Monday.com

Monday.com is aOnline collaborationApp that focuses on managing ongoing work, as opposed to longer-term projects. It helps you build, share, and communicate about a collection of highly customizable boards that organize tasks into spreadsheets and other visual charts. The app's flexibility, along with its large variety of automations and integrations, makes Monday.com a capable tool for companies that need to stay on top of simple or recurring processes throughout the work week. That said, its complicated (and sometimes expensive) pricing model and limited free plan are drawbacks.Asanaremains our Editors' Choice winner for work management because of its excellent free plan and superior value.

Project Management vs. Work Management

At The Shiro Copr, we make a distinction betweenProject Managementand work management software. Projects have start dates, end dates, and deliverables, while 'work' in this sense refers to a series of ongoing tasks. This distinction isn’t always crystal clear, however.

Monday.com, for example, can track assets, hours worked, tasks, statuses, and more across various boards, and it can do so with a variety of different visualizations, just like project management apps. Full-on project management apps, however, often go a lot further. Zoho Projects, for example, can generate in-depth reports on issues, tasks, time logs, and workloads in the form of many types of charts and graphs. Monday.com merely has widgets you can add to your dashboard to track progress. Zoho Projects is thus better for complicated projects, such as building and launching a website, whereas Monday.com’s solution is more suitable for simpler operations, such as the day-to-day work of a public relations representative.

If you're in the market for a dedicated project management app, you can choose among our Editors' Choice winners for that category:GanttProfor newcomers,Teamworkfor client work, and Zoho Projects for small and growing teams.

Pricing: Unnecessarily Complicated

Monday.com offers five subscription plans for its work management product: Free, Basic, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. A 14-day trial is available for all the paid plans, except Enterprise. Pricing for Monday.com'sCRM, service management and ticketing, and software development products differ.

Like competing apps, Monday.com charges per person or seat. The Free plan's maximum of two seats is its single biggest limitation. Otherwise, you get access to Android and iOS apps, unlimited document creation, up to three boards with eight column types, and over 200 customizable templates (for boards, documents, and forms) for free. Paid plans have many exclusive features, such as AI functionality, different board views, file storage, and higher usage limits, among others.

The Basic plan ($9 per seat per month, billed annually) adds a dashboard for tracking progress on a single board, priority customer support, unlimited boards, unlimited items (for tracking customers, projects, and tasks), unlimited read-only viewers, 5GB of cloud storage, and 500 AI credits per month. Monday.com's AI features all cost credits to use, but more on that later.

The Standard plan ($12 per seat per month, billed annually) unlocks guest access, more viewing options (calendar, Gantt, and timeline), and support for automations and integrations that cap out at 250 actions per month. Standard users also get a dashboard that can track progress on up to five boards.

The Pro plan ($19 per seat per month, billed annually) introduces a chart view, a board column for formulas, private boards, and time tracking capabilities. Pro users also get 25K actions per month for automations and integrations, alongside a dashboard that can track progress on up to 20 boards. For this review, I tested the Pro plan.

Finally, the Enterprise plan (custom pricing) gives you advanced analytics and reports, a dashboard that compiles information from up to 50 boards, multi-level permissions, a wide range of security features, 24/7 support, and 250K actions per month for automations and integrations. Monday.com can also build custom features for your team at this level.

When you sign up for a Monday.com subscription, you have to choose a team size. This is problematic because you can select only among preset team sizes that aren’t just multiples of five. For example, you can sign up for a three-person plan but not a six-person plan, or a 25-person plan but not a 35-person plan. In other words, you can't just pay for a plan that fits the exact size of your team, in most cases, which might lead to unnecessary spending. If you try to select 40 seats for any plan, you need to contact the sales department, too.

For comparison, Asana's cheapest paid plan ($10.99 per user per month, billed annually) costs slightly more than Monday.com's Basic plan. But the math might still work out in Asana's favor if Monday.com's preset team sizes don't match your needs.

The free version of Monday.com doesn't measure up to competitors. Asana's andTrello'sFree versions include file storage, integrations, and support for up to 10 collaborators, none of which are offered by Monday.com's free tier. You might not need more than Monday.com's free version if you mostly work independently, but otherwise you should explore better options.

Interface and Ease of Use: Approachable, But Tough to Master

You need to sign up for an account to use Monday.com, regardless of whether you start with a trial or go straight for the free version. When you sign in to Monday.com for the first time, the app asks you questions about what you want to do. It helps you set up your first workspace accordingly and allows you to populate it with your first board and a few tasks. Monday.com works best on the web, but mobile apps (Android and iOS) are available for when you need to check something on the go.

Before you dive in, though, you get a notification to complete your profile, which we recommend doing as soon as possible. Completing your profile involves a variety of tasks, such as inviting team members and uploading your photo. But the most important thing you need to do is tweak the notification settings. Monday.com enables all notifications by default, so we suggest turning at least some of them off to avoid distractions.

The app's interface is attractive and easy to parse. With fewer buttons and tabs than most project and work management apps, it won't overwhelm you, even if this is your first time using this type of software. It takes just a few clicks to open up your boards and see all your tracked items. Communicating with team members is as intuitive as with any social media app; just head to your update feed in the top right corner of the interface. We appreciate the healthy amount of color in Monday.com’s interface, too, since other apps rely on just a few shades.

Although Monday.com's interface is approachable, it offers a lot of functionality. It will take some trial and error to fully understand everything, and refining your processes will take some patience. Since you can create boards (as well as alternative dashboards, documents, and forms), customize them, organize them into folders, and track all sorts of items for each workspace you set up, wrapping your head around it all won't happen immediately.

Managing Work: Robust Functionality

In Monday.com, you start with a workspace. Your workspace houses your boards, which contain all your tasks (or items, as Monday.com calls them), dashboards for monitoring overall progress, documents, folders, and forms. You can easily organize items into groups.

Boards are the central component of Monday.com, and you can customize them to your heart's content. A board starts with a spreadsheet, but you can add otherboard views, including, in list order, table, Gantt, chart, calendar, kanban, document, file gallery, and form. It is also possible to set up a custom set of widgets. If you don't want to go through the hassle of creating a board, Monday.com has a long list of pre-made templates you can customize to your liking.

Within a board, you can add items (along with subitems) and customize them via a variety of columns. Items can then be organized into groups. Adding items and filling out relevant columns only takes a few clicks. For example, if you want to monitor order fulfillment, you can create an item and add date, number, person, label, and status columns. If an order involves multiple items, you can add these as subitems. As items go through various stages of completion, you can add updates, assign new team members to items, change statuses, check off completed items and subitems, and more. The above columns allow you to quickly see how much a given order is for, what stage in fulfillment the order is at, what type of order it is, the order placement time, and who is assigned to fulfill the order.

If you want to stay updated on the overall progress of your company's operations at a glance, open your dashboard. Here, you can add widgets that connect to various boards (the number depends on your subscription) that come in many forms. For example, if you want a quick and dirty way to see how close something is to completion, you can add the battery widget that fills up based on an item's status. You can also add a widget that tracks any number-based columns, such as budget spent or hours worked. This works for simpler tasks, but dedicated project management apps offer more in-depth analytics and reporting tools.

Monday.com supports basic time tracking in the form of a column you can add to a board (if you pay for the Pro subscription tier). In the column, you can start and stop a timer as necessary or manually add a session. You can add a corresponding widget to your dashboard for easy monitoring. This functionality is likely enough for most people, but you might need to pay for a dedicated service if your needs are more complex.

It's also possible to create documents and forms in Monday.com. For the latter, you can start from scratch or with a premade template. Documents are shareable both with people inside and outside of your organization, but you should still stick with the likes ofGoogle Workspacefor anything beyond brainstorming and jotting down notes. The form-building functionality is similar. You can make custom ones or start with a template. It's possible to create and share simple surveys, but Monday.com just can't compete with dedicated apps likeJotform.

Communication and Collaboration: Stay in Touch Easily

Monday.com is a work management solution for teams first and foremost, not individuals, so staying in touch with coworkers is a key feature. Luckily, Monday.com makes this easy. Click on your update feed at the top-right of the interface to find bookmarks of important updates, updates in which someone directly mentioned you, and updates on your boards in general. The communications features aren't too advanced, but they work fine.

To write an update yourself, just click on an item in a board and start writing in the side panel, or you can click on the 'Write a new update' button next to an item's name. When you @ people directly, your message appears in their update feed. If you want to track an item's activity, you can open up an item's Activity Log tab to see who made what changes and when.

