Whether you’re a project professional working with just a few others, or juggling multiple projects, teams, and vendors across time zones, you have many software choices when it comes to planning and managing all the details of a project. One of the top-rated choices for comprehensive project management support is monday.com Work OS.
Thousands of user reviews detail this powerful tool’s ability to plan, track, organize, and integrate details into one solution. If you are considering using monday.com for project management with your team, this review will help you determine if it is worth using and purchasing a paid plan.
Table of Contents
- What Is monday.com?
- monday.com Video
- monday.com Overview
- How Much Is monday.com?
- monday.com Features
- monday.com Integrations
- monday.com Automations
- Pros & Cons of monday.com
- monday.com Alternatives & Competitors
- Conclusion
Methodology
This product review is the result of extensive, hands-on testing. Over the past 16 years, I have worked professionally as a digital project manager — first at a start-up, and more recently at large corporations. I have extensively used competitor products to run global digital projects, following the evolution from basic, home-grown local systems to cloud-based and mobile-friendly enterprise anytime/anywhere access.
I have worked in popular tools like Harvest Forecast, Smartsheet, Asana, Adobe Workfront, and Trello. I was eager to learn this Work OS and see how it is different. I based this review off my time experimenting with the free version of monday.com, reading numerous product reviews, and speaking with other project management professionals working in varying industries about their experience and feedback when using it.
What Is monday.com?
The monday.com platform is billed as a work operating system (Work OS) that boosts a team’s ability to run projects and workflows efficiently and with confidence.
It’s a simple, yet intuitive solution, allowing teams to customize workflows, easily adjust to shifting demands, streamline work to maximize productivity, connect collaboratively from anywhere, and put a stop to annoying, time-consuming manual tasks.
In short, monday.com centralizes all your work, processes, tools, and files, making teamwork instant and guaranteed.
monday.com Video
monday.com Overview
Founded in 2012 by co-founders Roy Mann and Eran Zinman, today monday.com serves more than 150,000 customers in 14 languages, with over 850 employees across eight global locations. A quick search for “best project management software” brings up monday.com right at the top, alongside other well-known choices such as Smartsheet, Wrike, and Asana.
monday.com Work OS is more than just an execution platform that tracks projects and tasks; it is an open-platform Work OS pioneering a new category of software — a platform built for a new way of working. Project managers, operations teams, event coordinators, sales professionals, IT, HR, and marketers are among those who best benefit from this tool.
Unlike less feature-rich platforms, monday.com Work OS integrates with many other systems and applications. This creates a new connective layer for their customers to accelerate work, enhance teamwork, and increase operational efficiency. The vendor is constantly improving the platform with new features and capabilities to support distributed, cross-functional teams.
Instant access to an unlimited free trial allows you to jump right into the experience, with nine work management options to choose from. The two more robust options include project management and monday Sales CRM (customer relationship management) software, with other options including creative and design, IT, software development, marketing, task management, HR, and operations.
Getting Started With monday.com
Instant access to a free trial gets you right into the experience. You have to choose how you would like to manage your work by choosing one of nine options. Set up a quick account with basic profile details, agree to the terms of service and privacy policy, and then you are in.
From here, we’ll first investigate monday.com Work OS’s project management and CRM tools, and then overview the other seven uses below.
monday.com Project Management Software
Choosing the project management solution walks you through a series of screens to gather information on your specific needs. For example, “Project Management for Creative Design” is one of the many options available.
You are then presented with a list of tools to check off what you are currently using for easy integration later, followed by a prompt to invite teammates via email. Inviting teammates will allow you to go ahead and set up initial workflows together. However, monday.com allows you to do this at a later time.
Once the initial setup is complete, you will be presented with a series of recommended templates. For example, “Project Management for Creative Design” offers options for a single project, project portfolio management, project requests and approvals, customer projects, digital asset management, creative planning with Adobe, creative assets, processes and requests, design weekly tasks, content calendar, CRM, and contacts.
The single project template prompts you to set up the following items on a new board:
- Edit the name of the project (board)
- Name groups to organize your work
- Manage columns by adding details like:
- Assign a lead
- Set a status
- Create a timeline
- Assign priority
- Add numbers (with sum)
- Add #tags
- Add, delete, customize, and move items
- Add customized views including charts and calendar views
- Invite team members, and share board views with anyone
- Create and name “items,” which can be a task, client, project, or post
The single project board setup was quick and easy to understand and organize. You can get a basic project up and running within minutes, if you have your information planned out to enter into a board. Super useful add-ons include adding time tracking, dependencies, sub items, formulas, files, and the ability to connect boards.
