monday.com Review

monday.com, formerly known as “dapulse,” is a relative newcomer to the project management market. It’s been around since 2010, but it’s seen a lot of changes since then, especially since it left the “dapulse” name in 2017. In the short time it’s been around, however, it’s rocketed to the top of our best project management software list.

In this updated monday.com review, we’ll dig through every single management feature, analyze its prices and even read its entire privacy policy so you don’t have to. At the end of it all, we’ll tell you whether or not it still stacks up against the competition.

We’ll give you a little spoiler in advance: monday.com is still one of the best pieces of project management software out there. It’s reasonably priced, and it features tons of helpful views to organize your projects and team. Its ease of use is especially impressive for such complex software.

You don’t have to take our word for it, though. monday.com offers a 14-day free trial of its Pro version so you can give the product a spin for yourself and see if you like it as much as we do for your own projects.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for monday.com

Features

monday.com focuses on task management, first and foremost. However, its list of features is one of the biggest on the market. It contains almost every feature that any other project management tool has, as well as a ton of unique components all its own.

The basic view for the tasks on your boards is the table view. This is essentially a to-do list that’s split into groups. It also features the timeline view — a Gantt chart — and the calendar view.

There is a kanban view as well, which is a card-based view similar to Trello’s boards. Check out our article on Trello vs monday.com for a rundown of how these two management programs differ from each other and which one is worth your time.

LeanKit is another management program that focuses on a kanban view, but it has a lot of features unique to its board that make it stand out. Check out our LeanKit review for more on that.

Every task within monday.com can have a number of different variables associated with it, known by default as “columns.” This can be simple labeled strings or something more complex, such as a file upload, incrementing index or team member.

Chart View

This powerful view features the ability to manipulate the data from your boards. With real-time team updates, monday.com’s chart view allows you to track progress over time and even create management reports for your team.

Some of the chart types include bar, line, column and even area. You can plug any of the columns into the charts to create beautiful, versatile data visualizations for clients and team members.

Once you’ve created your chart, you can print it or export it in five different formats. This view is perfect for building management reports on your projects, and its flexibility gives you the freedom to use it in creative ways and save time with its simplicity.

Subtasks and Dependencies

It seems that monday.com has been a little slow to add subtasks, but it’s catching up. Subtasks are currently in beta. Anyone can enroll in the beta to start using them, but it still has some limitations due to its active development.

Dependencies are also similarly limited; monday.com supports only due-date dependencies. monday.com has a few automation actions associated with this, including moving all dependents on your boards when a parent is moved.

We would be happier if both of these features were fully functional, but at least they’re in active development. The addition of advanced task management will really cement monday.com’s position as top project management software.

Integrations and Automations

monday.com integrates with just about every software you would expect it to, as you can read in our piece dedicated to monday.com integrations. Gmail, Asana and Slack are among the many applications that work well. There are currently almost 40 apps that it integrates with, but some of them have multiple forms of integration.

Integrations and automations are laid out exactly the same way. monday.com provides a rule with a few variables in it, and you fill in the variables. “Automations” deal with rules for your boards, while “integrations” interact with a third-party product.

The rules for automation range from simple to complex. Some are as straightforward as “archive all tasks older than this due date.” Others rely on multiple values and perform complicated tasks depending on their content.

Apps

Apps are similar to integrations, but they function more like extra views that you can add to your project. They often manipulate your tasks in fun or practical ways. This is where a lot of monday.com’s most unique views are born.

monday.com aims to be a management hub for everything your team may need to do related to a project or task. Its apps reflect this, with free-form whiteboarding and collaborative documents. One of the most useful ones is the pivot board, an app that allows you to make complex tables and saves you time on reports.

By joining the monday.com developer beta, you can even make your own management apps just for your company and boards. The ability to be creative with what you make increases monday.com’s flexibility for different types of teams and complex projects.

Files

monday.com is big on everything being “in context” on its software. The first place where that hurts functionality is the file storage. It’s good enough for basic storage, but requiring every file to be attached to a task hampers its flexibility as a file management tool.

This list can be filtered by name or by other values, such as project, due date or owner. However, there is no way to organize it or add folders. This makes it not a great choice when you need to store and organize a lot of files that are not all related to discrete tasks.

