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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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The digital daily planner that helps you feel calm and stay focused.
Sunsama fits into the day planner app category, acting as a digital planner helping with task management and time blocking.
It can help with planning your daily work, time blocking and scheduling your important tasks each day. It takes a zen-like approach to helping you intentionally plan your day, allowing you participate in the planning process of your day all while giving you a calendar view of your tasks. Many people that struggle with focusing claim that it helps them better schedule their day, allowing them to get more work done.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
If your organization uses a full project management tool like Asana, ClickUp, or Trello and you want another tool to help you schedule tasks onto your calendar view and plan when you'll do each specific task, then Sunsama can be a great addition to your productivity tools.
If you don't have a need for a full project management tool and are more so looking for a task management app to get your daily work done, then Sunsama is a great choice. Just keep in mind that Sunsama only allows you to plan your schedule a few weeks in advance so if you have larger projects at hand, it might be a bit frustrating since you'll need to backlog most of your tasks until the time to actually work on them gets closer.
If you like to take an intentional, zen-like approach to planning your day, and can see yourself carving out 15-20 minutes a day for planning, then Sunsama could be the best day planner app for you.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Sunsama is not a project management tool, it's very much a task management software. It allows you to only plan only up to two weeks in advance. So if you are looking for a way to manage larger projects or collaborate with team members then you might find yourself looking for 2 tools to accomplish what one tool should be able to do (e.g. Motion vs Sunsama). So re-iternating again, if you are in the market for a new project management tool, and are considering Sunsama, you will be disappointed as this is not what it was made to do.
You should also not use Sunsama if you don't think you'd be good at keeping up with the planning process of your tasks. Sunsama doesn't automatically schedule or prioritize your tasks for you, YOU need to do that each day, so if you forget or it falls to the wayside, you might end up paying for a tool that is sitting dormant. There are other productivity tools (Motion) that use AI to schedule your day that might be better for you in this case.
Let's dive in deeper ⤵
Rating: B
Sunsama has invested a lot of time into their ke features such as their daily review, weekly review, and weekly objective functionality. All features that try to get you to plan daily, what tasks need to get done, and how they tie to the actual goals and objectives of the week.
That said, people have complained that they wish there was more of a monthly and quarterly objectives, since weekly is often too short of a time to plan for larger goals.
Sunsama is also a calendar app that integrates deeply with tools like Asana, allowing you to pull tasks from Asana and put them onto your calendar for daily planning. It's a clever idea, especially if you're already using and loving Asana, but just frustrated by the lack of integration with a calendar. Something that Motion actually does out of the box as it's an all-in-one task and time management tool.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Rating: A-
This is one of the areas that Sunsama totally excels. They have a super minimal and beautiful interface. They also have calming features like focus mode and daily shutdown, which allow you to take a deep breath, removing all other distractions, allowing you to focus your attention.
Rating: B-
With such a stellar UI, you'd expect the UX to be fantastic. And it is, in many areas. For example, things function the way you'd expect them to, and they have keyboard shortcuts for most things.
That said, it 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 Sunsama 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.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Rating: C-
Sunsama has an iOS and Android app that is relatively basic, and they refer to it as a "companion to the web app". So this means you can add basic tasks to Sunsama while on-the-go, and see what's on your calendar/schedule for the day, but you're not going to actually be planning any work while on-the-go.
You're also not going to have any actual calendar scheduling functionality while on-the-go. The truth of the matter is that it feels a bit rushed. We also experienced a pretty buggy mobile app experience with the app randomly crashing. There's only day view for the calendar for example, and the back gestures on Android don't even seem to work when backing out of tasks.
Let's just say that it's fair in that they are referring to it as a companion (for expectation setting), and you're not going to be replacing your calendar of choice or your primary project management app on mobile anytime soon.
With all of that said, you're going to want to use their desktop app or web app for planning your day and getting actual work done.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Rating: C-
Sunsama does not currently have an API. As it's more focused on native integrations with tools like that of with Asana, ClickUp, or Trello. So with that, you can see that their focus isn't actually on extending Sunsama into a flexible tool outside of what they've decided to integrate deeply with.
If you're using one of the main tools they integrate with, this might be a good thing, but for now, with no API, you cannot integrate it with your team's CRM for example, which leads us to feel they are more focused on being an individual daily planner application instead of a team project manager.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Is Sunsama worth it? If you need a daily planner application or task management software and are willing to intentionally take the 15-20 minutes to plan your daily work, then we think it's worth giving a shot. Their daily review and weekly review features are meant to help you reflect and better help you with managing your time overall.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
If you're not already using and loving another project manager like Asana, we'd recommend simply using Motion, as when you compare Motion vs Sunsama, you really need Sunsama and Asana together (2 separate tools) to get what Motion gives you out of the box.
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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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