monday.com Review: Features, Pros and Cons

According to our test results, the most impressive project management software tool you can currently buy monday.com, which was awarded 4.7/5 stars. In this monday.com review, you’ll find out why the provider is your best bet if you want more clarity and organization without a long, arduous setup process – in fact, monday.com topped our ease-of-use testing with a score of 4.5/5.

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. With monday.com, however, you’ll feel instantly more organized thanks to the software’s clean and tidy interface, and the platform’s flexibility makes it a better long-term investment than the likes of ClickUp, Smartsheet, and Jira. If you’re on track to expand your team and operations, monday.com has the capacity to grow with you. 

monday.com is one of the only project management providers currently offering an AI assistant, and thanks to features like custom project templates, sub-tasks, and a Kanban board being 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 you need to know about, plus compare monday.com to competitors so you can see if it’s the right fit.

In this monday.com review:

• monday.com Pros and Cons
• monday.com Vs Competitors
• monday.com Quick Fact File
• monday.com Review: Key Features
• How Did We Test and Rate monday.com?
• monday.com Review FAQs

monday.com Pros and Cons

monday.com has some useful advantages, but 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 is really simple to use – 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 testing

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. 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: How Does monday.com Compare to Competitors?

monday.com is easy to use, and has some of the best task management tools of any project management software, with custom fields and Gantt charts, as well as a useful “Chart” view for displaying project data. Overall, monday.com scores 4.7/5 in our testing, ranking first out of all the industry-leading tools we examined. So who was the runner-up?

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. Similar to monday.com, the interface is very intuitive and we didn’t have to do much menu diving to get it to do what we wanted when testing it. 

Teamwork includes advanced features like automation and time tracking on every plan, including its free plan. monday.com only offers this on its Standard plan and up, which costs $10 per user, per month.

ClickUp ranks third (4.5/5), falling behind monday.com and Teamwork in terms when it came to ease of use and customer support – but it has excellent task management and collaboration features, as well as a free plan with no user limit. 

For more information on the costs involved with monday.com’s plans, visit our monday.com pricing page, or take a look at the top monday.com alternatives:

monday.com is very easy to use and highly capable when it comes to taking your project from A to Z (there’s more information about the provider’s features further down in this monday.com review). Overall, monday.com scored 4.5/5 on our ease of use tests, which was better than Asana (4.2/5) and Wrike (3.9/5).

“I think the user experience is very intuitive,” says Stephanie, who is part of Tech.co’s testing team. “I just guessed where I thought things would be and they ended up being there, which was great.”

“Everything is placed very intuitively – a lot of thought has clearly gone into that,” agrees Alice, who also 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 is good.”

The provider is pretty simple to set up, even if you’re a newbie to the project management space. Initially, monday.com will guide you through the process with prompts. Most of our testing team found it easy to import data and appreciated how the setup questions guided them through their first few minutes using the software.

We also found setting tasks and sub-items (as pictured below)  – which can then be checked off as you complete them – very intuitive too, even without help from the provider:

Subtasks feature in monday.com
Image: Tech.co testing

monday.com’s 4.1/5 score for workflow creation is largely down to its custom project template builder and the fact that pre-built and custom automation are both available. Zoho Projects, which is half the price of monday.com, only scores 3.4/5 for this assessment area and doesn’t offer any pre-built automation on any plans.

monday.com improved 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 and doesn’t offer this option.

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. Both these providers offer project message boards on all of their plans, as we’ve mentioned already, as well as AI work assistants and document editing tools.

For more information on how monday.com compares to providers, visit our monday.com alternatives page. Or, find out more about why ClickUp is our top-rated project management software solution in our ClickUp review.

monday.com Review: Quick Fact File

According to our 2023 research, monday.com is the best-performing project management software provider out of 10 that we test on a regular basis. All in all, monday.com scores:

• 4.5/5 for task management, with seamless switching between Kanban and Gantt views
• 5/5 for data visualization, with display tools included on every plan
• 4.5/5 for ease of use, thanks to a straightforward setup process
• 3.3/5 for collaboration, with an AI work assistant included
• 4.5/5 for customer support, thanks to 24/7 live support

monday.com Review: Key Features

On our last round of testing, monday.com scored very highly compared to other providers when it came to features, with a score of 4.2/5 overall for functionality. 

You can tell monday.com hits that sweet spot between having genuinely useful tools and remaining straightforward and easy to use by its ease of use score (4.5/5), which was the highest out of all the providers we tested.

monday.com does its best to eschew built-in hierarchies, allowing users to create their own, but some kind of predetermined data organization is inevitable. Like other project management tools, it starts with a “main workspace” at the very top. Under that are what monday.com calls “boards”. Within each board are ‘groups’, which (as we explain below) can be used to group tasks together within the same board.

However, there are various different ways you can view your project and its constituent tasks on monday.com, such as the calendar view. But the flexibility of monday.com meant we were still able to change the dates of tasks in the “board view”:

Moving task deadlines in monday.com
Image: Tech.co testing

monday.com offers a dashboard 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.