Because monday.com requires every file to have a context, you can’t just add files directly to its cloud storage. You have to create a task to attach them to, regardless of why you need them. It seems like unnecessary rigidity.

Chat and Messages

The other place where the “in context” rule hurts is the communication system on monday.com. There is no way to message a team member — privately or publicly — on the app. Every communication with other people has to happen within the context of a task.

There isn’t any chat in monday.com, either, or any kind of message board or forum. If you have a message that isn’t directly related to a specific task, it can’t be sent on the site. 

monday.com does offer a Slack integration that mitigates this, but it’s not a great option either if you’re on the Standard tier. You’re limited to 250 “integration actions” per month, and chat will fill that up quickly. To see software that does this right, check out our Basecamp review.

Work OS

monday.com is the pioneer of the “Work OS” movement. This movement’s goal is to create one centralized management location that stores all work on a project, making it easy to search, navigate and link pieces of a project and saving everyone time.

Project management software is in a great position to be a Work OS, due to its integrations with third-party software and business-minded UI. monday.com’s structure is great to become a hub for all work, with its focus specifically on projects (see our article on project management vs task management to learn the difference).

Its permissions are also excellent for this management model. Any user can have full permissions, or they could be able to add and edit tasks but not change the overall structure of the project. Team members can even be limited to editing only things that are assigned to them.

Columns can also be restricted, both in editing and viewing. For example, manager approvals could be in a column that only a few managers can edit or even see.

One of the common problems with cloud software as a Work OS is its management permissions. Different levels in the hierarchy need different access to the work, and monday.com understands this and sets up its Work OS to function that way by default.

monday.com Features Overview

Pricing

For monday.com’s tiers, pricing is calculated as a flat rate per user. Its Pro plan is a bit less expensive per month than some competitors, such as Wrike (see our Wrike review for more). This small savings adds up if you have a large team, though.

Basic Unlimited users, forms, mobile apps Details	$ 10.00/ month
Standard Timeline & calendar view, integrations, automations, guest accounts, advanced search, 24/7 customer support Details	$ 12.00/ month
Pro Chart & time tracking views, private boards, formula column, unlimited guests Details	$ 20.00/ month
Enterprise Audit log, advanced account permissions, session management, HIPAA compliance. Contact monday.com for pricing Details	FREE

Its free tier is very limited, offering simply a task management list. You get only 500MB of storage space, so you’d need to find separate cloud storage. Check out our list of the best cloud storage providers for guidance on that front. 

The Standard plan is a little more generous, with 50GB of storage, and the Pro plan has no limit at all. This can be compared to competitors such as Podio, which offers unlimited storage, but check out our Podio review for more details.

Another limiting factor in monday.com’s pricing is its integrations and automations. Both of those are severely limited. You cannot use integrations or automations on the free plan, and the Standard tier allows only 250 actions per month.

The free version of monday.com doesn’t have enough features to justify using it. It lacks integral parts of project management, such as timeline view, integrations and advanced search. With such a low cap on file storage as well, the limitations make it worth upgrading.

If you simply don’t have the budget to spend money on software, check out our Freedcamp review for information on a more affordable option. You can also check out our guide to the best free project management software if you’d like to do some more research.

Standard or Pro?

monday.com’s Pro tier has unlimited file storage and 25,000 actions for integrations and automations per month. On top of that, some of its highly specialized management features may be useful to teams. The pricing isn’t very steep, so it’s definitely a solid option.

You may need this tier if you’re using monday.com for any large projects or as a company-wide management solution. The unlimited guests means companies can allow their clients to view its progress at any time. The Standard plan, on the other hand, allows guests, but they must be paid for at the rate of one user seat for four guests.

The main difference between Standard and Pro is the chart feature. This complex report-creating tool is available only on the Pro tier. The time tracking tool is also important if you plan to use monday.com as a Work OS, since the tasks are easy to process for payroll purposes (although if you’re planning on doing heavy accounting, check out our Mavenlink review).

We recommend aiming for the Standard tier unless you need the chart view or have a very large team. The most important upgrades are at that level, and if you are continually reaching the limits or miss the features, you can always upgrade to the Pro plan.

