ClickUp uses a variety of third-party services and tools which aren't always privacy friendly. With the assumption that your own machine, internet and apps are fine and that ClickUp's systems are fully up: it should be working reasonably speedy and you should see all of the features and speed.
If not, you, your network, your browser or your DNS ad-blocking may be preventing some certain features from loading. At least, that was the case for me.
Regardless of computer or device, ClickUp was frustratingly slow and certain things simply did not show up or work. It was only after digging deep we remembers we have network-wide ad blocking at the DNS & network level.
Therefore, it may be the case that your browser AdBlocking extension or your network firewall or DNS might be blocking certain services.
This, as far as I know won't prevent ClickUp from working overall. But certain things require those third party service such as:
- New ClickUp 3.0 split tested features, such as the menu
- A few integrations in the Clickup App Center
- Whiteboard performance
- Certain navigation features
Reason for third-party services
ClickUp, like any team, needs to worry about performance and the user experience to maximize their profit. One of the ways to do so is to split-test the interface and feature. Split test means that a certain percentage of users see slightly different things. From this data they find out what is performing the best and go with that.
These tools aren't always privacy friendly. Yes, they could use privacy focused open-source / on-premise tools. But that isn't always a practical thing to do for either resource (brains) reasons or financal reasons. Some certains/features aren't available as on-premise things. Or even: they have bigger things to worry about than the nuances of hosting something themselves.
It's why things like cloud hosting exist. Why worry about the underlying infrastructure when you can pay a small premium to have someone fully handle that for you?
The Fix
The fix is simple, add the following urls to your allow-list / white-list. ClickUp does have their standard recommendations below, but in my case I also had to allow the following:
sdk.split.io
In AdGuard Home the custom filtering rule is:
@@||sdk.split.io^$important
You can, if they are getting blocked, also allow the following recommended list from ClickUp (which is a bit of a different list than the one in their documentation):
https://clickup.com/
https://app.clickup.com/
https://app-cdn.clickup.com/
https://attachments.clickup.com/
https://*.p.clickup-attachments.com
https://attachments3.clickup.com/
https://api.clickup.com/
https://ws.clickup.com/
https://help.clickup.com/
https://feedback.clickup.com/
https://forms.clickup.com/
https://share.clickup.com/
https://amazonses.com/
https://help.clickup.com/hc/en-us
https://codox.io/
https://proxy.clickup.codox.io/
https://pendo.io/
https://exchangeratesapi.io/
http://sdk.split.io/
http://auth.split.io/
http://streaming.split.io/
data.webproduct.clickup.com
http://link.clickup.com/
I've removed the urls for MSTeams and Outlook since we don't use them:
https://outlook.clickup.com/
https://msteams.clickup.com/
Fun third-party tools:
Seeing their list (and their network log in the browser console) we can learn they use a few apps to help build up ClickUp infrastructure:
Split.io => split testing, flags
Codox.io => fancy collaboration tool that bring multi-user functionality into docs (similar to Google docs/notion/etc)
Intercom.io => Sadly they use this privacy unfriendly tool for feedback and support chat stuff. Lots of tracking. Boo. Thus I've left it out of the list above.
Pendo.io => Data analytics and tracking (for marketing and internal data). I haven't tested turning it off yet
Amazon SES => email
Understanding their urls:
They use many sub-domains for their various sub-services to help spread the functional load and traffic accross services and servers.
They have multiple systems for file attachments and the CDN. Kinda sorta important, thus this was a good idea to shard these / split them into multiple things.
Looking at the network log, I believe they are also hosted on AWS. For me, I end up connecting to AWS's west-2 data center. I do hope ClickUp network team spins up some edge nodes for faster data paths to users.
There are also sub-domains (and thus services) specifically for the websocket (good choice!) and streaming data.
I find it interesting that forms get their own thing, but it does sort of make sense with the privacy & sharing features for forms.