ClickUp Migration: 6 Steps and What Importers Leave Behind

Migrate to ClickUp in six steps, with a source-by-source list of what each importer does not carry over, from Jira and Asana to Monday.com and spreadsheets.

L5 Team

May 9, 2024 8 min read Seamless Migration to ClickUp in 6 Steps with L5: Your Path to Project Management Excellence

Migrating to ClickUp has two halves. ClickUp's native importers move your tasks, comments and attachments across from Asana, Monday.com, Jira, Trello, Wrike, Basecamp, Notion, Confluence, Teamwork, Todoist, Slack, or a spreadsheet. Everything the importer will not carry, and the workspace design nobody else can make for you, is the other half. A ClickUp data migration is judged on the second half. This guide covers the six-step sequence, what each importer leaves behind, and the decisions that determine whether your team actually uses the result.

How to migrate to ClickUp in six steps

Treat this as your ClickUp migration checklist. The order matters more than the tooling. Running the import before the workspace is designed is the most common way a migration produces a workspace nobody wants to open.

The six steps of a ClickUp migration, with hierarchy design flagged as the step that decides the outcome — The importer handles steps three and five. Steps two and six decide whether anyone uses the result.

Scope the data. Decide what moves and what stays. A migration is the one moment you can leave five years of dead projects behind without an argument. Export an archive of the old tool, then import only what the team will touch again.
Design the hierarchy. Map your teams onto ClickUp's Space, Folder and List structure, and decide your status sets before anything lands. The importer asks you to map statuses and users mid-flow, and answering those prompts without a plan is how a workspace ends up with forty statuses.
Pilot one project. Import a single team or board and inspect what arrived: dates, assignees, custom fields, attachments. Fix the mapping while the blast radius is one project.
Clean and map. Correct date formats, consolidate custom fields, and match users by email rather than by name. ClickUp's importers match people to existing users far more reliably on email.
Import in batches. ClickUp recommends bringing a few projects at a time rather than everything at once. Verification is possible in batches and impossible in one giant run.
Rebuild and enable. Automations, views, dashboards and templates do not import. Neither does the habit of using them. Rebuild the workflow, then train the team on the workspace they actually have.

Which ClickUp migration tools cover your source

ClickUp maintains native importers for eleven applications plus a spreadsheet importer for everything else. An Asana to ClickUp, Monday.com to ClickUp or Trello to ClickUp move is a supported path with its own importer. If your tool is not on the list, exporting to CSV and using the Spreadsheets importer is the supported path.

Source	How it lands in ClickUp
Asana	Each project becomes a Space or a Folder with a List. Sections map to Label custom fields, separate Lists, or statuses, your choice during the import.
Monday.com	Boards become Folders and Lists. Board groups or the status column become your ClickUp statuses.
Jira	Projects become Spaces. Epics and stories land as tasks and subtasks, or as related Lists. Statuses, custom fields and users are mapped during the import.
Trello	Boards become Folders. Columns become either statuses or Lists.
Wrike, Basecamp, Teamwork, Todoist	Native importers, project-to-List mapping.
Notion, Confluence	Native importers aimed at documents and knowledge bases.
Slack	Native importer for turning conversations into tasks.
Excel, Google Sheets, CSV	Spreadsheets importer. One row per task, one column per field.

Source: ClickUp's import documentation, verified August 2026. ClickUp changes importer coverage without notice, so confirm your source tool before you commit to a date. If you are still weighing whether ClickUp is the right destination, our complete ClickUp review covers the feature set and the gaps.

What each importer leaves behind

This is the part that surprises teams. Every importer has documented gaps, and they are different for every source tool. Reading them before you plan is the difference between a two-week migration and a six-week one.

What ClickUp importers leave behind for Jira, Asana, Monday.com and spreadsheet migrations — Monday.com dependencies do not transfer, and rebuilding them by hand is the biggest job in that migration. Every item shown is named in ClickUp's own importer documentation.

Source	Does not transfer
Jira	Recurring tasks, timestamps, the Priority field, links between tasks, and any custom field you defined yourself. Only Jira's built-in custom field types come across. Private comments arrive as public comments. Time logged on issues is reassigned to whoever runs the import.
Asana	Freestanding tasks that are not in a project, nested subtasks, tasks shared between projects, recurring tasks, private tasks, and @mentions.
Monday.com	Attachments, dependencies, formulas, mirrors, connected boards, timeline, buttons, info boxes and tags. Dependencies are the expensive one: rebuilding them by hand is usually the largest manual task in a Monday.com migration.
Trello	Cover images. Imported custom fields also arrive hidden and have to be added to your List view before anyone can see them.
Spreadsheet	Comments, attachments, dependencies and tracked time. The importer handles task fields only.