Moreover, this is not overwhelming or challenging for a new software experience. Although, if you have questions or don’t know how to do something, how-to and tutorial videos are easy to find.
monday sales CRM Software
If you are looking for CRM software, monday.com allows you to set up a CRM board by choosing “Sales & CRM” from the homepage. This option walks you through a series of screens to gather information on your specific use case.
You are then presented with a list of items to focus on, such as sales pipeline, contact management, leads capturing, and more. Similar to monday.com’s project management software, you can go ahead and invite teammates via email; however, you can also do this later.
A series of recommended templates include boards for CRM, contacts, a single project, project portfolio management, project requests and approvals, customer projects, supporting sales materials, marketing activities, real estate CRM software, and digital asset management.
Similar to the single project template, choosing the digital asset management template offers customizability as you set up the following items on a new board:
- Edit the name of the project (board)
- Name group items and subitems to organize your work via the main table
- Manage columns and add details like:
- Name of the designer
- Status
- Date
- Final version attachment and link
- Asset details and usage
- Add, delete, customize, and move items
- View and add asset cards for a quick view
- Use customized views and filters to get the information you need
- Invite team members to find and access the shared board
- Add and share board views with anyone
- Add integrations and automations that you require, or want to try out
This was an easy board to set up and add information to quickly. The look and feel is similar to the simple project template, and the different views make it more visual for a designer or person managing digital assets.
I can see how this would be useful, having managed a DAM at an agency made up of hundreds of unique files. Indeed, I wish I’d used this tool for managing other physical assets, too. For instance, I could have taken photos of the inventory items and created a “check in/check out” system for designers and writers, so I could always track down who had it last.
Other Categories
Creative & Design
Manage your creative requests by standardizing creative intake, managing and organizing assets, breaking down project details to meet deadlines, uploading and reviewing files for review, and managing document feedback and iterations.
IT
Streamline the process of IT operations through the use of functional boards. Whether you are onboarding a new company employee, managing a large inventory of products and requests, or refining the procurement process, you can keep everything on track with all the relevant details available for context. This is where automations across boards are useful to set up optimal workflows.
Software Development
Keep on top of a multitude of tasks that evolve quickly, and organize every aspect of the software development process by setting up custom dev boards. monday.com offers a multitude of board options you can connect to get a clear picture of what is happening when, and who is working on it.
- High-level roadmap and sprint-planning boards to track workflow and implement plans
- Bug and incident boards to track and manage bugs and take action on incidents
- On Call developer board to see who is available and when
Marketing
Manage all the intricate processes that make a marketing team work, from content calendars to digital asset management to planning and executing email and marketing campaigns and more.
There are templates to get you started with all of it, including an event RSVP board to oversee all aspects of your marketing event like planning, budgeting, creating timelines, collecting data, and analyzing post-event data.
Task Management
Plan, deliver, and track your team’s best work. Already a powerful project management tool for teams, monday.com is also a robust task manager, helping you create and organize tasks and lists of tasks.
You can plan, assign, analyze, evaluate, and report on task progress from anywhere for remote and hybrid teams. You can also set reminders, so your team always knows what is up next and when it is due — so they never miss an important deadline.
HR
monday.com offers a recruitment pipeline board, so you can find new talent and organize the process and candidates. Other features let you track roles, collect applications, record interview notes, and communicate with candidates through email integration.
You can also ask candidates to rate their experience by creating a survey and sending a link. And when someone is hired, you can track onboarding processes, such as preparing for their arrival, introducing them to the team, and scheduling their onboarding tasks and training.
Operations
monday.com’s operations capabilities enable you to get a handle on large projects and processes through easy collaboration with external and internal stakeholders, vendors, and service providers.
You can use real-time data on critical company operations to make informed decisions, eliminating guesswork and gray-area estimates. And monday.com offers an enhanced and secure environment, where you can instantly monitor and manage users to control who can access certain features across accounts.
How Much Is monday.com?
The pricing and plans for monday.com are similar to other software tool subscriptions. The vendor offers multiple tiers, ranging from individual plans to large corporate accounts with dozens of seats.
Pricing is based on two variables: the feature plan you would like to use and the number of users on the platform.
monday.com Pricing & Plans
While you can choose to pay monthly, opting for an annually billed plan offers an 18% discount. There are also discounted pricing plans for qualified non-profits, as well as student programs for university and college students, organizations, and fraternities and sororities.
Individual Plan: Free
This plan is good for independent professionals looking to keep track of their tasks and work. This completely free plan supports up to two seats and offers only the most essential features, including:
- Unlimited boards and documents
- 200+ templates
- Over 20 column types
- iOS and Android apps
Basic Plan: $8 per seat per month
The Basic Plan allows you to manage all of your team’s work in one place. This plan builds on the free individual plan and includes:
- Unlimited free viewers and items
- 5GB file storage
- Prioritized customer support
- The ability to create a dashboard based on one board
Standard Plan: $10 per seat per month
The Standard Plan will help you collaborate and optimize your team processes. This plan picks up where the basic plan leaves off and includes:
- Timeline and Gantt views
- Calendar view
- Guest access
- Automations (250 actions a month)
- Integrations (250 actions a month)
- The ability to create a dashboard that combines up to five boards
Pro Plan: $16 per seat per month
Choose this plan if you want to streamline and run complex workflows. The Pro plan includes everything in the standard plan plus:
- Private boards and documents
- Chart view
- Time tracking
- Formula column
- Dependency column
- Automations (25,000 actions a month)
- Integrations (25,000 actions a month)
- The ability to create a dashboard that combines up to 10 boards
Enterprise Plan: Contact Sales
This is the best option for large organizations seeking enterprise-grade features. This top-tier plan includes everything in all other plans plus:
- Enterprise-scale automations and integrations
- Enterprise-grade security and governance
- Advanced reporting and analytics
- Multi-level permissions
- Tailored onboarding
- Premium customer support
- The ability to create a dashboard that combines up to 50 boards
monday.com Features
There are many great features included in this platform that make managing work enjoyable and surprisingly easy. Let’s review some of the top features that make monday.com a top-rated solution.
Management
You can use monday.com across the board for any defined process. Use it for day-to-day task management, team management, or personal task management. Three of the most utilized management types include the following.
Team Management
Manage a team with monday.com by using it for daily stand-ups to review current tasks, plan new ones, and review an evolving backlog.
Contact Management
monday Sales CRM is useful for collecting leads with forms to integrate client emails. You can create a CRM board to showcase stages of leads and line items for clients, including point of contact, email, and phone information.
A clock feature also allows you to track sources, status, location, and geographic location. You can also add and display multiple contacts under one company and use automations and integrations to bring client emails directly into monday.com.
Deal Management
Manage the flow of sales deals from prospect to closed deal effectively on monday.com. Acting as a custom CRM, monday.com effectively closes gaps between marketing and sales teams by recording all interactions with a customer, as well as storing and organizing the real-time data about those interactions within one central, shared location.
You can create a shared sales funnel board and optimize your deal flow process and automate manual tasks, so your business team can work together more efficiently. A custom dashboard reflects your team’s progress transparently, and a sales pipeline template visually displays where each of your contacts is in their customer journey using color-coded status updates.
This data can be used to analyze your sales pipeline, forecast revenue, break out deals by representative, and understand your team’s capacity.
Collaboration
From your monday.com account or from a board, you can invite team members to collaborate and communicate to get them involved, boost productivity, and hit deadlines.
Sharable boards act as a customizable bridge for any team, keeping everyone aligned and on track in real-time. There, you can add relevant groups, items, and columns to plan and track the work. You can also collaborate with guests through a streamlined experience, where they see only the dashboards and boards they are invited to.
Note that guests must have an outside email address. While they can’t create new boards or invite others, they do have the ability to interact with your project by adding and editing items, comments, and more.
Email Capabilities
There are multiple ways to send and receive emails with monday.com.
Integrations allow you to incorporate email into your workflow by plugging in and using preferred email hosts like Gmail and Outlook. Emails are still sent out from your email client’s server.
The Emails and Activities app allows your team to centralize communications and manage hundreds of client or customer relationships from within monday.com. Use the app to send and receive emails, create email templates, capture notes, create events, and more, all in one visually optimized timeline on the monday.com interface.
The Email to Board feature helps you and any trusted member or guest keep track of correspondences that relate to items on your board by forwarding emails directly from your inbox to your monday.com boards in the form of new items or updates without limit on the email host.
