monday Review: An All-In-One Project Management Tool?

Work without limits and on your schedule - That's what monday.com promises. The project management tool helps both teams and organizations to oversee projects centrally. So, how good is it?

We intensively tested the platform and evaluated its user-friendliness, key features, and subscription options. Below, we'll let you know whether monday.com* is the right tool for your organization.

monday.com is a cloud-based project management platform that enhances organizational teamwork. Originally launched in 2012 in Israel, monday.com quickly became one of the world's most popular project management tools.

The provider's servers are primarily based in the US, however, since 2021, there are also GDPR-compliant servers in Germany.

monday.com makes registration easy. Just input your email address, username, a password, and answer a few basic questions about your position and goals, and you're good to go.

You can invite team members by email during these steps, or do it later. It isn't possible to skip the board creation process though, since this is where your projects are stored.

After you set up your account, you'll be taken to your personal work management area. Here, it's possible to navigate between the monday.com's different products.

Notifications are located to the right, along with your inbox, the invite button, apps, a search tool, a link to the support area, and your profile.

The interface has a modern and enticing layout, and its menus are highly intuitive. In addition, monday.com provides more detailed explanations for many of its areas. As a result, it shouldn't take long to familiarize yourself with it.

monday.com offers a wide variety of different products, which you can enable or disable as modules. When you first start, Work Management, which includes the most important project management features, will be active.

Since this review focuses on the software's task and project management features, we chose monday projects. Just like the rest of the platform's products, this can be tried out at no cost for 14 days.

The center of monday.com and where you'll likely spend the majority of your time, is the project board. Here, you'll create tasks, set their status, indicate who's responsible for them, and be able to monitor them.

You can filter overviews at any time, search through them, pin elements, or hide them. For this, you're able to select from a range of different views.

monday.com offers two basic types of views:

While Dashboard Views are best for reports, the Board options are a useful starting point for project-based work. The following choices are available:

Head to your project's dashboard screen to see all of your board's data and statistics. Here, you'll also be able to generate insightful reports for your team members and stakeholders.

Complex and large projects especially benefit from this dashboard, since it makes all sorts of important information immediately available in a single place.

Is the project on schedule? How many tasks are past their due date(s)? Answer these questions and more without having to consult each area of your project.

There's a time and place for every view. Deciding which is best depends on your requirements, preferences, and many other factors. For that reason, we like to see a large selection of views and monday.com doesn't disappoint.

In comparison to the other platforms from our sample, monday.com is among the leaders when it comes to views:

It's also possible to follow and manage your monday.com project on the go. However, the mobile app is more for checking in than doing real work. You can add new tasks, but it's a bit clunky and lots of scrolling is necessary in the default view.

Overall, monday.com scored thanks to its ease of use, variety of views, and modern, colorful, and intuitive interface.

Projects are comprised of tasks and milestones. monday.com serves up plenty of task management options and features that help improve team workflows.

There are several ways to add new tasks: You can click on the red "New Task" button on your project's page, add a new cell to a table, duplicate an existing task, or add subtasks to an existing task.

You'll make changes directly in the table and won't need to open a separate window or jump to a new area of the platform. Users get complete freedom when it comes to data and fields.

The only disadvantage is that they are automatically given an "In Progress" status and need to be manually changed.

This level of intuitive usage is only found on the main screen. If you change to the Gantt view, you'll be able to add new tasks (via pop-up), but not edit their fields. For that, you have to head back to the main screen, which isn't ideal.

It's possible to link certain columns with one another so that they impact each other (for example, timeline and length). This makes it unnecessary to work on each column individually, reducing the likelihood of mistakes or errors.

By default, users get the following columns:

Compared to what we've seen elsewhere, the detailed view for tasks that opens when you click on a task is fairly basic. When you start, it's only possible to add comments and updates, upload attachments, or review the activity log.

However, you can get more information about a task in this view. monday.com does this with Item Cards, which have a tab in the detailed view. These show all table fields in card form and can be edited accordingly.

There are also a few more widgets apart from Item Cards, that you can use to customize your tasks further. As a result, monday.com provides significantly more freedom when it comes to designing tasks than its peers.

You can add plenty of custom columns to your table. You'll be able to choose from check boxes, labels, numbers, text, and other items:

For custom fields, monday.com again flaunts its flexibility: 16 out of 17 fields were covered, with only Airtable offering more (a rollup field).

Some tasks are comprised of multiple, smaller subtasks. You can add these to monday.com by clicking on an item and selecting "Add Subitem". Sub-subitems aren't supported, however, subtasks and regular ones have the same tools.

Dependencies also get a field in monday.com. With this, you can show how tasks relate to one another, and optimize the order in which they're worked on

monday.com differentiates between four types of dependencies:

monday.com doesn't just offer flexibility for designing and displaying tasks, since it also provides plenty of options for arranging and indicating their relationships to one another.

The only thing we missed was the ability to add goals or targets for teams and businesses, such as the number of completed assignments per quarter. Maybe we're picky, but Asana and ClickUp offer this.

Apart from that, monday.com provided just about everything else that we think is important:

When it comes to designing and managing your project's tasks, monday.com leaves very few stones unturned: You can customize your board's items, use a plethora of different views, and add milestones, subtasks, and dependencies.

monday.com is marketed towards teams, which is clear from its pricing structure (premium subscriptions require purchasing a minimum of three licenses). As such, you'll need to know how to invite your team members to the platform.

Click on the "Invite" button in the upper right to add a new collaborator to your monday account. To see all users and define their roles, go to the account management area of your monday profile, and click on Teams > Users.

Monday.com has four different roles:

Unfortunately, monday.com's communication tools are fairly basic. You can assign tasks to team members and communicate through comments or updates.