Jira carries enough of its own traps to need separate treatment, from the hierarchy choice you make once to the way logged time is reassigned. Those are covered in our Jira to ClickUp migration guide.

Recurring tasks do not transfer from Jira or Asana. Write them down before you export, because after the import there is no record that they existed.

Limits worth knowing before you start

Attachment size. Imported attachments are capped at 1GB each on the Jira and Trello importers.
Jira upload size. The Jira importer accepts backup files up to 50GB. Above that, ClickUp asks you to contact its professional services team.
Reimport window. Uploaded Jira files stay available to reimport for 30 days, then they are deleted.
Date format. Jira dates must be mm/dd/yyyy. The mm-dd-yyyy variant fails silently.
Storage on the free plan. Free Forever caps the whole workspace at 60MB. Importing attachments on the free plan will hit that ceiling immediately. See our ClickUp pricing breakdown for what each tier includes.
Duration. ClickUp puts a typical import anywhere from one minute to a few hours, governed mostly by the source tool's API rate limits rather than by ClickUp.

Migrating from a spreadsheet

Plenty of teams are not leaving a tool, they are leaving a spreadsheet. The Spreadsheets importer treats each row as a task and each column as a field. Task Name is the only required column. Priority uses numeric codes rather than words: 1 for Urgent, 2 for High, 3 for Normal, 4 for Low. Every unique value in a List column becomes its own ClickUp List, which makes the spreadsheet itself the fastest way to define your starting structure.

The decisions the importer cannot make

Data movement is the mechanical half. These four questions decide whether the workspace holds up six months later, and no importer will answer them.

Hierarchy. Whether a client, a department, or a product line is a Space, a Folder or a List. Get this wrong and every report you build afterwards fights the structure.
Statuses. Importing every legacy status produces a workspace where no two Lists agree on what "in review" means. A standard status set per work type is the fix, and it has to be decided before the mapping screen.
Automations. None of the automations you built in the old tool come across. Which ones actually mattered is worth deciding rather than rebuilding all of them out of habit.
Permissions. Who sees what, and where guests are invited, is a structural decision. Retrofitting it means moving work between Spaces.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I import data into ClickUp?

Click your Workspace avatar, select Settings, then Imports / Exports, and choose your source. ClickUp has native importers for Asana, Basecamp, Confluence, Jira, Monday.com, Notion, Todoist, Teamwork, Trello, Slack and Wrike, plus a Spreadsheets importer for CSV and Excel data. Each importer walks you through mapping projects, users, statuses and custom fields before the import runs.

What does not transfer when you migrate to ClickUp?

It depends on the source. Recurring tasks do not transfer from Jira or Asana. Jira also loses timestamps, the Priority field, links between tasks and any custom field you defined yourself. Monday.com loses attachments, dependencies, formulas and tags. Asana loses nested subtasks, private tasks and @mentions. Automations, dashboards and views do not transfer from any source and have to be rebuilt.

How long does a ClickUp migration take?

The import itself runs from one minute to a few hours depending on data volume and the source tool's API rate limits. The full migration, including hierarchy design, a pilot, cleanup and training, is the part that takes weeks rather than hours. Importing in batches makes the total longer but the result verifiable.

Can I import into ClickUp from Excel or Google Sheets?

Yes. The Spreadsheets importer takes CSV and Excel files with one row per task. Task Name is the only required column, and supported fields include status, priority, assignee, start and due dates, tags, subtasks and checklists.

Should I import everything or start clean?

Import what the team will use again and archive the rest in the old tool before you export. Every extra project you carry across is a project someone has to re-triage in a workspace they do not know yet. ClickUp's own guidance for large Jira imports is to delete old projects and attachments before exporting.

Getting the design right the first time

L5 has run ClickUp onboarding for more than 600 customers in two years, and the pattern is consistent: the import is rarely what goes wrong. The hierarchy, the status model and the automations that replace the old ones are what decide whether a team is productive in week two or still arguing about structure in month three. Our ACT methodology compressed ClickUp onboarding from 55 days to 7 by making those decisions first and treating the import as one step inside them.

As a ClickUp Diamond and Preferred Partner, L5 runs its own business on ClickUp and onboards client teams onto it every week. Talk to us about scoping your migration.