Rovo vs Notion AI vs ClickUp Brain: 25 credits buys 2.5 questions a month, not unlimited AI
Atlassian bundles Rovo into Jira and Confluence instead of selling it as an add-on, then meters it in credits. We read all three vendors' own pricing and usage docs on 16 September 2026 and did the division nobody publishes.
By Ishan Vats · Founder of IV Consulting, builds AI agents and automations for 150+ teams
Bundled, then meteredRovo: 25 credits
Credits only for agentsNotion AI: included
$9 add-on per seatBrain: 1,500 credits
Atlassian Rovo is the cheapest of the three to buy and the first to run out. Rovo is bundled into Jira and Confluence rather than sold as an add-on, but Atlassian meters it: a Standard seat gets 25 Rovo credits a month and a basic question costs 10 credits, so one seat buys 2.5 questions. Notion Business at 20 dollars a seat includes everyday AI with no per question meter, and ClickUp charges 9 dollars a seat on top of Business for 1,500 credits. The twist is that Rovo's top up is cheap, 10 dollars per 1,000 credits from 3 December 2026, so the real risk is not a surprise bill. It is that Rovo pauses mid month if you leave extra usage switched off.
The verdict
Which AI runs out first, Rovo, Notion AI or ClickUp Brain?
Rovo, and it is not close. On a Jira or Confluence Standard seat you get 25 Rovo credits a month, and Atlassian charges 10 credits for a basic question. That is two and a half questions per person per month before the allowance is gone.
One disclosure first, because it changes how you should read this page. We deploy Notion and ClickUp for clients and we run both ourselves, so the middle and right columns come from daily use as well as the pricing pages. We do not run Jira or Confluence in production. Every Atlassian number below is read straight from Atlassian's own Rovo usage documentation, not from experience, and we have flagged the one place where their docs stop short.
Here is the shape of the three models, which is what actually decides your bill:
- Atlassian bundles and meters. Rovo costs nothing extra on top of your Jira or Confluence seat, which is why it reads as the cheap option. It is metered per interaction, and the included allowance is the smallest of the three by a wide margin.
- Notion includes and meters only autonomy. Core Notion AI is in the 20 dollar Business seat with no per question counter. Credits only start when the AI works on its own, through Custom Agents and, from 15 October 2026, Workers.
- ClickUp charges per head and meters generously. Brain is a 9 dollar per seat add-on on top of Business, and it carries 1,500 credits per user per month, sixty times Rovo's Standard allowance.
Now the part that makes us disagree with most of the coverage. Almost every write-up calls Rovo's credit system a trap, and if you stop at the allowance that reading is fair. But do the top up arithmetic: Atlassian's overage is one cent a credit. Giving ten people one Rovo question every working day costs about 20 dollars a month on top of the seats, which still lands under Notion and well under ClickUp. Rovo is not a cost trap.
The bundled model
How do Rovo credits actually work?
Rovo credits are a monthly, organisation wide allowance that Atlassian bundles into Jira and Confluence seats. A Standard seat adds 25 credits to the pool, a basic Rovo question costs 10 credits, search and summaries cost nothing, and unused credits expire at the end of each month. The rest of this section is the detail behind that sentence.
Atlassian made a genuinely different choice from Notion and ClickUp. There is no Rovo line item to buy, as Atlassian's Rovo pricing page shows. It ships inside Jira and Confluence, and the constraint moved from the invoice to a meter. That is better for procurement and worse for planning, because a bundled product with a cap still has a cap.
Not everything draws down the meter, and this is the part the "credit trap" posts skip. Rovo Search, definitions and summaries are free and unmetered. You only spend credits on the interactive work:
- Basic interactions cost 10 credits per billable event. That covers quick answers in Rovo Chat and the foundational agents, which is what most people mean when they say they are using Rovo.
- Premium interactions cost more, and Atlassian publishes the rate as variable. Think Deeper mode, advanced agents and coding assistance sit here. Some third party guides put deep research at 100 credits a request. Atlassian's own documentation says variable rather than naming a number, so we are not going to state one as fact.
