Marlo's Review of Monday.com
Here’s a review of my past experience with Monday including what I love (and don’t love) about it.
PROS
Modern UI
Highly customizable
Loads of integrations
Offers in-app automations
Includes templates
Great for larger teams
CONS
Confusing pricing and plans
Inconsistent navigation
Free trial insufficient to learn the complicated app
Monday.com (formerly known as Dapulse and what the tool was called when I used it) is an online collaboration app. Teams use it to organize and keep track of their work. It's more like a collection of highly customized spreadsheets in which everyone on a team logs the tasks they need to complete and updates them with status reports and other relevant information. In theory, every team member can see all active tasks and note their progress, making it easy to pass work from one person to the next or jump in quickly if someone is suddenly unavailable. I say in theory because there are some issues with this that are no fault of the tool—I’ll explain later.
Monday.com has a clean, bright and modern interface with a tonne that you can customize. But is this all worth it? Considering similar apps offer a 100% free tier of this type of service, Monday.com could be more competitive in their offerings. You can try Monday.com for free for 14 days, no credit card required. After that, you have to pay for an account.
If you're familiar with work-management apps, Monday.com may remind you of Asana. Asana is my personal choice today when it comes to this type of function, flexibility, supported integrations, value, and it’s generous free tier of service for small businesses.
The initial setup of Monday.com is through simple grids called boards and you choose what goes into them. You can have more than one of them in view at any given time. Each row typically contains a task or whatever it is you want to track. The columns indicate different states or details of that task, such as a deadline or who it’s assigned to.
For example, you could have columns dedicated to different states of project. Let's say the task is to sign-up a new client for a branding project. The first column might indicate the stage you are in (intro call, proposal sent, proposal approved), the next column might indicate the total value of the new project and the last column might indicate the start date or level of priority if won. For larger teams you can assign ownership and hand of tasks.
You can make your boards from scratch or use their templates. I encourage new users to explore the templates to get a sense of how many different ways you can use Monday.com. Everything about the boards in Monday.com is customizable which is one of the benefits compared to the free version of Asana. You can decide how many columns to use on each task row, what each column means, what options are available for the cells within the columns, and even what colour to associate with different options.
You can organize your boards into folders. You can also manage which boards are shared with outside clients, which are visible to all team members, and which are private and visible to only you. You can also add a Calendar view for boards that include dates or switch to a Map view that includes physical locations. There’s even a Kanban board, Chart, and Gantt Timeline.
The emphasis on team collaboration is key here. On each task row you can discuss work with your teammates in a conversation panel. Within that panel are a few tabs. You can write and post an update, add a note, add files, or add Q&A. The final tab shows an activity log, where you see a history of actions for that task or row.
My word of caution from earlier is that you need to be sure the entire team is on board. If only a few people on a project are actively engaged it makes the workflow switch from a dream to a nightmare. Suddenly you are not only managing your assigned tasks, but also chasing down others to updated their tasks status so that project automations kick-off and your project doesn’t get hung up or stalled.
Of all the features in Monday.com, integrations and automations are perhaps the most impressive. With over 50 integrations it blows most other project managers out of the water. Integrations with other apps let you move information between them automatically. Automations in Monday.com save time, too where one action can trigger an automated response every time it’s executed for things like notifications, status changes, recurring tasks, or even moving a task from one board to another. "When a task on Board A is marked complete, then move it to Board B."
Overall I really enjoyed working with Monday.com when it was used with a larger team. We eventually switched from Monday.com to Asana because we felt we weren’t leveraging the full power of Monday.com for the expensive price tag. The free version of Asana gave us enough control so the switch was a no brainer.
xo Marlo
Co-Founder, Creative Roots Co.
