ClickUp alternative

A ClickUp alternative where AI is not a second subscription

The everything app, plus an everything AI add-on, priced per seat on top of the seat you already bought.

The short answer

Polaris is a free alternative to ClickUp for teams paying twice: once for seats and again for AI. ClickUp lists Unlimited at seven dollars and Business at twelve dollars per user per month billed annually, with Brain AI at nine dollars and Everything AI at twenty-eight dollars per user per month, checked 21 August 2026. Polaris software is free and bills roughly two dollars per delivered human-hour.

ClickUp Business: $12 / user / month annual
Everything AI add-on: +$28 / user / month annual
Polaris software: $0, AI included in the product
Checked: 21 Aug 2026

Two bills for one team

Checked on 21 August 2026, ClickUp lists Free Forever at zero, Unlimited at seven dollars per user per month billed annually or ten billed monthly, Business at twelve annually or nineteen monthly, and Enterprise on request. AI is sold separately: Brain AI at nine dollars per user per month billed annually and Everything AI at twenty-eight.

A ten-person team on Business with Everything AI is therefore four hundred dollars a month at list, before anyone has produced anything. The seat charge and the AI charge both scale with headcount rather than with output, which means the eleventh hire raises the AI bill whether or not that person ever uses AI.

The other reason teams look elsewhere is configuration debt. ClickUp's range of views, custom fields, statuses and automations is real, and so is the state a workspace reaches eighteen months in when four people configured it differently and nobody remembers why.

Head to head

ClickUp prices from clickup.com/pricing, checked 21 August 2026.

ClickUp

Polaris

Software cost

$7/user/mo Unlimited, $12 Business, billed annually

$0 at any team size

AI cost

Brain AI $9 or Everything AI $28 per user per month, annually

No AI seat. ~$2 per human-hour of work delivered

What AI does

Assists inside the workspace: writing, summarising, answering

Runs on a cloud machine as an assigned teammate and returns finished work with files

Views

List, board, calendar, Gantt, timeline, mind map, table and more

List and board sharing the same lanes, plus a pinned Focus lane over three horizons

Docs and whiteboards

Docs, whiteboards, time tracking, goals

Docs with versioning, review and comments. No whiteboard, no time tracking

Configuration burden

High. Statuses, custom fields, spaces, folders, automations

Low by design. Workstreams and lanes, dragged into place

Assignees

Humans

Humans and AI workers in one members table

Bill shape

Rises with every hire

Rises only when a worker delivers something you can inspect

When you should stay on ClickUp

ClickUp gives you more surface area than Polaris does. Sometimes that is exactly what you need.

You need views Polaris does not have
Gantt charts, mind maps, workload views and whiteboards are all in ClickUp and none of them are in Polaris. Teams running dependency-heavy plans need a Gantt, and no argument about pricing changes that.
Time tracking is part of how you bill
ClickUp has native time tracking with estimates and reporting. Agencies billing clients by tracked hours would be removing a piece of their invoicing chain.
The Free Forever plan already covers you
ClickUp's free tier is one of the most capable in this category. A small team living inside it comfortably has no cost argument to answer.
Custom fields carry your data model
Teams that have modelled a real business process in ClickUp custom fields and automations have built something. Polaris has no custom field system to receive it.

Where the money goes

A ten-person team, list prices checked 21 August 2026.

ClickUp Business with Everything AI

$12 per user per month for the workspace
$28 per user per month for the AI tier
$4,800 a year at ten people, before Enterprise features
The bill is the same whether AI produced anything or not

Polaris

$0 for the workspace, at ten people or a hundred
Chief of Staff included in every org from day one
~$2 per human-equivalent hour that a worker delivers
Nothing delivered, nothing billed, and every hour is on the work log

Moving from ClickUp

ClickUp exports tasks to CSV and has a documented API covering tasks, lists, custom fields, statuses and comments. The parts that map cleanly are the ones every tool shares: name, description, assignee, due date, status, comments. The parts that do not are the ones you spent the most time on.

Automations, dashboards, whiteboards, Gantt dependencies, custom field schemas and time entries have no destination in Polaris. If the honest audit says half your ClickUp value is in those, stay. If the honest audit says your workspace is a task list with an expensive AI add-on bolted to it, the comparison is straightforward.

Go deeper

ClickUp pricing, checked August 2026

Cheap seats with an AI add-on that can cost more than the seat it sits on.

The cost of AI subscriptions for a team

Five figures a year at fifty people, and no shared record of what any of it produced.

ClickUp vs monday.com

Two platforms that both claim to replace your whole stack, with very different ideas about who does the configuring.

ClickUp vs Notion

Both promise one tool for everything. They disagree about which half of everything comes first.

Replacing ClickUp and Slack

You already bought one all-in-one product. The Slack subscription next to it is the interesting fact.

Usage-based pricing

The bill follows consumption, which cuts both ways for buyer and vendor.

Questions people ask

+How much does ClickUp AI cost on top of a ClickUp plan?

Checked on 21 August 2026, ClickUp lists Brain AI at nine dollars per user per month and Everything AI at twenty-eight dollars per user per month, both billed annually, in addition to the workspace plan. A ten-person team on Business with Everything AI is around four hundred dollars a month at list price.

+Does Polaris charge extra for AI?

There is no AI seat and no AI tier. The Chief of Staff is on your roster in every organisation from the first sign-in, and hiring more workers is free. The only charge is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour that a worker actually delivers, itemised on that worker's work log.

+Does Polaris have Gantt charts and whiteboards?

No to both. Polaris has list and board views that share the same lanes, plus a Focus lane pinned across today, this week and the next thirty days. Teams that plan dependencies on a Gantt or run workshops on a whiteboard would be losing something real.

+Can I export my ClickUp workspace?

ClickUp exports tasks to CSV and exposes an API covering tasks, lists, custom fields, statuses and comments, which is enough to move the task data. Automations, dashboards, whiteboards, Gantt dependencies and time entries do not have a counterpart in Polaris and should be treated as retired.

+Is Polaris actually free, or free for now?

The software is free with unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams and docs, and no seat count exists in the product. Polaris is in free public beta with no customers and no revenue yet, and the intended revenue line is delivered agent work rather than seats. That is the whole model, stated plainly.