Our Expert Opinion
If you’re looking for a feature-packed project management platform that is also one of the most user-friendly pieces of software in this space, monday.com could be for you. There’s nothing complicated about monday.com; it just works. This is why it’s a staple of our best project management software roundup. The platform’s browser client, dedicated desktop applications and mobile apps are easy to navigate, and the tools are easy to understand and manipulate.
I found it straightforward to create predictive and agile projects from scratch and templates. It’s the ideal platform for startups, project management newcomers and experienced teams, no matter whether you use traditional project management methodologies or agile frameworks. I’ll provide more details about my findings below.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
3
Wrike
Yes
$10 per user per month
Salesforce, Adobe, Miro, Netsuite, QuickBooks, SAP
4
Hubspot
Yes
$15 per seat per month
Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace, QuickBooks and more
Beautiful, Beginner-Friendly Interface
One of the first things you’ll witness is the bright, colorful, airy user interface that monday.com uses. It’s a feast for the eyes! Columns and rows are easily distinguishable, as are task cards and timelines. On top of looking great, monday.com is also incredibly easy to navigate. I found the main left-sided navigation panel intuitive, and adding new project views is as simple as clicking a plus sign along the top of the workspace and selecting what tool you want.
The user interface on monday.com is colorful and easy to navigate, making it a joy to use.
Various user menus are easy to access at the top of the screen, as are integrations and notifications. Everything you need is front and center or just one click behind your avatar. The user experience is identical if you use the dedicated Windows and macOS desktop applications. Even if you have never used project management software, it won’t take long for teams to find their way around the monday.com landscape.
Intuitive Mobile Experience
The monday.com mobile applications for Android and iOS can help you get work done while you’re out of the office. The applications aren’t as good as Wrike’s or Zoho Projects’ mobile apps, but they are well-designed and user-friendly. You can use the apps to create tasks, view dashboards, upload files, and leave comments and voice notes on tasks. Tables, lists and Kanban boards can be viewed, as can workload reports and project assets.
As you can see in this iPhone screenshot, the tools are large, which makes text easy to read but also means you’ll be scrolling a lot.
Whether you’re using Apple products or Android devices, you’ll have a good experience. The applications run smoothly, and for the most part, I found it easy to interact with the tools. I will say that even on large phones, such as my iPhone 14 Pro Max, the Kanban and table views can be cumbersome due to the size of the fonts and columns. Ultimately, it just means more finger-swiping. The phone experience is great, but you’ll have a better experience on tablets.
The Android application for monday.com is fast and responsive.
It’s unfortunate that Gantt charts are not available in mobile applications at the time of this review. Another complaint is that you cannot use the mobile apps to collaborate on monday.com’s real-time documents. I love being able to work on documents in ClickUp’s mobile applications and hoped monday.com would offer a similar experience. Hopefully, future updates will add real-time document support to the mobile applications.
Plenty of Employee Management Tools (With a Caveat)
If you need to manage team members, set work policies and put stringent security measures in place, you’ll likely get along well with monday.com. You can assign roles to employees (admin, member, viewer and guest), limit or grant access to specific site areas and documents and set work schedules. You can also create custom roles for each team member and limit integration permissions. In all, monday.com makes it easy to manage what employees can and can’t do.
Changing security settings and creating custom roles on monday.com is straightforward.
Head to the security section, and you’ll find options to set authentication policies, implement a System for Cross-Domain Identity Management (SCIM), which automates the exchange of user information between IT platforms, set up single sign-on tools, restrict IP addresses and make two-factor authentication mandatory. However, there’s a catch. To gain access to most of these powerful tools, you’ll need to be an Enterprise member, which can be cost-prohibitive for SMBs.
If you work in healthcare settings and need a HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant platform, you’ll also need to cough up the money for monday.com’s Enterprise plan, which is unfortunate. I suggest looking at Zoho Projects or nTask if you need a HIPAA-compliant platform that won’t break the bank.
