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monday.com is a widely used project and work management platform. It scores an impressive 4.7/5 overall against our latest project management testing criteria, the highest score achieved out of 10 major providers we regularly test. In this monday.com review, you’ll find out why the provider is one of your best project management software options if you want an organizational boost without a long, arduous setup process.
Deciding whether a specific software program is right for your team isn’t always easy, especially if you’re a small business without much of a software budget. However, you’ll feel instantly more organized with monday.com thanks to the software’s clean and tidy interface. What’s more, if you’re on track to expand your team and operations, monday.com can grow with you – there’s currently a free plan and four paid plans for businesses of different sizes.
monday.com is one of the only project management providers currently offering an AI assistant, and thanks to features like industry-specific project templates, sub-tasks, and a Kanban board being made available on all of monday.com’s plans, you can rest assured that the finer details of your project can be taken care of with ease. In this article, we’ll summarize the key pros, cons, and features of monday.com you need to know about.
monday.com came first on our 2023 project management testing series, scoring highly for task management (4.5/5), data visualization (5/5), security (5/5) and ease of use (4.5/5). It has a minimalistic interface that, despite feeling simple, contains quite an impressive number of features.
The platform is highly customizable, but monday.com is definitely built with the general user in mind, and it doesn't take a tech whizz to quickly master its menus. There are lots of support options on hand if you get stuck, including a live chat function that we found very useful.
monday.com is a cloud-based project and work management platform geared towards planning and managing projects and tracking day-to-day workplace activities, tasks, and duties.
As tools for project management go, it’s extremely easy to use, with a clean interface, helpful instructions, and intuitive tools that don’t take long to master.
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It also has a wide range of advanced features like a workload view for keeping a close eye on your project’s progress and team duties, and one of the best dashboard builders in the industry, helping it to a 5/5 score for data visualization.
Thanks to its customizability, monday.com is a solid option for a wide variety of teams, from those who just want a central place to track their daily work tasks to larger teams who want to streamline processes and mechanisms at scale.
monday.com’s Kanban board. Image: Tech.co’s testing process.
monday.com has a straightforward automation builder that is easier to use than ClickUp’s and a genuinely helpful and highly responsive live chat function for sussing out where you’ve gone wrong. There’s also a really useful, customizable “Chart” area for project insights, as well as a Kanban board, a time-tracking feature and a classic grid/table view.
Overall, monday.com scored 4.7/5 on our most recent round of project management testing, making it our top-scoring provider for 2024 – last year, it came a close second to ClickUp. monday.com also scored 4.5/5 on our ease of use tests and 5/5 for data visualization – higher than any other provider we tested – which makes it perfect for anyone new to digital project management.
Test Summary (2024)
I didn’t find the latest version of monday.com difficult to get started with at all – thankfully, there are lots of helpful pointers provided that keep you on the right track. The software feels like it’s been built with newbies in mind, and the clever use of white space instantly makes your workspace feel organized and uncluttered.
Setting up didn’t take very long – I finished both the data import and setting up my project views much more quickly than I did wen we ran our test with Smartsheet. The automation builder is a good example of monday.com’s simplicity advantage – while Wrike’s automation builders both felt restrictive and tricky to configure, monday.com’s was more flexible and easier to create useful automations with.
I was particularly impressed with the customer support experience – the live chat function is really useful, and a member of monday.com’s support team even sent me a video showing me where I was going wrong at one point.
monday.com Pros and Cons
monday.com has some useful advantages that helped it secure top spot in our recent project and task management software testing series. It’s not a perfect software program either – and it wouldn’t be a monday.com review without some honest pros and cons. Here, we’ll briefly go through some monday.com pros and cons.
monday.com pros:
- ‘Custom Fields’ feature available on all plans
- Rule-based automation for simple tasks
- More than 200 project templates
- Modern, minimalistic user interface
- Free plan available for solo users and duos
- Quicker to set up than Wrike and Jira
- Highly responsive live chat feature
- Easy to add budgeting information to tasks
monday.com cons:
- Task filtering tools can be a little restrictive
- The “My Work” area isn’t that useful
- time tracking only on Pro projects plan
- The mobile app isn’t as functional
- Onboarding questions aren’t straightforward
- The dashboard feature needs more guidance
“I like monday.com as it’s a really simple project management tool – you don’t need an introduction, you can just start using it,” says Aimee Irvine, an SEO campaigns specialist who uses monday.com to organize her team’s work. “You can share boards with people who don’t have access to monday.com with a view-only link, and lots of the automations save time when planning and keeping organized. I also like being able to save many filtered views of a board, which makes it easier to find information, and the Kanban board is good for understanding task progress, too.”
