Monday.com review: An easy recommendation

Monday.com is one of the most well-known project management suites out there, thanks to a massive advertising campaign and slick presentation. It offers a powerhouse of project management features, presenting multiple ways to manage tasks and projects – but is it really the new way of working it claims to be?

Having taken it through its paces, our experience is that Monday.com has plenty going for it. While it isn’t quite as revolutionary as it would have you believe, it’s still a flexible and easy-to-use tool. It’s great for both veteran project managers and novices alike, although freelancers and other one-man bands probably won’t get much use out of it.

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Monday.com review: What do you get for the money?

Offering five different plans, like most rival suites, Monday.com ramps up the number of features to which you get access as you move up the cost scale. However, it differs from most others in that the first two tiers are near-useless. The free plan, called Individual, offers just some simple boards for up to two users.

This may appear decent until you compare it to Asana’s superb free package for 15 team members, or that of Trello, which offers an unlimited number of users access to a greater number of features without the need to spend a penny.

Monday.com’s next tier, the Basic plan, isn’t much better. It removes some usage caps and adds 5GB of file storage for £84 per user, per year, with a minimum of three users. For the money, you could do a lot better. For example, ClickUp delivers far more functionality for about £50 per user, per year, with the same amount of storage for free.

It’s with the third and fourth tier that Monday.com ups its game, however. The Standard plan costs £108 per user, per year (with the same minimum of three users), adding a timeline that can be used as a Gantt chart, as well as an all-important calendar. This tier is where you really see Monday.com coming into its own, and it’s a good deal at this price.

Step up to the Pro plan – which, at £168 per user, per year, is pretty pricey – and you get the full suite of features. These include time tracking, some new charts, as well as some security features such as the ability to make certain boards private. The final tier, Enterprise, expands on this theme, offering even greater control for a price that’s to be negotiated with the company.

Leave the first two tiers and the Enterprise plan out of the picture, and Monday.com offers plenty of value for money. Although it isn’t the cheapest, it shaves a few quid off Asana’s prices while offering much the same functionality. And if you’re not entirely sure about it, a free two-week trial of the Pro plan offers ample opportunity for you to check it out, no credit card details required.

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Monday.com review: What’s it like to use?

Using Monday.com is, quite simply, a pleasure. Right from the start, there are pop-ups and short videos offering guidance on how everything works – even the most tentative user should feel pretty comfortable with the program in just a few minutes.Those more familiar with this type of software can just click all of this help away.

At Monday.com’s core is its board, which delivers a table-based view of all the tasks that need to be completed. You can customise this so that it makes sense for your particular project: in our example, we made sub-lists based on the month, and added fields for the status of each task and the user responsible for it.

If this doesn’t suit you, then you can turn the whole system around and get rid of the sub-lists, and replace our markers with others. It’s entirely up to you as Monday.com is pretty free-form. In addition, there are plenty of options besides the table – a simple kanban board, for example.

Monday.com’s Kanban view won’t win any awards – Trello’s is much better, in our opinion – but it does what it needs to do just fine. Much the same can be said for its Gantt chart. There are better examples out there, but none will be so well integrated with other parts of your project management tools.

These three views just scratch the surface of what Monday.com offers; there are also charts and timesheets available that will be useful for the right team. Also helpful is the fact that you can click on any task and receive detail on it, including any updates other team members have left.

The end result is a comprehensive project management tool that can handle pretty much anything you throw at it. We especially welcome the strong visual nature of Monday.com. Since everything can be color-coded, you can view at-a-glance the tasks that need to be done, where the bottlenecks are, and which jobs can be postponed until later. It removes many of the barriers thrown up by other tools.

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Monday.com review: Are there other useful features?

Besides Views, Monday.com has some other features that may prove useful. For one, you can open up a chat on both the general level as well as per task, improving communication across a team. It won’t replace communication programs such as Slack, for example, but it at least pinpoints the subject of the communication.

Monday.com also offers file storage, up to 20GB on higher-tiered plans, and lets you automate certain tasks. The latter can greatly speed up processes – for example, you could have a task pop up on another team’s board if it’s marked as done on yours. It’s pretty nifty.

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Monday.com review: Should I sign up?

There’s no doubt that Monday.com is a very good piece of project management software. As mentioned, there are some issues over the setup of the pricing scheme; however, these can be disregarded if you focus on what the software can do and how it does it. If your team has at least three people in it, we recommend Monday.com for users of all skill levels.

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