Monday vs Notion

Monday has a very steep learning curve and is a tool you'd likely need a consultant to help you set up. Some teams have even reported spending over $20,000 on implementation, only to end up with a system that didn’t work as they imagined. This steep learning curve is especially important to keep in mind if you're a small team. Because of that, we typically recommend Monday more for enterprises or teams that have someone more technical who’s familiar with processes and software implementation. It's more for highly complex projects that require very deep customization.

Because Monday is very customizable, it requires proper team onboarding from the person setting up the account. If an implementation is not done right and there's no onboarding, you can expect that almost certainly the team will not adopt it. So if you go down the path of using Monday, you need to make sure that you invest in proper team training and hand-holding.

Monday's AI feels confusing, and ultimately not very useful. The AI features that exist feel like light automation layers tied to columns rather than anything that meaningfully speeds up real work. Combined with clunky workflows, a high learning curve, and a $2,400/year price tag if you go over free credits, the ROI simply isn’t there. A lot of users also complained that they will build out these robust workflows, and then if they go over the usage, you can only upgrade for the entire year rather than paying for the overage for that month. So you're basically faced with either not being able to rely on the AI for the rest of the month or paying $2,400 for the whole year.

Monday is not truly innovative. They followed Asana and built a competitor, but there was nothing revolutionary about Monday. They always excelled in their marketing with their bright colors, but in terms of the actual user experience, many people have felt like Monday has fallen short. Users report having consistent performance issues. Monday has also gone down the path of trying to be an all-in-one tool, similar to ClickUp, But they have taken it to another level. They have so many features at this point that it feels like they don't even know themselves what they are and who they're for.

Once Monday is configured, and the team is trained, it can help you stay on top of your work. However, when I previously used Monday with a previous company, we found that most of the team struggled to adopt it, which actually hurt productivity because one person (the project manager) ended up spending all day in meetings with the team and then updating the projects in Monday.

While some people like to argue that Notion is easy to learn, they are people that are typically more technical and passionate about learning about databases.

If you don't have interest in learning how to build apps and you have an interest in just managing your projects, you are definitely better off using another project management tool. Notion has a very steep learning curve, and people are often surprised when it doesn't work as easily as everybody makes it seem.

Team adoption with Notion for project management tends to be extremely low. The person who built the system usually had to invent their own structure, and often that structure only makes sense to them. When they try to onboard the rest of the team, it creates a ton of friction.

On top of that, most people don’t think about scalability aka how this system will hold up as the team grows to 5–10+ people. So if you’re aiming for real team adoption, it’s almost always better to use a purpose-built project management tool that works out of the box.

Notion launched AI Agents and gave them these cute characters and these cute hats, but the overall response with the functionality has been mixed. Overall a lot of people have been disappointed with the functionality saying it's not as good or comprehensive as they thought it would be and it sometimes falls short. We're sure that Notion will continue to improve their AI over time like every software company out there.

Notion was one of the first tools that let you build your own systems, it’s very customizable. But that innovation doesn’t make it a good project management tool. Notion markets itself as a great project management tool, but it doesn’t highlight the steep learning curve. So while it’s flexible, it’s not actually helpful for the average user. It’s best suited for a small subset of people who want to build something fully custom. AKA the average business owner should not be using Notion for projects as it will serve as a major distraction.

Notion is the most unproductive project management tool. The reason is because you have to build it yourself from scratch, which means you need to learn how databases and relational databases work. Our argument is that if you are running a small business, there is no world where you should need to learn about these things, and instead focus on running your business. You should use a tool that out of the box does project management out of the box. Notion is more of a distraction.