Discounts and Free Trials

There is a discount of 18 percent if you bill annually, like most subscription-based software pricing. This puts monday.com on the lower end of the price scale, which is shocking considering how feature-rich the product is.

monday.com offers a 14-day free trial of its Pro tier, and it only requires an email. This is a great way to check out the extra features — especially the versatility of the chart view — before making a choice.

User-Friendliness

monday.com is an absolute pleasure to use, as you’ll start to notice right after you enter your email. Some project management tools will give you an entire questionnaire to customize your boards. monday.com instead asks you two questions: the size of your team and what you want to use it for.

After that, monday.com sends you through a short, hands-on tutorial in creating and managing a project and a few tasks. It then sets you free, but with a list of tasks to complete to master the whole product.

We appreciate the approach monday.com has taken toward management tutorials. They exist if you need them, but for the most part it expects you to use it yourself to figure it out. We didn’t find navigating monday.com difficult at all, and its ease of use is a huge point in its favor.

It’s always difficult for project management software to balance ease of use with the complex tools needed for robust task management. monday.com addresses this by using a lot of hover tools. For example, hovering over a column reveals options to move it, sort its tasks or open a menu with a host of other options.

We found this software to be very friendly to its users, in general. It’s not often that we comment on the copywriting within cloud software, but the monday.com team does a great job of making you feel like you’re welcome and leading you through the management app.

One partially hidden setting that we found really adds to the ease of use of monday.com is the terminology setting. This can be changed on a board-by-board basis and allows you to customize which words the app uses for relevance, from “task” to “item” to custom entries.

monday.com’s search feature also deserves a place in our user-friendliness overview. With a single search, you can navigate across every board you own to find tasks, files or people in your team. There’s a lot of compartmentalization in monday.com, and this saves it from becoming too complex.

monday.com Mobile Apps

monday.com also offers an Android and iOS mobile application. We were especially curious to see how it managed to fit all the hover options for tasks and columns into an app where there’s no way to hover.

The applications, understandably, don’t have as many options for each task as the desktop version. For example, if you wanted to change a column from “text” to “long text” or change its position, you would need to use a computer.

We did find it easy to use, but it doesn’t seem to be meant to work on phones. However, you could almost entirely manage your team on the go with monday.com on a tablet in landscape mode.

Security & Privacy

monday.com does everything right when it comes to security against cybercrime. It is SOC II Type 2 certified, which means that a third party audited the security of its product for a period of time, and determined that its security procedures are correct and that the employees are following them. Completing this audit is a great way to ensure that users’ data is safe.

Its security overview goes into almost painful detail on the steps it takes to make sure its user data is safe. We found it most surprising that it even assured us that its servers are on separate air conditioning systems so they won’t overheat. Not all project management software offers this amount of detail; check out our TeamGantt review to see why this is so impressive.

All data at monday.com is encrypted both in transit and at rest. This is more than we can say for some of its competitors, and it ensures that no man-in-the-middle attacks will steal your data. We dug into its history, as well, and found no records of any data breaches.

monday.com also offers two-factor authentication, which isn’t always an option but should be. Check out our article on what two-factor authentication is to see why. We’ve even rounded up the best 2FA apps for you to use with monday.com.

Privacy Policy

However, we wish monday.com’s privacy policy was just as easy to understand as its security page. The privacy policy consists of an embedded PDF containing its legal privacy documentation. We were surprised the company didn’t put more time into this page, like a layman’s version or at minimum an HTML representation.

It is important to note that the administrator of the account owns all the data created by the users signed up under that license or team. For example, if an admin needs to access your account, any private boards or projects you may have made will be accessible.

We also weren’t impressed with how much information monday.com collects including browser version, operating system and location. Many companies use this data to create a “digital fingerprint” of you, and it’s unnecessary for the product.

We found its privacy a bit disappointing compared to competitors, such as Airtable (read our Airtable review). However, this isn’t a security risk and as long as you know how to protect your privacy, you’ll be fine.

