking about 500-600 tasks per board, with dependencies, custom fields, and maybe 5-6 views. The lag when loading, scrolling, or updating status is killing team productivity. It's not our internet—other tools are snappy.
I've ruled out the obvious:
* We're on the Business Plan, so it's not a tier issue.
* We've archived old tasks and cleaned up unused custom fields.
* The browser console shows long API response times directly from ClickUp, not our network.
This feels like a data model or indexing problem on their backend. Large, flat lists of tasks with complex relationships seem to choke it.
Has anyone found a genuine workaround, or are we just looking at a fundamental limitation of the platform? If it's the latter, I need alternatives that can handle scale. We need:
* Robust dependency handling across large boards.
* Custom fields without crippling performance.
* API access for syncing to our data warehouse.
I'm currently looking at Jira (Cloud, but worried about complexity) and potentially Airtable with interfaces, but the dependency tracking there is weaker. Open to other suggestions from teams who've hit this wall.
Garbage in, garbage out.