What Sets monday.com Apart?
Project management platforms are a dime a dozen these days, and they all do the same thing. However, there are a few reasons why I might pick monday.com over ClickUp, Wrike, Teamwork and many other platforms. First, monday.com’s ease of use is unmatched. Any team will be able to hit the ground running and get projects off the ground quickly. If you do get stuck, you’ll find that monday.com’s knowledge base and learning materials are second to none.
You’ll find over 200 project templates on monday.com.
The selection of templates monday.com offers is also hard to beat. With over 200 templates available, whether you develop software, work in healthcare, human resources, construction, marketing, education, real estate or sales and CRM, you’ll find customizable templates that will put you on the right path. Lastly, monday.com’s customer service is exceptional.
Unlike Wrike, which charges extra for premium support and takes days to respond to help tickets without the pricey support package, monday.com offers 24/7 assistance. You can strike up a conversation with an agent and have issues resolved nearly instantly. If you prefer to submit tickets, you’ll typically receive a helpful response in under an hour. I have used monday.com extensively over the years, and it’s clear that customer service is a top priority.
CRM Partners
1
HubSpot
Free; $15 per user per month (billed annually)
14 days
Yes
2
monday CRM
Free; $12 per user per month for basic features
14 days
Yes
3
Pipedrive
$14 per user per month (billed annually)
14 days
Yes
monday.com Key Features
Now that you have a better understanding of how monday.com feels to use, it’s time to look at some of the platform’s key features. This is not an extensive list. However, I have selected tools and features that will dramatically impact how you manage projects and teams.
Project and Task Management Tools
Whether you use predictive methodologies such as Waterfall, critical chain project management and critical path, or agile frameworks such as scrum, Kanban, dynamic systems development method (DSDM) or Extreme Programming (XP), you’ll find all the workflow management tools needed to run successful projects. I found boards for Kanban and scrum, Gantt charts, timelines, tables, lists, calendars and a map view, which is helpful for construction projects.
Tables are clean, functional and easy to customize.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $10 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
ClickUp
Yes, for one member
$7 per member per month (billed annually)
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
3
Wrike
Yes
$10 per user per month
Salesforce, Adobe, Miro, Netsuite, QuickBooks, SAP
Thanks to a slick drag-and-drop mechanic, all the tools are intuitive. The views are colorful and easy to customize. I found it simple to sort and filter data, color code tasks, assign jobs to team members and add due dates and other pertinent task information. You can quickly upload files to tasks, leave comments for team members and, with the right plans, create custom fields to customize tasks to the project your team is working on.
If you use predictive project management methodologies, you’ll appreciate the intuitive Gantt charts.
Overall, the workflow management tools on monday.com are as user-friendly as possible. Whether you’re leading a new team or managing an experienced one, I don’t think anyone will have issues coming to grips with the tools on offer.
Collaboration Features
While monday.com’s real-time collaboration tools aren’t as powerful as those found in ClickUp, Coda and Notion, they’re still significantly better than those found in Wrike. The collaborative documents (called workdocs) allow multiple team members to collaborate in real time. You can quickly create business plans, marketing campaigns, project scopes and recaps with charts, tables, timelines, YouTube and Vimeo elements, and other formatting features.
You can add widgets, tables and charts to monday.com’s workdocs.
Alongside collaborative documents, you’ll find whiteboards, which you can use to brainstorm ideas. I wish the whiteboards were as intuitive and user-friendly as the documents, but they aren’t. They’re quite cumbersome and aren’t as good as those in ClickUp and Zoho Projects. Still, they get the job done.
You’ll need to leave @mentions on tasks to communicate with team members, as there is no dedicated live chat tool. Again, ClickUp offers much better communication options. Its live chat tool, which also supports group chats and voice and video messages, is vastly superior. Still, I’m pleased that monday.com offers real-time collaboration tools for remote work; they enable teams to get things done together, but there is room for improvement.