- Enriched cross product queries cost 1 to 10 credits. Single product lookups against the Teamwork Graph are free.
Two structural details matter more than the headline number. Credits are pooled at the organisation level, so a heavy user can spend a light colleague's share and nothing is stranded on an individual seat. And the allowance refreshes monthly with no rollover, so a quiet month buys you nothing in a busy one.
| Plan tier | Credits per user, per month | Basic questions per user | Pooled for a 10 person team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jira or Confluence Standard | 25 | 2.5 | 25 questions a month |
| Jira or Confluence Premium | 70 | 7 | 70 questions a month |
| Jira or Confluence Enterprise | 150 | 15 | 150 questions a month |
| Teamwork or Service Collection, Standard | 250 | 25 | 250 questions a month |
| Teamwork or Service Collection, Premium | 700 | 70 | 700 questions a month |
| Teamwork or Service Collection, Enterprise | 1,500 | 150 | 1,500 questions a month |
The other two meters
How do Notion AI and ClickUp Brain meter the same work?
This is the half of the comparison we can speak to from our own workspaces. We hold Notion and ClickUp consultant certifications and we run client builds on both, so the behaviour below is not just a reading of the pricing page.
Notion puts the meter around autonomy, not around asking. According to Notion's pricing page, core Notion AI comes with the 20 dollar Business seat, and using it all day does not draw down a counter. Credits arrive at 10 dollars per 1,000 when the AI starts running without you: Custom Agents began consuming them on 4 May 2026 and Workers start on 15 October 2026. In practice this means a team that writes and summarises with AI never sees a credit bill, and a team that builds a fleet of scheduled agents does. We unpacked that meter in Notion AI credits and limits explained.
ClickUp puts the meter around headcount. Per ClickUp's pricing page, Brain is 9 dollars per user per month on top of Business at 19 dollars, and it carries 1,500 AI Super Credits per user per month, pooled across the workspace. Everything AI is 28 dollars per seat for 5,000 credits. On annual billing those drop to 7.20 and 22.40 against a 12 dollar base. The trade is that your AI bill is knowable on day one and it scales with people rather than with usage.
One warning about the table below. A credit is not the same unit at all three vendors, so comparing the per credit price across columns is meaningless. What is comparable is the ratio of allowance to what one ordinary action costs, and Atlassian is the only one of the three that publishes a clean per question rate. That transparency is to Atlassian's credit. It also happens to be the reason we can show you how small their allowance is, and why we cannot do the same arithmetic for the other two.
| Per user, per month | Jira or Confluence + Rovo | Notion Business | ClickUp Business + Brain |
|---|---|---|---|
| How AI is sold | Bundled into the seat | Included in the seat | Paid add-on on top |
| Base seat, monthly billing | $7.91 Jira, $5.42 Confluence | $20 | $19 |
| AI cost, monthly billing | $0 extra | Included | $9 add-on |
| Total with one product | $7.91 | $20 | $28 |
| AI allowance included | 25 credits (Standard) | Core AI, no credit draw | 1,500 credits |
| Cost of one basic question | 10 credits | Not metered | Not published per action |
| Extra capacity | $10 per 1,000 credits | $10 per 1,000 credits | $10 per 10,000 credits |
| When overage starts | 3 Dec 2026 | Agents now, Workers 15 Oct 2026 | Now |
| Behaviour at the cap | Pauses unless extra usage is on | Agents stop, core AI continues | Buy more credits |
| What the meter tracks | Every interaction | Autonomous runs | Headcount |
| Our call | Keep it, budget an overage | Default for most small teams | Pick when everyone uses AI daily |
The numbers
What does each one cost a 10 person team?
For a 10 person team asking one AI question each per working day, Jira and Confluence with Rovo cost about 152.80 dollars a month including the credit top up, Notion Business costs 200 dollars, and ClickUp Business with Brain costs 280 dollars.
List prices hide the thing you care about, so here is the same team priced three ways, with a realistic AI habit attached: one basic AI question per person per working day, about 22 a month each, or 220 for the team.
| 10 people, monthly | Jira + Confluence + Rovo | Notion Business | ClickUp Business + Brain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seats | $133.30 | $200 | $280 |
| AI allowance included | 250 credits, 25 questions | Unmetered for this use | 15,000 credits |
| Credits needed for 220 questions | 2,200 | None | Covered by the allowance |
| Shortfall to buy | 1,950 credits | None | None |
| Top up cost | $19.50 | $0 | $0 |
| Real monthly total | $152.80 | $200 | $280 |
| Per year | $1,833.60 | $2,400 | $3,360 |
Read that table twice, because it says the opposite of the headline. Atlassian's allowance covers 11 percent of a modest team habit, which sounds alarming, and topping up the other 89 percent costs 19.50 dollars a month, which is not. Even after the top up, Rovo comes in roughly 570 dollars a year under Notion and 1,500 under ClickUp for this workload.
So the allowance is a bad headline and a weak argument against Atlassian. The honest arguments against it are different ones: you are buying into Jira and Confluence as your system of record to get there, the premium interactions are priced as variable so heavy research use is genuinely hard to forecast, and the cap pauses your AI rather than degrading it. None of those are about the 25 credits.
The mirror image is worth stating too. ClickUp looks expensive in this table and buys you the one thing the other two will not sell: certainty. 3,360 dollars is the whole number for the year regardless of how hard the team leans on it. If your finance lead values a fixed line over a smaller one, that is a defensible purchase, not a bad deal. We priced the two seat based options against each other in ClickUp Brain vs Notion AI, per seat.
The 5 minute decision
Which should your team actually pick?
Answer one question first: where does your operational work already live? The AI meter should follow that decision, not drive it.
Stay on Rovo if
Your work already lives in Jira or Confluence. The AI is bundled, the top up is a cent a credit, and moving platforms to escape a credit meter is a far more expensive decision than the meter. Turn extra usage on, then forget about it.
Choose Notion if
Only part of your team needs AI, you are under 25 people, or you cannot yet name the autonomous workloads you would run. Everyday AI comes with the seat, so occasional users cost you nothing extra. This is still the default answer for most teams we advise.
Choose ClickUp + Brain if
Everyone uses AI daily, you are already committed to ClickUp, and you want one flat predictable AI line on the invoice. You pay more for the certainty. Sometimes that is the right trade.
One last thing worth saying plainly, because it undercuts the whole comparison: the spread between these three is a few hundred dollars a year for a small team, and it is smaller than the cost of running your operations in the wrong system. A workspace nobody adopts wastes more than every credit meter on this page combined. If you are still choosing the underlying platform rather than the AI on top of it, settle that first with our four way comparison of Notion, ClickUp, Monday and Asana. If the Notion column is the one you are leaning toward and you want it built properly, that is what a Notion consultant for small businesses does.
FAQ
Questions teams ask about Rovo credits
How many Rovo credits do you get per user per month?
How much does one Rovo question cost in credits?
Is Rovo included in Jira and Confluence, or is it an extra cost?
What happens when you run out of Rovo credits?
Is Atlassian Rovo cheaper than Notion AI or ClickUp Brain for a 10 person team?
Do Rovo credits roll over to the next month?
Ishan Vats
Founder, IV Consulting · AI and automation consultant
I build workspaces, automations, and production AI agents for teams from startup to enterprise. 150+ ops transformations over 10+ years. We run Notion and ClickUp ourselves and we do not run Jira, which is exactly why the Atlassian column above is sourced to Atlassian's own docs rather than dressed up as experience.
Price my own AI credits →Keep reading
Related guides and work
ClickUp Brain vs Notion AI, per seat
The two seat based meters priced head to head. The real gap is 8 dollars, not 2x.
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Notion AI credits and limits explained
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A Notion consultant for small businesses
If Notion is the column you are leaning toward, this is what having it built properly looks like.
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