The platform doesn't offer team chats or private messages. To change this, you can integrate Gmail, Microsoft Teams, or Slack. Below, we'll let you know exactly how to do this.

If you're looking for an all-in-one platform that can fulfill not only your project management but also your communication needs, monday.com isn't it. And we don't expect it to be. All the same, it would be nice to have chats and PMs.

Just because monday.com lacks communication channels doesn't mean you can't collaborate in real time with your team. The platform's whiteboard app, which you can add to your dashboard, allows this.

In addition, you can add documents to your boards and jointly edit them with your team. This feature feature comes in particularly handy for taking notes at meetings and brainstorming.

Overall, monday.com does pretty well in terms of collaboration. The only drawback it has is the absence of direct communication channels like those Basecamp or Asana offer:

monday.com was designed for teams and offers solid user management and collaboration features. However, it won't replace Slack or other platforms anytime soon.

You'll get basic commenting tools, but apart from the ability to jointly edit documents or a whiteboard in real-time, it isn't ideal for daily team communication.

There's plenty more to monday than the features we've listed above. Its expandability is one of its biggest strengths thanks to the many apps that can be seamlessly integrated into your boards and dashboards.

monday.com currently supports more than 200 apps and external tools, and that figure is constantly growing. Click on the puzzle piece symbol in the upper right of the interface to go to the appmarketplace and add an integration:

Installed apps can be added to specific work areas and boards. If one of your teams needs a dashboard like Miro, you can make it available for them, without "bothering" any of your teammates.

If an app is needed for the whole team, you can add it to all of your work areas. This approach allows every team to customize the board to their needs and preferences.

Another nifty feature is the ability to directly app apps to a board by clicking on "Integrate".

Apps are also grouped into categories here. The selection is huge and ranges from communication and marketing tools to time tracking, and ecommerce options.

The variety shows that monday.com is not limited to a specific branch, but is intended for managing any project, regardless of its area or type.

Our only comment is that it would be helpful to include a brief description of the available apps, since when you click on a logo, you can't easily close the window that opens.

Teams lose valuable time completing routine tasks, many of which can be completely automated with monday.com.

You can use one of monday.com's templates for this, which are grouped into categories such as "Status Change" or "Due Date", or create a custom automation.

The latter consist of a trigger and a consequence, as well as specific, optional conditions that must be met.

Automations can be linked with external tools. This has the happy result that you can have an automatic message sent through Slack or an event added to your Google Calendar when it's triggered in monday.com

The number of automations depends on your subscription: Pro subscribers can set up 25,000 automations.

monday.com offers a good selection of charts that provide insight into the most important stats. As mentioned above, you can create a project dashboard comprised of different data and information.

This is particularly helpful when you are managing multiple projects at the same time.

Chart data is drawn from your boards and constantly updated. As such, you'll get a quick and accurate view of how projects are progressing, how your budget is faring, and other aspects.

And that's not all: monday.com also provides time tracking, a form builder, resource management, and a range of other tools. There are some AI features as well, such as automatic task assignments and text summaries.

This makes monday.com is one of the most feature-filled platforms from our review series:

There's little that you can't do with monday.com, whether with its out-of-the-box features, or with its apps, extensions, and automations.

The Israeli project management software doesn't trip up when it comes to support content either, offering a variety of insightful video guides in its excellent PM Learning Center support area:

This support center is integrated into monday's user interface too: Click on the question mark in the upper right and you'll be able to search for articles, check the Knowledge Base, or review contact options.

The platform's Knowledge Base includes extensive guides and explanations for most features. Video guides and step-by-step walkthroughs with screenshots and GIFs can be found in nearly every article.

All content is constantly updated and users can see the date of the last quality check.

monday Academy offers a range of interactive courses to instruct users in how to make the most effective use of the platform.

These courses cover many different topics, including project management, team collaboration, workflow automation, and much more. Each month, a 50-60 minute webinar is hosted introducing new features.

If you can't answer your question using any of the above, you can contact monday.com's direct support team. There is hotline support, but only for billing questions. Our live chat query was answered within a few minutes.

Overall, monday.com provides quite a bit in terms of documentation and support. Its direct support would benefit from a hotline, but we can't complain about the live chat support we received.

There are four standard monday.com subscriptions: Free, Basic, Standard, and Pro. Businesses or large organizations can also book an Enterprise package.

Below, we've prepared an overview of monday's subscriptions:

The exact costs depend entirely on which features you need and your team's size.

Below, you can see how much monday.com costs compared to the other providers from our sample. The ranking shows the annual price for 10 users and unlimited projects. According to this, monday.com is in the middle of the pack:

monday.com is powerful and good-looking. The remarkably flexible project management platform can be customized thanks to its wide selection of boards, views, columns, forms, and automations.

On top of that, there are all the integrations and apps that can be added.

As such, monday.com is a viable solution for many different kinds of projects and teams.

Flexibility starts with its colorful and relatively customizable interface. This can be adjusted to your or your team's needs. At the same time, it's intuitive and logical, even though beginners will need some time to familiarize themselves with it.

However, even monday.com isn't perfect: The platform's chat and private messaging features (or lack thereof) are disappointing. Basic subscribers have to make do without many important features and views.

Despite those minor issues, monday.com is one of the most powerful project management tools currently on the market.

But what do monday.com's users have to say about it? We consulted verified reviews on reputable aggregators and noted the most common feedback, positive and negative:

Are you interested in an affordable project management platform that caters to individual users? If so, then ClickUp or Trello are worth checking out.

Or perhaps you'd like a project management tool with better communication features than monday.com? In that case, Basecamp or Teamwork could be ideal.

Below, you can find our list of more of the best alternatives to monday.com: