It is well known that every uniquely clean ring is strongly clean. In this paper, we investigate the question of when this result holds element-wise. We first construct an example showing that uniquely clean elements need not be strongly clean. However, in case every corner ring is clean the uniquely clean elements are strongly clean. Further, we classify the set of uniquely clean elements for various classes of rings, including semiperfect rings, unit-regular rings, and endomorphism rings of continuous modules.