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The "Project Management" category is one that has been quite underwhelming for a while. Project management software was first created for engineering teams or large enterprise companies. If you've worked for an enterprise company, you'd be familiar with the software Smartsheet and/or Jira. Project management tools were reserved for highly complex technical projects and there weren't any tools available for the average small–medium sized teams.
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An all-in-one project management tool and suite of products for teams.
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.
While they have a free version (for small teams of 2), their key features like workflow automation are only offered on the paid plans.
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).
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.
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):
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.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
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A daily planner tool to help you centralize your schedule.
Akiflow falls into the daily planner app + productivity app category. It helps individuals that have tasks in multiple different tools (e.g. email, Asana, Slack, Google Calendar, Notion) and want task consolidation. Akiflow's integrations allow you to build workflows from various apps to add to-do list items in Akiflow, and within Akiflow you are able to arrange the tasks into a calendar view. It aims to be your personal task manager.
Akiflow as a task manager is great if you are using many different tools (Gmail, Outlook email, Google Calendar, Asana or ClickUp, Slack, etc.) and you want one tool to help with the task consolidation and daily planning of your tasks. If you are a part of a team that is using a project management tool and you feel like you are constantly consolidating your to-dos from different channels, with Akiflow's integrations you can automatically have a running list of all of your task list items which can be helpful.
Akiflow might be well suited for you if you're working at an organization where you have little say about the number of tools used for the team to communicate internally, and you want to have more control over organizing your tasks and planning your day.
Akiflow has a powerful command bar and keyboard shortcuts, so if you are more of a power user who enjoys this level of productivity it's worth giving a shot to help with time management and using it as a personal task manager.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
If you are looking to reduce the number of of productivity apps you use, then there might be better tools out there for you. The whole problem Akiflow is trying to solve is that some teams have become reliant of using so many tools to manage projects that we now need another tool to have a central place for all of our tasks 😅 For example, if your team is not yet using a project management tool (or you individually know you need to manage larger projects), then considering something like Motion might be best as it would eliminate your need for a project management tool + a daily planning tool (it offers daily planning, time blocking, and calendar scheduling capabilities in addition to full project management capabilities).
On the other hand, if you don't need integrations with other tools and just want a task management app that can help you act as your personal task manager, then you can even consider something like Routine and Sunsama which are both beautiful more minimalistic time management apps.
Finally, if you are easily overwhelmed at the thought of spending 10-20 minutes per day organizing your tasks, then Akiflow won't be a great task management app as it requires you to manually drag tasks onto your calendar.
Rating: B
Akiflow was created as a response to the cognitive overload from using a lot of different tools to communicate and plan our work. They've invested a ton in their integrations with the goal to help you centralize your schedule and have one tool that answers the question of what you need to work on next. Their calendar experience allows you to drag tasks straight onto your calendar view so you can visualize your day.
You can label your tasks into categories like "personal" "marketing" "bugs" "school" so you can easily view groupings of your tasks. Their progress visualization is also great to keep track of how many more tasks you need to complete for the day. At the end of the day, their daily shutdown feature will show help you reflect on your current day and plan tasks for future days.
While Akiflow is impressive, there is a lot of Akiflow alternatives on the market with similar features. Sunsama and Routine are two of the main competitors along with Motion, although Motion stands out more as they have AI capabilities to help auto-schedule your tasks (including rescheduling your tasks for you if you don't complete them).
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Rating: B-
While Akiflow's interface has improved time, compared to other daily planning tools, it's more clunky to use. It looks similar to your email inbox with a calendar on the left hand side where you can drag and drop tasks. But when viewing all your tasks that have come through from your integrations, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and cluttered.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Rating: C+
The truth of the matter is just because you can consolidate all of your tasks in one place, doesn't mean you should. For instance, just because you need to respond to 5 Slack messages and answer 3 emails, should you add it to Akiflow and then manually drag the items onto your calendar as a part of your daily tasks? We'd say probably no.
It can be easy to over engineer your schedule with Akiflow. When we used it, we found this is exactly what happened. We found ourselves slightly overwhelmed with the number of tasks in Akiflow. At the end of the day, you want to be more productive, not spend more time scheduling tasks and planning your day.
More than that, when you complete a task in Akiflow, it doesn't sync back to the app that sent over the task so you can end up having to check it off twice.
To get the best experience with Akiflow, we suggest being highly selective in terms of which tasks you want to be in Akiflow. If they are meaningful tasks that require some planning, then they are useful to add. If they are tasks that are not as substantial, then we say it's best to probably not clutter your Akiflow task list with them.
It also does feel like there's many missed opportunities to automate some of the things you need to do during your daily review (and yes, you need to review your Akiflow daily so that it doesn't fall behind). Why not have an option to automatically reschedule your day for you, why is it such a manual process? The same frustration that we have with a tool like Asana and Sunsama.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Rating: C
Akiflow's mobile app for Android and iOS is in beta, so it is still relatively new.
Rating: B
This is where Akiflow excels out of all the daily planner applications, with native integrations. They have a super barebones Zapier connector allowing you to build your own custom workflows with Akiflow (although be warned, they only allow for "create task", no search/update functionality, meaning the custom integration you can build will be quite barebones).
That said, you could have a simple integration like: do you want a new task in Akiflow when a new lead is added to your CRM? That is possible with Akiflow and other daily planning tools lack. Although we would recommend keeping CRM and relationship-focused tasks outside of your project manager and use your CRM task section instead.
All this being said, Akiflow is the best daily planner app if integrations with other tools is important to you.
If you use a ton of productivity apps and are craving one tool to help you with daily planning while continuing to use all the other tools for different reasons, then we'd recommend at least signing up for a Akiflow free trial to see it in action.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Is Akiflow worth it? If you identify as a professional power user who wants one tool to help with task consolidation, then it's worth signing up for a free trial. Just remember you will still need to manually plan your tasks into your day and falling behind on this won't allow you to get the most out of the tool. That said, it's a much better daily planner alternative than using paper planners and certainly beats out Google tasks as well!
If you're not already using and loving another project management tool and would prefer one solution that offers daily planning, time blocking, meeting scheduling and project management capabilities, we'd recommend simply using Motion, as when you compare Motion vs Akiflow, you really need Akiflow and a project management together (2 separate tools) to get what Motion gives you out of the box.
Akiflow could be a good personal task manager with an improved calendar experience to reduce cognitive overload, but prepare to invest sometime in learning how to best use it to get the most out of it.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
7-day free trial + $10 off your next billing by using the link above.
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