CLion 2018.2 brought compilation database project format support. And it's more useful already than you may realize, as nowadays an increasing number of build systems allows generating comp db out of them. Typical example is Makefiles!

Working with Makefiles in CLion using Compilation DB

by Phil Nash

From the article:

Now that CLion can open Compilation DB JSON files it means it can effectively understand projects from many more build systems. This gives CLion full code-completion, static analysis, navigation and even refactoring on such projects. For 2018.2 we don’t yet have build (except for individual files) or debug capabilities – but these are planned for an upcoming release. To see just how useful this is, we’ll work through a couple of examples.