Using the Kanban board in monday.com. Image: Tech.co’s testing process
As we’ve said, however, monday.com isn’t perfect. “I don’t really like the ‘my task’ view,” Aimee continued, echoing a frustration we experienced when we tested monday.com. “It has very limited functionality so being able to see all my tasks from multiple boards is difficult unless there is a deadline assigned to every task.
She continued, “I also don’t like how the same task cannot exist on two boards without it just being a duplicate of the task. This results in having to manually update two tasks if you make any changes to one as they are not the same item/linked tasks.”
monday.com Review: Key Features and Test Results
On our last round of testing, monday.com scored highly compared to other providers when it came to features, with a score of 4.2/5 overall for functionality.
While it might not have the feature set included in ClickUp, monday.com hits that sweet spot between having genuinely useful tools and not becoming overwhelming or unnecessarily complicated.
Setting up with monday.com
Like most other project management tools, monday.com starts with a “main workspace” at the very top. Under that are what monday.com calls “boards”. When testing the platform, I worked on a one-board-per-project principle and this seemed to work just fine for my test project, which revolved around the key elements of launching a website.
After you log in and create a workspace, you’ll be asked if you want to import any project data from another program (Excel, Google Sheets, etc.), which was a pretty smooth experience all things considered – this isn’t always the case with all project management tools.
Importing data in monday.com. Image: Tech.co’s testing process.
After your data is imported (which took very little time) the software will present you with a view called the “Main Table” where you can add the different tasks you need to complete.
monday.com layout and project views
monday.com’s aggressive color coding may be a little blinding at first, but customizing the main table is actually super easy to use. All you have to do is add columns that serve different purposes, and you can just grab individual tasks by clicking them and group them as you please.
Creating task groups in monday.com. Image: Tech.co’s testing process.
The functional columns are very general, and you can effectively turn them into anything you want. Inserting a currency symbol, for example, will turn it into a money/budget column for you. Alternatively, you could make it a column for estimating the time needed to complete the task. It’s very much like a sandbox – you can ask yourself what you need and create it yourself.
However, monday.com offers a huge range of additional views (over 15 in total) that I could use for oversight, such as a calendar, a Gantt chart, and a workload view.
monday.com’s Gantt chart view. Image: Tech.co’s testing process
Although I had to play around with the Gantt chart for a minute (and consult monday.com’s live chat), all the data I needed from my main table was already there – I just needed to select it. I then turned on the “critical path” function to highlight the most important tasks in my project, which is a relatively new feature.
The workload view, on the other hand, really clearly shows which team members have the longest to-do lists. Another recent monday.com feature is the ability to accurately define and divide up effort, which puts it on par with Wrike, a software tool known for its workload-tracking capabilities.
Assessing a team workload with monday.com. Image: Tech.co’s testing process
Managing tasks with monday.com
Overall, monday.com scores 4.2/5 for functionality, helped by its 4.5/5 score for task management. As we’ve discussed already, one of the reasons it achieved such a high score is the huge range of views you can use to secure top-level oversight over task progress – there are more than 15 in total.
I found the more detailed elements of task management pretty simple too. When I clicked on specific tasks, I was able to peruse the activity log, attach files, and leave comments and @ other team members. You can also attach files and peruse the task history to get yourself up to speed.
Managing a task in monday.com. Image: tech.co’s testing process
The bottom line is that you can mold tasks into containers of information that suit your needs – and it doesn’t take a tech whizz to get to grips with it quickly, either. Granted, it’s not quite as powerful or customizable as arch-rival ClickUp’s task management area, although there’s a nice invoice function that makes keeping track of spending much easier.
Setting up an invoice for a task in monday.com. Image: Tech.co’s testing process
Unfortunately, when I was using monday.com, I found that some of the advanced task management features, such as monday.com’s task dependency and time-tracking tools, are only available on the Pro Projects ($19 per user, per month) and Enterprise plans.
What’s more, Gantt Charts aren’t available on monday.com’s free plan, called the individual tier, while milestones, task dependencies, and a calendar aren’t available on the Basic plan.
Rival project management software tool Teamwork also excels in this area, netting a 4.3/5 score for task management. Teamwork’s Starter plan ($5.99 per user, per month), which is just 1 cent cheaper than monday.com’s Standard projects plan, includes a time tracking tool and a task dependency feature.
Building automations in monday.com
monday.com scores 3.8/5 overall for workflow creation, which is determined by the quality of a provider’s pre-set and custom templates, as well as how capable their automation builder is (if included).
This is a slight decrease from monday.com’s 2022 score (4.3/5). This is partly because rivals like Teamwork have upgraded their automation capabilities since our last tests. That being said, monday.com still has one of the simplest automation builders in the game.
As you may be able to tell from the automation center options, monday.com will carry out particular actions for you after something else happens:
monday.com’s automation center. Image: Tech.co’s testing process.
What that “something” depends on how you program it. You to create an automated task in plain language – for example, I created an automation that makes sure I’ll be notified if the phase status of any task is changed to “quality assurance phase”:
Creating an automation in monday.com. Image: Tech.co’s testing process
Automations have their limits, however. In the version of monday.com we used during testing, we couldn’t set automations for specific tasks, such as “when Task 1 is done, alert person in charge of Task 2.” Our way around this was to add a new status column, rename it “dependency”, and then edit it to have only two statuses: “not ready” and “ready.”
We then created an automation to notify another team member when the dependency column changed from “not ready” to “ready.” That way, only tasks using the dependency column would activate this automation. In other words, our solution worked but required more tinkering than some users may be happy with.
If automation is your main priority, we’d recommend taking a look at Teamwork – our research team thinks its automation builder is easier to use than monday.com’s, although they both function quite similarly.
Collaborating with your team in monday.com
If monday.com has a weak point, its collaboration – although it scores a decent 3.3/5, it’s not got quite the range of accessible tools for communication as the likes of ClickUp.
monday.com’s whiteboard tool, for instance, has traditionally been useful for interactive sessions to pool stakeholder views – but this feature is now being retired, which is one of the reasons that monday.com lost out to ClickUp when it comes to collaboration.
There is a document editing tool, however, and a project message board for discussions. If you want a proper chat “view” that can be added to your bookmark bar, however, you’ll have to download a monday.com app, such as the chat app we downloaded:
Using a chat app downloaded from monday.com’s app marketplace. Image: Tech.co’s testing process.
One useful collaboration feature, however, is that monday.com allows you to make your project read-only and grant guest access to anyone who may need to view it, which is ideal if you have stakeholders who aren’t directly involved in the project but would still benefit from being able to view your work.
monday.com’s third-party integrations
monday.com scores 4/5 for integrations, and has a decent-sized library of apps it can sync up with. However, it’s not as impressive as Wrike’s (4.8/5) and Asana’s (4.7/5), which both offer larger, more relevant selections.
Naturally, monday.com integrates with commonly used services like Gmail, Teams, and Slack, but there’s also a wide range of marketing, CRM, finance, and reporting integrations available.
The Gmail integration allows you to create a new task when an email is received from a particular contact. along with a variety of other triggers for actions. Alternatively, you could use a Slack feature that notifies people in a particular channel (chat room) when a new pulse is created. If all you need from Slack and Gmail are these two features, then that’s all you have to add.
Browsing the pre-built monday.com G-mail integrations. Image: tech.co’s testing process
You’ll also be able to integrate with other teams in your business using other project management software tools, as monday.com integrates with Asana and can be hooked up to ClickUp via Zapier.
However, there are no integrations available on monday.com’s Free or Basic plan – the $12 per user, per month Standard plan is the cheapest monday.com plan that can integrate with other software.
Viewing project data in monday.com
Thanks to monday.com’s Chart view, which was extremely useful for visualizing project data, monday.com was awarded 5/5 for this assessment category by our research team. This was the best score achieved out of the 10 providers we tested.
The Pro projects plan is the most fully featured monday.com plan from a data visualization perspective, with 6 preset charts to choose from as well as the ability to make your own. However, you can create widgets, which can be used to display specific metrics, on the Basic and Standard plans.
There are offers a chart view, allowing users to get a global view of their various boards with bar charts, timelines, and so on. In fact, monday.com scores 5/5 for data visualization, putting it joint first with ClickUp, Asana, and Wrike.
Building a dashboard in monday.com. Image Tech.co’s testing process
On monday.com’s cheaper plans, you’ll still be able to build widgets and display them on a dashboard. Some competitors, like Trello, only offer limited data display tools on their most expensive plans, so didn’t score as well (2.9/5) in this category.
Jira, however, actually has a full suite of data visualization tools on every plan, including its free version – although it’s a bit more of a steep learning curve than monday.com, in many instances.
Customer support and security options in monday.com
monday.com’s support options are reasonably varied, and my personal experience with using the live chat function was particularly positive. After running into an issue and contacting a customer service agent, they promptly sent me a Loom video via email showing me precisely what I had to do to rectify my problem.
The speed of the response was very reassuring, and this experience – plus the company’s 24/7 live support, which some providers like Wrike don’t offer – helped monday.com achieve an impressive 4.5/5 is that 24/7 live support is available, which some providers like Wrike don’t offer.
