All-in-one adoption changes habits slowly
Tommy Wang, Chief Business Officer at ClickUp, on the rise of the all-in-one
The real moat in software expansion is not shipping the adjacent product, it is changing buyer trust and daily habits inside a new department. Workday bought Adaptive Insights in 2018 to speed up its finance planning push, yet finance teams still commonly pair enterprise planning systems with separate tools and spreadsheets for the hardest revenue models. That is why broad product convergence happens, but share shifts slowly, especially when a new workflow has different users, budgets, and operating logic.
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ClickUp itself describes the pattern clearly. Teams may use its whiteboards because they are already inside the product, but power users often stay on Figma or Canva. Expansion starts as convenience inside an existing seat base, not immediate category leadership.
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The Workday example is concrete. Workday acquired Adaptive Insights for about $1.55 billion and said it would accelerate the roadmap by more than two years. Even so, finance planning remains specialized enough that larger companies still use Adaptive or Anaplan for structured planning and separate tools for custom revenue forecasting.
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This is the same adoption pattern seen across horizontal software. Causal argues that enterprise planning tools handle standardized budgeting well, but companies still export custom revenue work from spreadsheets or modeling tools back into the system of record. The incumbent keeps the core workflow longer than product breadth alone would suggest.
The next phase of all-in-one software will be won by companies that turn a foothold into default behavior across more teams, one workflow at a time. AI will make adjacent features easier to build, but significant share gains will still come from patient distribution, deeper workflow fit, and years of cross functional adoption rather than fast feature launches.