Integrations and Automation
The number of integrations offered by monday.com is quite impressive. You’ll find over 200 integrations with leading software such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Drive, Docusign, Gmail, Outlook and many other platforms SMBs commonly use. Thanks to a central monday.com marketplace, it’s easy to find, choose and configure integrations. With just a few clicks, you can create cross-platform links.
There are over 200 integrations on monday.com.
With integrations comes cross-platform automation. Once you have linked your software platforms, you can create simple and complex automations that send bidirectional data. I genuinely appreciate monday.com’s graphical automation interface. To create recurring tasks or automated workflows, you choose an automation template and change values in drop-down menus. Creating a custom automation from scratch is just as painless.
The automation builder on monday.com is class-leading.
One thing to note is that while monday.com’s integration selection and automation builder are excellent, you need to pay attention to automation plan limits. The better the plan (we cover the plans below), the more monthly automation runs you can create. If you depend heavily on automated workflows, be sure to pick the correct plan for your SMB.
Dashboards and Reports
Thanks to customizable dashboards, business owners, project managers, Scrum Masters, team members, clients and stakeholders can track key performance indicators (KPI). You can select from various widgets that show financial data, tasks, timelines, Gantt charts, calendars, countdown timers, time worked and employee workloads. You can also add pie charts and bar and line graphs. With a glance, you can see how your project is progressing.
The customizable dashboards on monday.com are hard to beat.
On the free plan, dashboards can only display data from one board. However, move into the paid plans, and you can display data from multiple boards and projects. No matter what data you need, monday.com allows you to generate and display reports in a visually pleasing way. Oh, if you have a thing for llamas, you’ll love the Llama Farm widget. Llamas represent tasks, and they turn green when they are complete. It’s a cute, fun way to track progress.
Administration and Security Features
As mentioned earlier, monday.com offers plenty of administration and security features, so long as you’re a member of the Pro or Enterprise plans. Free, Basic and Standard plans only provide basic features. Still, thanks to a well-designed admin area, managing team members, assigning roles and creating custom roles for employees and guests is straightforward. You also don’t need to be an IT guru to configure two-factor authentication, single sign-on and IP restrictions.
You can assign and create custom roles for employees in the administration center.
To put your mind at ease, monday.com offers SOC Type II (data protection) compliance across all plans, meaning your data is secure. All plans also use 256-bit AES and TLS 1.3 (1.2 at a minimum) for encryption. This means your data is encrypted, and monday.com uses strong ciphers to protect it in transit and at rest. I hope that monday.com will eventually offer more administrative features in lower plans. If you can afford the top-tier plans, though, you’re golden.
monday.com Pricing and Value
How much does monday.com cost and what features come with each plan? I’ll cover this in the table below. Keep in mind that this isn’t a complete list of features, but they are the most important ones.
| Free | Basic | Standard | Pro | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | N/A | $12 per user per month (billed monthly, three-user minimum) | $14 per user per month (billed monthly, three-user minimum) | $24 per user per month (billed monthly, three-user minimum) | $16,000 to $19,000 annually, depending on users and features |
| Maximum Number of Users | Two | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| File Storage | 500MB | 5GB | 20GB | 100GB | 1000GB |
| Integrations and Automations | N/A | N/A | 250 actions per month | 25,000 actions per month | 250,000 actions per month |
| Real-Time Documents | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Project Views | One board per dashboard, Kanban board | One board per dashboard, Kanban board | Five boards per dashboard, Kanban boards, timelines, Gantt charts, calendars and map view | 20 boards per dashboard, Kanban boards, timelines, Gantt charts, calendars, map and chart view | 50 boards per dashboard, Kanban boards, timelines, Gantt charts, calendars, map and chart view |
| Time Tracking | N/A | N/A | N/A | Yes | Yes |
| Custom Fields | N/A | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Customer Support | Knowledge base | Same as the Free plan, plus 24/7 support and daily live webinars | Same as the Basic plan | Same as the Standard plan | Same as the Pro plan, plus a customer success manager and 99.9% guaranteed uptime |
| Security | SOC II compliance, 2FA | Same as the Free plan | Same as the Basic plan | Same as the Standard plan plus private boards and docs and Google authentication | Same as the Pro plan, plus SSO, HIPAA compliance, IP restrictions, integration permissions and a content directory |
| Administration Features | N/A | N/A | N/A | Board administrators | Same as the Pro plan, plus SCIM provisioning, audit logs, session management, private workspaces and advanced account permissions |
While monday.com offers a free plan, I can’t recommend it. It’s so devoid of features that one should only consider it a demo. I suggest looking at ClickUp and Asana if you need a robust free plan. You can also check out our best free project management software roundup. The Basic plan is also not worth your time. For $12 per user per month (billed monthly), it’s a bad value as it offers so little. Check out ClickUp or Zoho Projects’ cheaper plans instead.
