I've been using ClickUp to manage content projects for several blogs and while it works fine I'm looking for up and coming alternatives with similar flexibility but lower cost.

I feel like SmartTask fits that niche pretty well after playing around for about an hour. Here's what I like and don't like:

PROS:

- Easy, intuitive interface. I didn't have to read any tutorials to figure out how to create tasks, projects, groups, set deadlines, dependencies, custom fields, or setup automations.
- Task lists, boards, Calendar, recurring tasks, everything you'd expect from a PM tool
- Custom fields per Project/list of tasks with the ability to sort based on those field values
- Automations when moving across boards, like changing a custom field, assigning a user, or marking task closed or incomplete.

CONS:
- Interface needs a little TLC. It feels like some things are crammed with not enough padding and spacing, especially the task description textbox. If there is a video or lots of text, the editing features (bold, italic, embed, image, etc.) disappear at the bottom so you have to scroll back to the top of the text, highlight something, then scroll back down to the bottom and click the tiny bold button. These icons should be larger, with more padding in between, and the whole thing should float wherever the cursor is. It's incredibly annoying and not well thought out.
- Custom field options are limited to: Text, Dropdown, Date, Number. No Link? Seriously? No text area? No email? ClickUp has: Date, Dropdown, Labels, Progress (Auto), Checkbox, Text, Text area (Long text), Email, Files, Formula, Location, Money, Number, People, Phone, Progress (Manual), Rating, Tasks, Website. Hopefully more options are added soon.
- Cannot embed CloudApp or Nimbus Capture screen recording videos. I use both tools to make screen recordings for my team and need to be able to share them easily. While I could just paste the link in the description and let them click to watch, I would like to use the embed feature. Unfortunately, when embedding its brings the entire page into the little description area and makes it impossible to view.

I would like to see:

- More custom field options added. Website, Email, Phone, checkbox, radio, etc.
- More Automation options added. For example, use Custom Field values to set Conditional Automations, if custom field = X, Do Y.
- Refreshed UI. Just add a little more spacing here and there, it's not TERRIBLE by any means, but its not pretty either.
- Fix the task description editing options with floating icons (or make it stick to top on scroll) for the bar containing bold, italic, embed, images, etc. Formatting large amounts of content in the description is very frustrating.

Overall, I like what Smart Task has created. It needs some UI improvements and missing features but it is more than capable as a main PM tool. I will keep my code and consider adding more if some of the main points I addressed are acknowledged and put on the roadmap.