Thanks to its direct messaging capabilities andZoho Meetingintegration, Zoho Projects can serve as a one-stop shop for your work life. Monday.com, on the other hand, makes it easy to talk to your team about Monday.com action items. You're better off using it alongside other apps, such asGoogle MeetorSlack, for deeper, richer communication.

Integrations and Automation: Endless Options

Integrations and automation are where Monday.com shines. With a paid subscription, you can connect your Monday.com account to other apps your team uses. At the time of writing,hundreds of integrations are available, including DocuSign, Excel, GitLab, Gmail, Mailchimp,Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Slack. Integrations with other apps allow you to automatically move information between them. For example, you can sync all the dates from a specific board to your Google Calendar. When you add a new date to the board, it automatically appears in your Google Calendar. Integrations can save your team time by eliminating the need to copy data from one place to another.

Automations save your team time too. If you've ever tinkered with smart home products or used Apple Shortcuts, IFTTT, orZapier, you might be familiar with automation. Essentially, automations are an "if this, then that" statement (which is whereIFTTTgets its name). "If someone marks a task complete in my Monday.com Product board, then send my manager an email."

Monday.com has a list of preconfigured automations that you can customize to your needs. One example is an automation that says, "Everytime period,createan item." When you choose this automation, you get to decide what time period and what item, so you might end up with, "Every Friday, create a task called Log Your Hours." You can use automation to move a task from one board to another, as well as set up notifications, recurring tasks, status changes, and much more.

AI Features: Potentially Useful, Depending on Your Needs

Monday.com has a wide range of AI features. You can use AI to enhance your boards with AI-powered columns that do everything from analyzing the sentiment of updates to extracting information from files to translating text. You can also use AI within items to improve or shorten the text of your updates and summarize others' updates. AI also extends to automations, which means you can add AI functions to workflows. For example, you can set up an AI automation to scan updates for a date, and then use that date to fill out an item's due date column, among other things. You can also use AI to create documents and forms, if you can't find a template you like.

For now, Monday.com's AI assistant (called Sidekick) and Monday.com's AI automations are in early access, so you need to complete a form to request access to them. Of course, early access means you are likely to encounter bugs and limitations. More AI features are "coming soon" according to Monday.com, such as AI resource allocation, AI risk management, AI service agents, and more. Furthermore, Monday.com is gradually rolling out its AI capabilities to accounts, so you might not have access to all or any of them, even if you submit a request.

The various AI functions mostly work, but whether they are useful depends on your needs. In most cases, for example, AI text summaries and AI translations just aren't relevant. When it comes to talking to Sidekick, whether it's for brainstorming, writing content, or anything else, there isn't a huge draw to use Sidekick overchatbots, likeChatGPTorGemini, outside of saving yourself a click to a new tab. You can ask Sidekick to do things for you, like make changes to items and perform calculations in your boards, but once again, how useful that is depends on what you are managing.

AI features are not just part of paid subscriptions either; you will eventually have to spend credits to use them. For example, executing an AI automation costs one credit. Subscribers to paid plans receive only 500 AI credits per month, as mentioned, and you must purchase more if you run out. Credit expenditures could therefore quickly add up, but it is currently difficult to tell how quickly you might run through your allotment, since AI features are still in beta and do not currently cost credits. AI automations you added before you run out of credits will still function after you do, but Monday.com notes that this behavior might change.

Is Monday.com Safe to Use?

We don't see any major causes for concern in Monday.com'sPrivacy Policy. As with any site, Monday.com collects a variety of information you submit, but the motto of Monday.com is "Privacy is more than just a policy," which it supports witha statementFrom its Data Protection Officer, Aner Rabinovitz: "Customer data belongs to the customer. Your personal data is yours. We're here to secure that. To honor your trust in us and ensure that your privacy and rights are protected."

Beyond mere words, you can read Monday.com’sWhite paper on securityfor a comprehensive look at its privacy and security policies. If you're particularly concerned about security, you can choose Monday.com'sGuardian add-on. This includes bring-your-own-key encryption, data leak prevention, single sign-on, and tenant-level encryption. However, this add-on is available only for Enterprise subscribers. Anyone can enable it.Multi-Factor Authenticationon their Monday.com account, though.

The approach of Monday.com to privacy and security is great, but that doesn't mean nothing bad ever happens to it. In 2024, for example,a bad actor exploitedMonday.com's share update feature, allowing them to send phishing emails to a large audience. As always, you should be careful about adding sensitive information to any cloud-connected service.