Required workflows: Status directions and approvals (conditional status changes)
Wes Brummette
[from support] If I have [statuses such as] open, requirements complete, in progress, development complete, closed can I set it up so that a task cannot move back from development complete to in progress?
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Elise Remissong
"Waiting," "Approval" functionality and "Join" logic should not be locked to agents. The original requests behind all of these functionalities were all made with the core platform, integrating into the current automation toolkit, in mind.
Zach - ClickUp
Early look: Workflows (visual, multi-step agent orchestration) 👀
We've been building something we're really excited about and wanted to share it early to get your feedback before we lock things in. Hoping I got the right audience here for this!
Workflows
is a new visual builder for multi-step, agent-powered processes. If you've used tools like Make, n8n, or Zapier, the canvas will feel familiar, but this is deeply integrated into ClickUp and built around AI agents.Check out the demo video here:
https://share.clickup-stg.com/clip/s/t333/97b742c6-7e0e-48bb-b729-fee8a52dc597/97b742c6-7e0e-48bb-b729-fee8a52dc597.webm?filename=New%20Workflow%20Feature%20Demo.webmHere's what you'll see in the video:
- Visual workflow canvaswith drag-and-drop nodes and branching logic
- AI Instruction nodeswhere you just tell the AI what to do at each step
- AI Condition nodesfor dynamic branching (as many paths as you need)
- Agent nodesthat call your Super Agents, with optional extra instructions per step
- Agent-to-agent handoffsso one agent can kick off another
- Approval nodeswith configurable approvers and approve/reject branching
- Join nodesthat wait for parallel branches to finish before continuing
- Wait actions(wait X hours, then continue): something we couldn't do in Automations
- Real-time execution visualizationso you can watch your workflow run step by step
- Automation triggers: you'll be able to kick off a Workflow from any automation (e.g. "when status changes to Closed, start this workflow")
This is still in active development, so some things are rough around the edges. That's exactly why we're sharing it now.
What we'd love to hear from you:
- Does this direction feel useful for your team?
- What's a use case you'd run through this? Send it our way and we'll put it through our test environment and show you the results
- Is anything critical missing that would make or break this for you?
Drop your thoughts below! This is the time where your feedback genuinely shapes what ships 🙏
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Daniel Urbano
Hi Zach - ClickUp !
Thanks for providing the fixed url.
Is there any way to sign up for a beta of this feature?
Zach - ClickUp
Daniel Urbano: how embarrassing...thanks! Fixed
Saskia Mardi
Zach - ClickUp This looks incredible! 👏 As someone who builds ClickUp systems full-time for solopreneurs and small teams, I'm genuinely excited about this. Most of my clients aren't running complex internal ops flows - their biggest pain point is client-facing processes, especially onboarding. Right now a lot of them either bring in a separate CRM (Dubsado is the big one in this space) purely for the sequencing/wait-step logic, or we end up building a sprawling web of dozens of Automations stitched together in ClickUp to fake it - neither is ideal.
My use case: a new client fills out an intake form → AI Condition node branches based on service type → Wait node holds until contract is signed → Agent node sends the welcome sequence and creates their onboarding tasks → Approval node lets me sign off before kickoff assets go out. If Workflows can genuinely replace that Dubsado-style logic natively in ClickUp, that's a huge value-add I can bring to my clients - one less tool, one less monthly fee, and one less tangle of automations to maintain. Would love to run a real onboarding flow through your test environment if that's useful - happy to share the exact steps.
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Simon Stender
Zach - ClickUp I would love to see some more hard basic logic that is not reliant on AI. At least I didn't see them in the video.
We are using a lot of blocking/waiting on relationships, which is always clunky in external apps. Things that do something to all relationships of a task would be nice, like 'when this custom field (e.g., version number) changes -> update it on all blocking tasks' or 'when this task gets reopened -> change the status of the tasks waiting on it to in progress.'
Also, just simple binary logic, 'if X then Y else Z,' would also be a big improvement over the current automations.
TLDR; Get all relationships of a task and do conditionally edit them.
Franziska Tryzna
Zach - ClickUp While this looks great, my main concern is the heavy reliance on AI. Current automations are too limited—for example, there are no OR conditions. This forces us to maintain multiple, near-duplicate automations that differ only by a small variation in the first condition’s field value and the value to be set in the action as a result.
We don’t need AI or agents for our automations. What we need is a more granular way to define branching logic and choose different paths. Right now, we work around these limitations by using Make: we trigger webhooks from ClickUp Automations and let Make handle the logic, since it supports multiple paths and OR conditions.
We don’t want to be compelled to purchase an AI plan just to access a more capable automation builder—especially when our use case doesn’t require any AI-driven conditions.
Κωνσταντίνος Τσιώμος
Zach - ClickUp I agree with many of the points raised by Franziska Tryzna. It's very AI-oriented while I believe it will shine brighter if combined with traditional automations. In addition, the combination may smooth out the lack of logical operators (AND, OR) that indeed forces implementors to create minor variations of the same automation, risking errors in automations firing and further debugging in compicated workflows.
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Ralph Stokes
Zach - ClickUp I also agree with Franziska Tryzna 's points here. Automations are currently the bottleneck in clickup (along with email) and I'd find more flexible automation options much more helpful as this new idea adds a level of complexity that is probably more than I'd need and also introduces a heavy reliance on AI, while I'd still be required to maintain my many iterations of the same automation anyway due to the lack of a logical operator. Automation triggers, actions and action options are also lacking. I feel like I'd have to purchase an AI plan rather than having a comprehensive automation system which doesn't require AI.
Elise Remissong
Zach - ClickUp "Wait," "Approval," and "Join" functionalities shouldn't be locked to agents. The original requests for all of these were made with the core software, integrating into the current automation toolkit, in mind. This is a critical distinction. Our workspace doesn't use agents/the AI plan, so adding these features locked to them essentially adds nothing for us.
Sandra Booker
Zach - ClickUp This looks really great. I can't wait to try it out. I would love to see more details about what the possible triggers are and what all the non-ai actions are. I don't want to use AI anywhere it's not needed. The existing automations are a bit too limited but AI is not necessarily the answer. Similar to what Simon and Franziska have said.
Also, I'm curious if there are any outside triggers available? Would love to trigger workflows from outside of clickup (like when a doc gets added to a folder, or a new row added to a spreadsheet) without having to use zapier or make if possible.
Zach - ClickUp
Hey all, appreciate the feedback here! Reading through the responses, I can see this landed differently than I intended, so let me share a bit more context.
A lot of you have been asking for things like approval gates, status transition rules, and better branching logic in the core platform for a long time. We hear you, and those needs are real and valid. What we're doing with Workflows is proving out those exact capabilities (branching, waits, joins, approvals) through agent orchestration first, because we can unlock them significantly faster than building them directly into the existing automations architecture. The plan is to take what we learn here and bring those patterns over to deterministic automations. We didn't want to make you wait years for us to do it all at once when we could start delivering real value now.
That said, these Agent Workflows in its initial form is heavily AI-focused.
You can use all the triggers you already know from automations to kick off a workflow, but the actions inside are AI-powered: agent steps, AI conditions, waits, approvals, joins. If you're using agents, this is going to be a huge unlock. If AI isn't your thing right now, I understand this isn't exactly what you were hoping for, but it's the fastest path to getting these capabilities into the platform and eventually into the core experience you already use every day."Can outside events trigger a workflow?"
Yes. Webhooks, integration triggers, and scheduled triggers are all supported. Direct third-party integrations (Google Drive, Calendly, etc.) are on our radar but not in the initial release.
"Beta?"
Soon. We're testing in dev right now. I'll post here when it opens up.
Thanks for the honest feedback, keep it coming 🙏
J
Joseph Plaizier
This would be very helpful. Jira makes this very easy and intuitive and anything that resembles what they've made would be amazing.
https://community.atlassian.com/forums/App-Central-articles/Understanding-Jira-Statuses/ba-p/3122343
I also agree with Simon Poot that approvals deserve more functionality.
I've used Workfront before and they have a thorough and robust system for their approvals. Projects and tasks actually lock up until an approval workflow is completed, which really helps to ensure that tasks don't continue to get worked without approval and really put responsibility on the managers to complete their approvals. They also have built in ways to notify the approvers, remind approvers, and set up different approval logic. You can specify a single approver, put together an approval workflow, jumping from one person to another, you can select a group and then set whether anyone from that group can approve or if everyone has to.
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Simon Poot
Strongly supporting this request. In general I think things around approvals deserve some more functionality.
Caroline Ginty
Merged in a post:
Required Custom Fields Based on Task Status
Junior Mendes
I would like to suggest the implementation of a highly valuable feature for process governance and data quality: the ability to define required custom fields based on the task status.
Currently, ClickUp allows custom fields to be marked as required only at the moment of task creation. However, in many operational workflows, certain fields do not need to be completed when the task is created, but should become mandatory as the task progresses through different statuses.
In more structured process management environments, it is common for each stage to require specific information to ensure workflow integrity. Without status-based enforcement, it becomes possible to move a task to the next stage without filling in critical data, which can:
- Compromise data quality
- Break automations that depend on those fields
- Generate operational rework
- Impact metrics and reporting
Tools such as Pipefy, HubSpot, and Kommo already support conditional required fields by stage/phase, preventing cards from advancing unless the required information for that specific stage has been completed.
Implementing this functionality in ClickUp would significantly elevate operational control, especially for teams that rely on the platform as a structured system for process management and automation.
This improvement would be extremely valuable for organizations that depend on consistent data and well-defined workflows.
Caroline Ginty
Merged in a post:
Workflow status: define who can change a specific status
João de Souza
I work in an industrial engineering designer. Here we prepare dozens of documents every day. For us, each task in a list in ClickUp is a document. Each document will pass through the hands of at least 3 people: the creator, the verifier and the issuer (who sends the document to the client). It would be really nice if I could lock the statuses as follows: only the developer can move the task from status "to do" to "in verification", only the developer can move from status "in verification" to "ready to send" or "not ready for sending" (returning the activity to the creator), and at the end, when the document is ready, only the sender can move the status from "ready for sending" to "sent". Please help me with this, it's something that already exists in other applications and would be very useful for us here at the company.
Caroline Ginty
Merged in a post:
Block status change unless required fields are populated
D
David Greene
Please add native status transition validation. When a task is moved into a specific status, ClickUp should block the change if required Custom Fields are missing and show a prompt listing what’s missing.
Example: If moving to “Ready for Review”, require [Field A] and [Field B]. If either is blank, prevent the move and prompt the user to complete it.
Caroline Ginty
Merged in a post:
Validation Rules on standard and custom fields
Ryan MacAlmon (HPE)
Allow validation rules on both standard and custom fields. For example with Status equals In Progress, start date and due dates are required
Caroline Ginty
Merged in a post:
Custom role by List (status and fields permissions)
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Henrique Rossato
It'd be great if we could create role permissions by List, in order to permit who can change from specific status to another one. Example: just the approvers role (for this list) can change to approved status or can change some fields.
Some complementary requests:
Daniel Urbano
Wes Brummette Juan Grandas Hi guys! Do you Know the status of this project?
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