Along with the live chat function, you can contact the company for help via email, and there’s also a knowledge base and community forum to refer to if you feel like you can fix the issue independently. There are quite a few video tutorials for users to refer to as well if your problem doesn’t demand a direct channel of communication.
Searching for an automation guide using monday.com’s knowledge base. Image: Tech.co’s testing process
monday.com’s Enterprise plan is the only plan that comes with premium support, and larger businesses will appreciate this if they get stuck with some of the more complex enterprise-level features. There’s also onboarding assistance to help you and your team get set up.
In terms of security, monday.com has 2-factor authentication available on all plans, as well as a guest access function on the Standard, Pro, and Enterprise plans. There are also IP restriction capabilities included on the Enterprise plan, which not a lot of competitors offer, helping monday.com to a 5/5 for security.
What’s new in monday.com in 2024?
monday.com is adding new features to its software every month – and take it from us, not everyone is updating and iterating as much as monday.com is. Programs like Trello simply don’t get new features and functions at the same pace – monday.com has made more product updates in August of last year than Trello did for the whole of 2023.
However, perhaps the most exciting recent product update is monday.com’s new AI assistant, which you can call on to help you with all of your project-based needs. As of July 2023, you can create “up to 15 new items at a time according to your specific needs using AI-generated task suggestions.”
The tool is still in beta, but it’s already becoming a key reason why a lot of new customers are signing up for monday.com – and it’ll continue to be rolled out to more customers during 2024.
At the end of 2023, monday.com improved its scrolling experience, added custom roles for account permissions, revamped its dashboards to make it easier to create reports, and added a two-way sync integration with Jira. More updates have also been made to the Kanban board, which now has a battery-style widget so it’s easier to see exactly what has been achieved throughout your project so far.
In January 2024, monday.com is adding keyboard accessibility on the home page, so you can flick between boards without using your mouse. But there are more exciting updates than that – for example, monday.com’s dashboards will now run on MondayDB, which means quicker loading times.
Another handy change coming to monday.com is automation notifications – now, when an automation you’ve built changes something on a board, you’ll be notified as to what changed, and why.
monday.com Review: How Does monday.com Compare to Competitors?
Overall, monday.com scored 4.7/5 in our recent testing series, coming first out of all the industry-leading tools we examined. It’s pretty decent value for money, with paid plans starting from $9 per user per month.
If that sounds like the deal for you, find out more about monday.com pricing, but if it doesn’t, take a closer look at the monday.com alternatives currently available:
Price From All prices listed as per user, per month (billed annually) | Score The overall score obtained from our most recent round of project management software user testing. | Free Version | Verdict | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Best Overall | Best for Budget Tracking | Best for Task Management | |||||||
4.7 | 4.6 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.3 | 4.2 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 2.9 |
| | | | | | | | | |
A great task management system due to strong customizability and support team, with a generous free trial. | A great user experience all round, with an easy-to-use automation builder and great budget tracking capabilities. | Slick software with a highly powerful core and an AI assistant, plus a genuinely usable free tier for individuals. | A simple task-list-based project management platform with an acceptable free tier. | A feature-rich service with two plans for enterprises, and a free tier for new users to try. | A fairly-priced, stripped-down option best for small teams who need a central location for basic task management. | A great tool for spreadsheet-natives, which can take your Excel-based task planning to the next level. | A great value piece of software that’s ideal for tech, software development and engineering teams. | A solid project management solution with an attractive free tier for small teams and a very affordable premium plan. | A very basic, relatively limited software that’s a lot simpler than its competitors. |
Try monday.com | Try Teamwork | Compare Deals | Compare Deals | Try Wrike | Compare Deals | Try Smartsheet | Compare Deals | Try Zoho | Compare Deals |
monday.com vs Teamwork
So who was the runner-up? Surprisingly, it’s Teamwork that ran monday.com the closest out on top in our tests, scoring 4.6/5, thanks to an affordable starter plan, great budget tracking and security tools, and a commendable 4.3/5 ease of use score.
As you can see from the image below, just like monday.com, the interface is pretty clean and unintimidating. However, Teamwork it includes advanced features like automation and time tracking on every plan, including its free plan – helping it to a pricing score of 4.4/5, which is better than monday.com’s 3.9/5.
Adding tasks in Teamwork. Image: Tech.co’s testing process
monday.com vs ClickUp
ClickUp ranks third (4.5/5), thanks to excellent task management and collaboration features, as well as a free plan with no user limit.