When using monday.com day-to-day with your team, the best way to work is to log in to the system and make use of the inbox, notifications, chat, activity list for updates, and social media-style message board.
Customization
Everything about boards in monday.com is customizable, whether you start from scratch or use a template. You can fully customize any template or board in your account by determining how many columns to use; what each column represents; and editing names of tasks, groups, and columns.
One of the best features in monday.com is the ability to use automations to create complex workflows and reduce manual steps. You can also create custom “recipes” to apply to your own automations.
Experienced developers can go as far as creating custom monday.com integrations, add-ons, widgets, client portals, plugins, extensions, and even an app. An array of customizations are available via low-code/no-code tools, but more complex workflows may involve API work. That said, the customization possibilities in this work OS are effectively endless, assuming you have developers on staff that can make full use of the API.
monday.com App
There are mobile applications available in both iOS and Android, so you can manage your monday.com account from your phone or tablet. Look for the monday.com app on the iOS and Android app stores.
If you are already signed in to your monday.com account via a website browser or desktop app, click on your profile picture in the lower left corner of your screen and select “Get mobile app.”
monday.com Integrations
When you sign up for an account, you are presented with a screen to select which tools you are currently using for later integration. This includes Microsoft Teams, Google Calendar, Outlook, Adobe Creative Cloud, Zendesk, Gmail, Mailchimp, Slack, Zoom, Facebook Ads, and Github.
A full list of integrations can be found on monday.com.
monday.com Automations
monday.com’s automations enable you to save time by taking the manual work out of updating project plans and tasks. By clicking the robot icon at the top of a board, you can access the Automation Center to create a custom automation for your workflow.
You can choose from templated recipes across categories, such as status change, due dates, and recurring tasks, that consist of a trigger and an action that can be added to a board.
Each recipe is configurable by drop-downs, allowing you to specify exactly what you want the automation to do. For example, “When STATUS changes to DONE, move item to COMPLETE.”
Pros & Cons of monday.com
monday.com Advantages and Benefits
monday.com Work OS gives teams the power to run projects and workflows more efficiently. It offers a lot of benefits to its customers.
- It is a simple yet intuitive system with the ability to customize and shift according to needs.
- It has the general look and feel of a familiar spreadsheet-based application like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, but is easier to use.
- It offers the ability to perform task management in many views, including spreadsheets, Kanban boards, or timelines.
- Work is transparent and updated in real time.
- Teams can effortlessly collaborate on many details in one central location.
- It eliminates much of the need for manual work, saving time and money.
- It’s applicable to a wide range of use cases.
monday.com Disadvantages
Unfortunately, there are some noted drawbacks when it comes to using monday.com for project management.
- It’s been referred to as “just a simple task management tool” that does not do much for broader project management initiatives.
- While you have a spreadsheet-like view, it does not have the formulas or pivot tables you need to analyze data.
- It has limited reporting capabilities, which are required for project management. You will still need to create a status report to track project health and go beyond bulleted lists with dates for all stakeholders.
monday.com Alternatives & Competitors
Top competitors for monday.com in 2023, according to reviewers, include:
- ClickUp seems to be better at customer support.
- Wrike is better at overall project management, though monday.com is has superior task management.
- Asana is a similar tool that is also geared toward less complex work with a spreadsheet-like interface.
- Nifty is easier to set up and do business with, and it offers better support.
- Smartsheet is an excellent alternative, although it is more expensive and not as easy to use, requiring more training.
- Scoro is a little more expensive, but it easily integrates with over 1,000 applications for essential business management.
- Trello is easier to set up and offers more intuitive Kanban boards for software development and IT.
- Teamwork is less expensive and has more freedom for users, but less training options.
- Workfront is more expensive and better for enterprise-level needs.
Conclusion
Finding the perfect work collaboration software is all about evaluating various similar solutions and identifying the top software for your specific needs. monday.com Work OS is a powerful platform that is proving to be strong competition in the marketplace for project management and CRM.
To sum it all up:
- monday.com Work OS can be used anytime, by anyone, from anywhere for free on any device.
- It’s project management software and a custom CRM, and it can be used for marketing, sales, software development, creative management, HR, and more.
- It’s collaborative, easy to use, and plays well with other programs to make work easier for all.
Try monday.com for free today to test drive the functionality that is relative to what you do and what you want it to do, and see for yourself just how easy it is to get set up and manage just about anything you can think of.
