monday.com Review: Features, Pros and Cons

monday.com is one of the best tools you can buy for project management, scoring 4.7/5 stars in our testing, a score that is only bettered by ClickUp, which offers slightly better customer support and value for money.

We found monday.com capable of customizing different types of workflows and managing intricate tasks with ease, with features like custom project templates and a Kanban board available on all of monday.com's plans.

In this monday.com review, we'll summarize the key pros, cons and feature you need to know about, plus compare monday.com to competitors, so you can see if it's the right fit for your needs.

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. Here, we'll briefly go through some monday.com pros and cons.

monday.com pros:

• Highly customizable, with a ‘Custom Fields' feature available on all plans
• Rule-based automation can be used to complete simple tasks, like archiving items
• More than 200 project templates to choose from
• Modern, minimalistic user interface that isn't hard to navigate
• Free plan available for solo users and duos
• Quicker to set up than Wrike, Smartsheet, and Jira
• Highly responsive and useful 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
• You need the Pro projects plan for time tracking
• The mobile app isn't as functional as the desktop software

“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

monday.com isn't perfect, though. “I don't really like the ‘my task' view,” Amee 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.”

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. It's also popular with its users, with an average customer score of 4.5 stars. Overall, monday.com scores 4.7/5 in our testing, ranking second out of all the industry-leading tools we examined. So who comes in first?

It's ClickUp that came out on top in our tests, scoring 4.8/5, thanks to its excellent value for money. ClickUp includes advanced features like automation on every plan, including its free plan. Smartsheet ranks third (4.6/5), falling behind ClickUp and monday.com in terms of collaboration tools, but offering the most straightforward ease of use and a cheaper first paid plan than monday.com.

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 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 scores 4.1/5 for usability, which was better than Asana (3.9/5) and Wrike (4/5). 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.

We 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

However, monday.com wasn't quite as usable as Smartsheet (4.3 /5), the latter of which our team found to be the most user-friendly project management tool overall in great part due to the ease with which you can set up sheets and collaborate with your team via an instant messenger tool, which monday.com doesn't provide.

monday.com’s 4.3/5 score for workflow creation was largely due to its custom project template builder and the fact that pre-built and custom automations are both available. Zoho Projects, which is half the price of monday.com, only scores 3/5 for this area and doesn't offer any pre-built automations on any plans.

monday.com isn’t so impressive when it comes it customer support, scoring just 2.8/5 in this area, largely due to the fact there’s no phone or 24/7 live support. ClickUp, conversely, scores 3.8/5 and has both those options included for customers on all of its plans.

ClickUp also scores better for collaboration (4/5) than monday.com (3.8/5), as does Teamwork (4/5). Both these providers offer instant messaging tools on all of their plans, and as we've mentioned already, monday.com doesn't include this as a feature on any of its plans.

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

monday.com was the second best-performing provider out of 14 that we tested on our most recent round of project management testing. All in all, monday.com was scored:

• 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
• 4.1/5 for usability, thanks to a straightforward setup process
• 3.8/5 for collaboration, thanks to a useful online whiteboard (but no team messenger)
• 2.8/5 for customer support (monday.com does not offer phone 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 4.4/5 overall.  You can tell monday.com hits that sweet spot between having genuinely useful tools and remaining straightforward and easy to use by its customer 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 features (4.5/5). Once you get to monday.com and ClickUp's most expensive plans, 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 and workflow creation tools than monday.com's comparably priced $8 per user, per month Basic Projects plan.

Other key monday.com features are the helpful global and board-specific 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 elements to it, 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.

If your tasks need to have both assignees and leads, you can add two people columns. Budget information can be attached to each task too, and displayed on the main table, as can due dates, category tags, and color-coded priority labels. 

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 4.4/5 for features, which was 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 monday.com's 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: 

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

Rival project management software tool Teamwork really excels in this area, netting a 4.9/5 score for task management. Teamwork’s Deliver plan ($9.99 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.

Automations and workflow creation features in monday.com

monday.com scores 4.3/5 for workflow creation, which is determined by the quality of a provider’s preset and custom templates and how capable their automation builder is (if included).

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 centre, 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, you couldn't set automations for specific pulses, 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.

Although a bit trickier to get to grips with than the likes of Smartsheet, as we've mentioned previously in this monday.com review, the provider's automation builder and wide range of project templates helped it to a 4.3/5 score for workflow creation and a 4,3/5 usability score.

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, can be utilized in interactive sessions in order to pool stakeholder views.

There's also 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 doesn't offer traditional third-party integrations the way other services do. Usually, you hook up services like Gmail or Slack, and then start using them with all the supported features available.

Instead, monday.com's integrations are another extension of the company's “customize everything” ethos. Each supported integration includes various features that you can activate a la carte, using plain language scenarios similar to the website IFTTT (if this, then that).

The Gmail integration, for example, allows you to create a new pulse 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.

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.

The Pro projects plan is the most fully featured monday.com plan from a data visualization perspective, with preset charts and widgets to choose from as well as the ability to make your own. 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 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 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.

However, this isn't as good of an offering as ClickUp, which has 24/7 support available, or Teamwork, which you can contact by phone. However, monday.com does have a live chat feature that will immediately connect you to a monday.com customer service agent, but this is only available Monday to Thursday 1 AM – 8 PM and Friday 1 AM – 7 PM EDT.

In fact, monday.com only scored 2.8/5 for customer support, putting it 6th out of the 14 providers we tested.

monday.com's Enterprise plan is the only monday.com plan that comes with premium support, and many businesses will appreciate the help 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 Microsoft Projects just don't get new features and functions at the same pace.

This year, for example, monday.com improved its Gantt Charts exportation process for PDFs and added a “read more option” to automation notifications, so users get better visibility over what's been built within their project.

Also 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.

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 14 leading tools and subjected them to a rigorous assessment process, so we can create articles like this monday.com review. The main criteria used to judge monday.com's plans were:

• Usability – 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.
• Features – an assessment of the different types of features a provider offers, and how they function.
• Customer Score – how do real-world users rate the software?

We've got sub-criteria that we rate providers on too. For example, our “features” score is an amalgamation of how monday.com and other providers fared while performing Task Management, Workflow Creation, Data Visualization, and Collaboration functions.

monday.com Review FAQs