Monday Review: Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Monday.com has done a really good job at giving Asana a run for their money. They built robust project management features that an enterprise can use, yet they also really hit the ground running with amazing marketing to appeal to the average business owner.

The appeal with Monday is that it has a pretty user interface, lots of vibrant colors which might make it seem like project management is fun. But in reality, similar to Asana it's not a super opinionated project management software tool, meaning that you can "set it up however you want" which can be confusing for an average business that doesn't have a dedicated project manager on their team.

That said, Monday started as a project manager and is now expanding into the "we're trying to do everything" space. I mean they're even claiming to be a CRM at this point 😱

While an "all-in-one" tool may sound appealing because it sounds simple, the problem is they are extremely overwhelming to use. Monday has too many features that end up being buggy due to missing the last 10-15% in every category, which might not seem like a big deal, but we assure you that it'll frustrate the team.

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While they have a free version (for small teams of 2), their key features like workflow automation are only offered on the paid plans.

Features & Differentiation

Rating: _C-

Asana was the first project management software that helped improve team collaboration that just about any business could use (large or small). Monday.com came to the market later, and while they are giving Asana a good run for their money, they are lacking in differentiation.

With Monday (like Asana), you'll get all bells and whistles when it comes to project management. If you want RACI Charts, Gant charts, tasks, team collaboration, calendars, logs, advanced reporting features, file versions and more, you'll get it with Monday.

Where Monday has tried to differentiate themselves from Asana is with building more tools atop their platform: a sales CRM, lead capturing, docs and more. If you're looking to use a CRM, you should use one of these great CRM tools that were built specifically for managing relationships (not a project manager turned CRM).

User Interface (UI)

Rating: _B+

Monday has a nice and vibrant interface that adds a sprinkle of fun when managing projects. They have different ways to visualize data, like using a 5 star rating system (for priority for example) or a cool timeline view to see project progress. Dragging and dropping tasks in is relatively easy and intuitive.

Their custom dashboards take expertise to set up properly, but once you setup, having customizable reports on a nice interface could be highly helpful to view project progress and help with internal resource management.

User Experience (UX)

Rating: _C+

The appeal with Monday is most definitely that it's "pretty and colorful" interface that looks super simple to use. Upon setting it up, you're given endless options of columns you can add to your projects like status by the way of colorful buttons, priority by way of a star rating.

The first time you enter a task, it's like "cool, that was kind fun!" but when you actually start using it on a daily basis, you quickly find out that all these buttons are needy for your attention and you start wondering if they are are even needed, since now you're spending more time filling in the Monday task than getting work done.

Andra used Monday previously for client work and adoption of Monday was a struggle with the team. "We had to spend a lot of time setting up the right notifications for everyone as team members were left confused as to where they were actually needed or not. We ended up having a dedicated project manager that we decided should just solely update Monday on his own as there was too much confusion otherwise. There was a steep learning curve and ultimately Monday was phased out of the business."

What we've seen is that even those that like Monday's interface, still prefer using an alternative like Asana. There's even a chrome extension tab management company that actually built an internal Chromium extension for their team who's sole purpose is to make Asana's list view look like Monday. 😂

When I asked them why they didn't just use Monday at that point, they replied with: "Oh, yeah, Monday sucks, we just prefer how it looks!"

In the below reddit post (that has over 1,000 upvotes), a business owner discusses their experience with Monday—even after investing in an agency to help them set it up.

(tl;dr If you are willing to spend the money to hire an agency to setup a tool, go with something more reliable like Asana):

Final Thoughts

Monday has grown incredibly quickly and in that, is trying to expand their platform offerings to continue to grow. We don't think that's a good thing, because alternatives like Asana are much more well oiled at project management since they are focusing 100% of their resources internally to *only* build the best task management experience.

In terms of your project management software options, Monday might be suitable for large teams (but if we haven't made it clear yet, we still prefer Asana for larger teams due to increased reliability). For small teams, the alternative is Motion which doesn't have as much of a steep learning curve.

Monday does have a free plan available for small teams of 2 so to adequately compare it to other project management software, you'd should be considering their paid plans that include automation. The best free project management tool doesn't totally exist as each online project management tool will have guard rails on their best features.