However, monday.com’s $14 per user per month (billed monthly) Standard plan and $24 per user per month (billed monthly) Pro plan offer top value. SMBs needing highly polished project and task management tools, collaborative documents, templates, numerous integrations and automation runs should consider these plans. If you need vast amounts of automation runs and top-tier security and admin features, you should look into the Enterprise plan.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that monday.com’s free plan only supports two users and that the paid plans require a minimum of three users. Keep this in mind when making calculations. You can also save 18% by signing up for a yearly plan. Additionally, monday.com offers discounted rates for nonprofits, free accounts for students over 16 years old who are enrolled in an accredited school, and a 20% discount for educators at accredited institutions.
Is monday.com Right for Your Business?
There’s no doubt in my mind that monday.com is one of the best project management software platforms for most SMBs. The tools are intuitive and support traditional and agile ways of working. The collaborative documents are good, and the number of platforms monday.com integrates with is excellent. Still, I know it’s not right for every business owner and project manager out there. Look below to see if you fall into one of the following categories.
We recommend monday.com for:
- Predictive and agile project management teams
- Teams, new and old, that need a no-fuss, highly polished, easy-to-use platform
- SMBs that need to protect their bottom line while receiving a healthy feature set
We do not recommend monday.com for:
- SMBs that need the strongest security and robust administration features from affordable plans (as it stands, monday.com’s are locked in behind top-tier plans)
- Small to medium businesses that are looking for a free plan with plenty of features
- SMBs needing class-leading real-time collaboration tools
If monday.com isn’t for you, I suggest reading our ClickUp and Zoho Projects reviews. ClickUp’s excellent free plan is feature-packed, supports unlimited users and offers real-time collaboration documents, whiteboards and chat tools. Zoho Projects is incredibly affordable, starting at $5 per user per month (billed monthly), user-friendly and offers real-time collaboration tools such as live chat. Both also work with predictive methodologies and agile frameworks.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
3
Wrike
Yes
$10 per user per month
Salesforce, Adobe, Miro, Netsuite, QuickBooks, SAP
4
Hubspot
Yes
$15 per seat per month
Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace, QuickBooks and more
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is monday.com?
In summary, monday.com is a project management software platform that allows teams to plan, track and complete simple and complex projects. With monday.com, project managers can create and assign tasks, generate reports and collaborate with team members.
Is monday.com free to use?
Yes, monday.com is free to use, thanks to its free plan. However, the free plan is limited to two users and offers little functionality. To get the most out of monday.com, you must be a member of one of its four paid plans.
Can I use monday.com offline?
Yes, you can use monday.com offline. Thanks to dedicated desktop and mobile applications, you can update projects, check notifications and make other updates without an internet connection. When you restore a connection, the updates are automatically uploaded.
Can SMBs benefit from using monday.com?
Yes, SMBs can benefit from using monday.com due to its abilities and ease of use. The software can be used to plan and track traditional and agile projects, create tracking forms for human resource initiatives, and manage customer information and marketing campaigns.