Only ClickUp performed better than monday.com when it came to overall functionality (4.6/5). Once you get to monday.com and ClickUp’s pricier tiers, both providers offer very similar packages – but ClickUp’s first paid plan, the $7 per user, per month Unlimited plan has far more task management, data visualization, and workflow creation tools than monday.com’s comparably priced $9 per user, per month Basic Projects plan.
ClickUp also scores better for collaboration (4.7/5) than monday.com (3.3/5). ClickUp has a very advanced online whiteboard, whereas monday.com will soon be retiring this feature and directing users to a third-party product for brainstorming sessions. There’s also a chat view for instant messaging, which monday.com doesn’t offer as a native feature.
ClickUp’s chat view. Image: Tech.co’s testing process
However, it fell behind monday.com and Teamwork in terms when it came to ease of use and customer support. monday.com improved greatly on its 2.8/5 score for customer support we awarded it in 2022, scoring 4.5/5 in 2023 in this area, largely due to the fact there’s now 24/7 live support available.
ClickUp, conversely, scores 3.3/5 for customer support and doesn’t offer this option anymore. For a more detailed head-to-head, visit our monday.com vs ClickUp comparison page.
monday.com vs Smartsheet
Everyone in our testing group found monday.com was significantly easier to use than Smartsheet (4.2/5). The data import was quicker and smoother, it’s easier to flick between views and you’re able to customize them much more easily. As you can see, Smartsheet’s interface isn’t as easy on the eye:
Commenting on a task in Smartsheet. Image: Tech.co’s testing process
“I think the [monday.com] user experience is very intuitive,” reports Stephanie Lennox, a writer who participated in our testing series. “I just guessed where I thought things would be and they ended up being there, which was great.”
“Everything is placed very carefully – clearly a lot of thought has gone into that,” agrees Alice Martin, another business writer who took part in our ease-of-use testing. “It feels a little bit like an Apple product. You just instinctively know how to work it, which can’t be said for Smartsheet”.
For example, you can edit the size of widgets and charts like it’s an image in a Word document – you don’t have anywhere near as much freedom with Smartsheet.
At Tech.co, we test all of the software and services we write about in order to draw out valuable insights for those on the hunt for tools that can have transformative impacts on their businesses.
We also conduct background and market research to ensure we’re putting the top providers to the test, for content like this monday.com review. For project management software, our team identified 10 leading tools and subjected them to a rigorous assessment process, allowing us to create articles like this monday.com review. The main criteria used to judge monday.com’s plans were:
- Ease of Use – an assessment of how easy it is to perform a series of basic project management tasks.
- Customer Support – the quality of the customer support options on offer.
- Functionality – an assessment of the different types of features a provider offers, and how they function.
- Security – the quality and effectiveness of the security options on offer
- Integrations – the quality and quantity of software that a given provider integrates with
- Value for money – an assessment of how many features you get for the price you pay
We’ve got sub-criteria that we rate providers on too. For example, our “functionality” score is an amalgamation of how monday.com and other providers fared while performing Task Management, Workflow Creation, Data Visualization, and Collaboration functions.
Although we have commercial relations with some of the providers we write about, it’s our independent research and testing procedures that allow us to stay editorially independent. The only thing that determines our product rankings is our test results.
Ease of Use | Pricing | Customer Support | Functionality | Security | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4.5 | 4.3 | 4.2 | 3.9 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 3.6 | 3.2 | 3.2 | 2.5 |
3.9 | 4.4 | 3.7 | 4.4 | 3.7 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.8 | 4.6 | 2.8 |
4.5 | 3.8 | 4.5 | 3.3 | 4.0 | 5.0 | 4.5 | 3.5 | 2.7 | 2.8 |
4.2 | 3.7 | 4.1 | 4.6 | 3.7 | 2.9 | 3.2 | 3.1 | 3.3 | 1.7 |
5.0 | 5.0 | 4.4 | 4.3 | 5.0 | 4.4 | 4.4 | 4.2 | 4.8 | 3.3 |
Verdict: Is monday.com Worth It?
monday.com scores 4.7/5 overall, and it’s the best-performing project management software tool out of the 10 major providers we regularly test. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use, flexible app that can cater to a wide variety of projects, look no further than monday.com.
The provider is particularly capable when it comes to task management, with a huge range of features for viewing project progress included on the Standard plan and upwards, including custom fields, Gantt Charts, and Kanban boards. This helped monday.com to a very commendable score of 4.5/5 for this category of assessment.
Before settling on which to invest in, we’d recommend making use of the free trials offered by monday.com and Teamwork. Teamwork was one of our biggest climbers, and aside from monday.com, I found it the easiest to use. It’s not quite as powerful, but it’s worth seeing which one you prefer.
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