GDPR and CCPA

The General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act are aimed at protecting your data from companies, usually by allowing you to access, update and delete any information a company has about you as a user. Check out our article on the GDPR for a more in-depth look.

monday.com does comply with both of these laws, but only for the minimum number of people it can get away with. Some companies go above and beyond, offering these options to everyone using its service.

Service & Support

So many companies make the support system twisting and complex, overengineering the layout and structure to minimize tickets submitted. monday.com is nothing like that. It has a huge breadth of support options, but it recognizes what users want and makes it simple to find in the least amount of time.

It does have a full support knowledgebase, but a user’s first experience with monday.com’s support is its overlay, triggered by clicking the question mark icon on any page.

At the top is a global search of every form of self-help support monday.com offers. This includes its webinars, video tutorials and knowledgebase. If none of these help you, its ticket option is front and center for ease of use.

A lot of project management software like to try to hide their ticket systems so fewer people use it. A bad example of this is Asana (see our Asana review to see where it shines, as well). monday.com, on the other hand, makes it almost easier to submit a ticket or send an email than to read the knowledgebase.

monday.com boasts 24/7 support for paid users, which we put to the test. We sent in a ticket at 10 p.m. on a weeknight and received an email response six hours later. The priority email options were a nice touch: for example, “awesome support” for normal support and “drop everything and answer me” for emergency support.

Knowledgebase, Forums and Chat

When we visited monday.com’s knowledgebase, we noticed that the product articles were all updated very recently. It seems that the support staff goes through some of the articles every week, so none of them get too out of date.

The forums are very active, with dozens of posts per day by users and monday.com team members. Interestingly enough, the majority of the forum isn’t actually individual user problems with the product. Instead, it’s feature suggestions that monday.com takes seriously and implements into the application over time.

It’s pleasantly surprising to see how receptive monday.com is to product feedback. Its team seems to understand exactly what people want when it comes to software support: ease of use in talking to a human and regular updates based on what users want you to add.

The only downside of its support is the lack of chat options. It’s difficult and costs some money to add a real-time support system for your product, but chat would move monday.com’s support from stellar to perfect.

The Verdict

monday.com isn’t the perfect project management software. It struggles a little bit when it comes to private communication and data collection, and we would really like it if it had a live chat support option.

That being said, we’re impressed by all the unique features that monday.com offers, and its security is rock solid. It’s also one of the easiest programs to use out of all the project management reviews we’ve done.

Although monday.com has a bit of room to improve, it still remains a top choice for project and task management. 

What do you think of this review? Have you used monday.com with your team and found it simple? Let us know in the comments. As always, thanks for reading.

monday.com FAQ

• What Is monday.com and What Can monday.com Do?

  monday.com is a project management tool that combines file management, tasks and data manipulation into one intuitive package. Its position as a Work OS means that employees can use its integrations and tools for all their work without having to switch applications, which saves time and improves productivity.It can host your team’s to-do list just as easily as a massive company’s full organizational structure. This is due to its flexibility and simplicity in its boards. You can choose to add tasks and nothing more, or you can delve deep into its permissions, organization and dependencies.

• Is There a Free Version of monday.com?

  Yes, there is. It has no user limit, but it has only a few basic views available. If you are looking for project management software for simple projects that don’t require much organization or analysis, this product is a great choice.If you need more customization for your management or any kind of data analysis, though, its Standard and Pro tiers are affordable and will provide you with them. There’s even a 14-day free trial to try it out.

• How Much Does monday.com Cost?

  monday.com is split up into three tiers: Free, Standard and Pro. Standard is $11.80 per user per month, while Pro is $19.80 per user per month. In the Standard tier, you can also invite guests at the rate of four guests for the cost of one extra user.If you choose to pay for the service annually, you receive an 18-percent discount on every product. This makes monday.com a bit cheaper than most other project management prices.

• Is Asana Better Than monday.com?

  We’ve reviewed both sides of the Asana vs monday.com project management fight. monday.com has topped our rankings for project management software for a while now, and our latest reviews of each haven't changed much on that front.That being said, Asana is not a bad management product. It lags in its customer support options, but it is incredibly intuitive and useful for projects. Both of these options have free trials to play with, so you can see for yourself which one fits your needs the best.