If you care about efficiency, Monday does a better job than Streak. Streak just turns your Gmail into a slow, cluttered mess once you have any real volume, and it ends up feeling like a spreadsheet glued onto your inbox. That makes it a headache for anyone who wants to actually get work done at any scale.

Monday isn't perfect and can be a pain to set up, especially if you're a small team without the time or desire to invest in proper onboarding. But once you get past the setup, it doesn't drag down your core tools or become unusable with more data. Streak's core design choice of living inside Gmail is the main thing that kills its efficiency.

If you're looking for something that won't slow you down as you grow, Monday is the safer pick. Only go with Streak if you're absolutely determined to run everything out of Gmail and don't mind things getting slow and messy.

Streak Editor's Verdict

What is Streak?

Streak CRM is trying to be a CRM accessible from the convenience of your Gmail inbox. Although what we find is that it heavily slows down Gmail with any level of scale.

Streak tries to meet the Google Sheets users in the CRM world, by using a non-standard implementation of a CRM (which feels more like a spreadsheet).

Read our more in-depth article about why we recommend staying away from Streak in most cases.

Monday Editor's Verdict

What is Monday?

Monday started off as a project management software, but in order to gain more market share, continued to build tools and expand their offering. They went from being a project management software, to an "all-in-one" tool. They now offer products such as Monday "Work Management" (aka project management), Monday sales CRM and Monday dev (for agile workflows).

Monday went from being a project management software to trying to be an "all-in-one" tool. They even coined the term "Work OS"

While Monday offers tiers for small teams, we'd think there are better tools for teams with under 300 employees (like Asana or Motion). That's not to say that smaller teams don't use Monday (they do), it's just going to take quite a bit of work to set it up for success.

Limitations

The main difficulty with Monday is actually getting it setup for success. Many folks create an account, invite their team, pop in some projects and then it sits there as an abandoned tool, with no one on the team actually feeling like its reliable. This comes from not doing a proper Monday implementation (often means working with a consultant). Mapping your processes to Monday and creating team documentation will lead to higher chances of success.

If the above sounds overkill for your business, consider something like Motion as that's more so a project management tool that you can get set up out of the gate and have your team using it fairly quickly.

Pricing

Free Tier: While Monday has a free forever tier, it's extremely limited so we wouldn't consider it a "free project management tool". The free tier is made for individuals or hobbyists at best.
[SKIP ❌] Basic Tier: $27/mo on annual tier (Monday's website says $9 per seat, but actually forces you to purchase a minimum of 3 seats). We recommend skipping this tier altogether as it's still very limited in features. For example, you don't get any automations or integrations.
[GOOD ✅] Standard Tier: $36/mo on annual tier. (Monday's website says $12 per seat, but forces you to purchase a minimum of 3 seats). This is the first useful tier, but still has a limited number of automations/integrations. If you need to collaborate with guests outside of your organization, this is the first tier that would allow for it.
[BEST 🥇] Pro Tier: $57/mo on annual tier (Monday's website says $19 per seat, but forces you to purchase a minimum of 3 seats). If you're a business, this is the tier you'd want to be on. You unlock all the key Monday features including private boards, time tracking, and ample automations and integrations.

Streak vs Monday

Comparison Summary

Editor's Verdict

Comparison Video and Summaries

CRM Alternatives