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 $8 per user, per month Basic Projects plan.

Other useful monday.com features include board-specific and global search tools, and the ability to share boards with people outside of the company (such as freelancers). Below, we’ve had a closer look at a number of key features of monday.com.

monday.com’s unrivaled customizability

When you set up monday.com, you’ll have to input some information about your business, after which monday.com will create a “board” for you.

If you’re running multiple projects, then it’s probably going to be easier if you keep to one board per project. However, if you’re running a huge project with lots of different, interlocking elements, you might want to use several boards for different teams or groups.

Once monday.com creates a board for you, you’ll be immediately greeted with a view called “Main Table” where you can add the different tasks you need to complete. Customizing this to suit your needs is super easy – all you have to do is add columns that serve different purposes.

“monday.com gives you very general functional columns and you can sort of turn them into anything you want,” explains James, head of product research at Tech.co. “If you insert a currency symbol, for example, it will turn it into a money column for you, so you can have it as your budget. But 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 do I need?’ and create it yourself.”

If your tasks need to have both assignees and leads, you can add two people columns. Budget information can be attached to each task, as James said, and displayed on the main table. Due dates, category tags, and color-coded priority labels can also be added in just a couple of clicks.

If you’d like to view your tasks a different way, don’t worry – just add a different view on the top menu next to “Main Table”.

Adding dates to tasks in monday.com
Image: Tech.co testing

If you add a Kanban board, for example, monday.com will auto-populate it with all the data from the main table. If you’d like the Kanban board columns to have different labels, simply click the settings cog and change the Main Table column you’d like to display.

Once you click on specific tasks, you can edit the activity log, leave comments, a section to create an FAQ, and the ability to attach files. 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. 

Task management features in monday.com

Overall, monday.com scores 4.2/5 for functionality, helped by a 4.5/5 score for task management. Included within monday.com’s suite of task management features are a Gantt chart creator, a spreadsheet-style view, and a Kanban board (pictured below) for viewing the progress of your project.

Kanban Board in monday.com
Image: Tech.co testing

There are a number of useful features for managing complex tasks like sub-tasks, milestones, and custom fields included in monday.com – but some of these, such as monday.com’s task dependency and time-tracking tools, are only available on the Pro Projects ($16 per user, per month) and Enterprise plans.

We found commenting on tasks a really simple, easy process too, and it helped us keep on track of what team members were editing during testing: 

However, it’s good to know that 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.

Task Comments in monday.com
Image: Tech.co testing

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.

Automation and workflow creation features in monday.com

monday.com scores 3.8/5 for workflow creation, which is determined by the quality of a provider’s preset 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) due to the fact that, since we last evaluated the provider’s automation features, rivals like Teamwork have upgraded their automation capabilities.

With its automation builder, monday.com will carry out particular actions for you after something else happens. What that “something” depends on how you program it. You to create an automated task in plain language, for example, in the provider’s automation center, which looks like this:

Automation center in monday.com
Image: Tech.co testing

Automations have their limits. 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 Asana – our research team thinks its automation builder is easier to use than monday.com’s, although they both function quite similarly. 

Compiling post-project feedback in monday.com

monday.com has some great features and tools that will come in handy if you’re planning to view or compile feedback on a project after its completion.

The whiteboard tool, for instance, has traditionally been useful for interactive sessions in order to pool stakeholder views – but this feature is now being retired, which is why 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.

There is, however, a form builder (pictured below), which isn’t something every project management software has, so that’s a nice touch too. Despite the flexibility to create all sorts of forms, it’s not as easy to use as other competing platforms that do house form-building tools. Overall, however, it’s a good thing to have at your disposal.

What’s more, 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 a number of people not involved in the project that 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, the software 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. 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.

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 $10 per user, per month Standard plan is the cheapest monday.com plan that can integrate with other software.

Data visualization 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.

Here’s a chart we made showing how far along we were with certain tasks:

Building a chart in monday.com
Image: Tech.co testing

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 options in monday.com

monday.com’s support options are reasonably varied. You’ll be able to 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. But part of the reason monday.com scores an impressive 4.5/5 is that 24/7 live support is available, which some providers like Wrike don’t offer.

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.

monday.com’s newest features

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 2023 than Trello has since January.

Recently, 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.

In June 2023, one new change that was welcomed by Kanban fans was an update that let users divide the cards according to different values from their board such as the board’s groups and status columns. We tested monday.com the same month and found this to be a very useful update, giving us even more customizability.

In August of this year, a raft of new features have been added, including a new update feed that will help you oversee all your updates in a much clearer way thanks to improved navigation. On top of this, you can now use emojis to react to updates in monday.com, similar to how you can in Slack, Teams, and Google Chat.

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.

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.

monday.com Reviewed: How Did We Rate monday.com?

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.

monday.com Review FAQs