In Jira, an Epic is a significant body of work that can be split into smaller, manageable segments of work called user stories.
In ClickUp, we use parent tasks for Epics and subtasks for user stories.
What you'll need
- You can create Epics in ClickUp on every plan. A Business Plus or Enterprise Plan is recommended for scalability. This is due to the following:
- Unlimited uses of Subtasks in Multiple Lists are only available on the Business Plus and Enterprise Plan.
- Unlimited uses of Custom Fields are only available on paid plans.
Create an Epic parent task
Open a List in ClickUp and create a task. This task will be your Epic.
Create one subtask for each user story within this Epic parent task.
Add user story subtasks to multiple Lists
You can use the Subtasks in Multiple Lists ClickApp to add subtasks, representing user stories, to more than one List in your Workspace without needing to create duplicates.
For example, a user story subtask could simultaneously live in its Epic parent task's backlog List and a Sprint.
An admin or owner needs to enable this ClickApp.
Customize user story subtasks with Custom Fields
Fully customize your user story subtasks with Custom Fields!
For example, an engineering team could create an Item Type Dropdown Custom Field to categorize and organize an Epic parent task and its user story subtasks.
Real-world example: software development
Our engineers and product managers at ClickUp plan out Epics in ClickUp to prioritize tasks, get work done efficiently, improve visibility, and collaborate.
Teams are organized into squads, each having a dedicated Folder. Each squad Folder contains Lists for backlog items, bugs, and Sprints. Relevant Docs are stored next to Lists in the Sidebar.
These Lists have both Epic parent tasks and user story subtasks, using Tasks in Multiple Lists to store them in multiple Lists.
Custom Fields are added to identify tasks as an Epic or story, include additional details, and more.
You can quickly create a similar setup using our software development template.