monday work management Review: Features, Benefits, and Cons [Tested]

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monday work management software has become popular among startups, small businesses, and agencies looking to manage day-to-day tasks, projects, and communications. It offers multiple views, templates, automation, and integration capabilities to help you visualize and manage your work pipeline.

I tried and tested monday work management, and I’ll be honest: I had mixed emotions–the platform is so feature-rich that it immediately adds a learning curve to it.

In this monday work management review, I will share my experience using the platform’s features and analyzing its key benefits and drawbacks.

Features

• Build custom project workflows using no-code building or choose from ready-made workflow templates.
• Has over 15+ views, including List, Kanban, Calendar, and Gantt to visualize your project pipeline.
• Automate internal board and cross-platform workflows with 200+ ready-made automation templates.
• Use the visual automation builder to create custom AI-powered automations from scratch.
• Create custom dashboards with 30+ preset widgets to display the KPIs and metrics that best suit your business.
• Integrate with 200+ apps, including Slack, MS Teams, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.

Pros

• Excels at ease of use and customizability
• Dedicated mobile app for Android and iOS
• Built-in API and an extensive set of integrations

Cons

• Conversations and tasks exist separately, requiring external tools for real-time collaboration
• Many functions are dependent on the app add-ons from monday.com marketplace

How Does monday work management Work?

At its core, monday work management offers visual boards to help you plan, track, and manage projects from one place rather than asking all team members individually.

When I signed up, I walked into a brilliant self-onboarding process, allowing me to customize the boards and workflows from the beginning.

For instance,

• I can add a name to my workspace and project.
• Select relevant columns, such as status, due date, priority labels, notes, etc., to display with task cards.
• Customize dashboard widgets and keep only the metrics I want to measure over time.
• Select from List, Kanban, Gantt, and Board views to see and manage my work.

• Once the basic project board is ready, monday.com lets you upload data from your spreadsheet in CSV, XLS, and XLSX file formats or add task details manually.

• You can choose from different views to visualize tasks. Drag and drop tasks across stages as they progress. And edit task card details like name, owner, and due date without opening a separate window.

• From the top toolbar, you can integrate monday.com with 200+ apps. Plus, use the automation builder to automate internal and cross-app workflows. (more on this in the next section)

Special features in the monday work platform include real-time dashboards, which are readily available with each workspace. You can customize the dashboard with 30+ widgets to keep the metrics you like.

Overall, I cannot deny an initial learning curve to the monday work management platform, but monday.com’s visual interface makes it easy to navigate.

Now, to evaluate monday work platform capabilities in deep waters, I tried it feature-by-feature and also took some interesting feedback from its users.

7 monday work management Features (With Use Cases)

I tested monday.com’s all-around work management capabilities across industries and use cases. Here’s my detailed review:

1. Project Management

Imagine this: you run a marketing agency juggling multiple clients and projects. Each project has dedicated tasks and deadlines, but the same team members are working on them.

Overwhelm, confusion, work overload, missed deadlines. Argh!

This is where I like monday.com’s ‘Project Boards.’

Using a project board, you can break down complex projects into smaller task cards with all the necessary lower-level task details for each new project.

I love how you can switch between 15+ views—Gantt, Kanban board, Workload, Calendar, Timeline, and more to easily visualize the project cycle.

When it’s about managing multiple projects, my favorite is the Gantt view.

Gantt view helps visualize your tasks, milestones, and dependencies within a set timeline.

See this for example 👇

monday.com is also testing some critical add-ons to the Gantt view. For example, you can now add:

• Critical paths: Add on top of Gantt charts to identify the tasks your team must complete to meet project SLAs 
• Baselines: Compare your planned vs. actual project schedules and make necessary adjustments to meet deadlines
•  Fiscal year: Adjust your project timelines as per your business’s fiscal year rather than the standard calendar year. This helps in improving resource allocation, budgeting, and planning.

👀 Note:

You can create unlimited project boards with all plans (except for the free plan).

I must say, the monday.com work platform’s ability to customize boards based on different teams or project needs is insane. 

For instance, marketing teams can track campaigns, budgets, and ROI. Meanwhile, the operations team can use the same tool differently to manage timelines and logistics.

I like that I could save my current board setting as a template or simply pick from 200+ customizable board templates for various project types, such as marketing campaigns, product launches, etc.

2. Task Management

As I said, project boards help you break down complex projects into simpler tasks. You’ve options to add tasks manually or bulk import from a spreadsheet.

monday.com offers over 30 column types to add to each task. For example, you can:

• Assign and set deadlines for tasks
• Add priority labels, tags, ratings, etc.
• Color-code columns for visual task status updates
• Use in-task comments to brainstorm ideas, share files, and confirm task timelines
• Generate tasks automatically with monday AI

Owners of the respective tasks are instantly alerted. As an admin, you can use List, Board, Calendar, and other views to visualize task progress.

3. Work Automation

Last quarter, we automated our bug reporting process. Used to take 4-5 manual steps. Now? Bug gets reported, right people get notified, ticket gets created, all automatic. Beautiful.

– Andrew Lokenauth

Work automation is the bread and butter of monday.com Work OS, so I was curious how it would work for me. 

From the ground, monday.com offers automation in two folds:

• Basic board automation: Create tasks from incoming emails, move tasks across the board, update statuses, automate reminders, and more.
• Cross-platform automation: Automate processes across apps like Slack, Gmail, MS Teams, and CRM systems. For example, send Slack notifications for status changes, schedule recurring emails, etc. 

Whatever the case is, I’ve options to choose from hundreds of AI-powered automation templates. Or build custom automations using the automation builder.

In my testing, I very much like the automation builder. Instead of the traditional drag-and-drop interface, the monday.com work platform lets you build automation on a visual canvas with pre-set AI blocks, actions, and trigger elements. 

I like how monday.com has worked around the AI blocks in workflows. For example, I created workboard automation with AI in the loop—the experience was great. 

4. Manage Business Operations

Apart from typical project management, I found the monday work management platform excellent for tracking and managing business operations.

From the template center > Operations, you can find templates for:

• IT and support request operations
• Human capital management workflows
• Incident reporting and facilities management
• Procurement operations
• Inventory management

Suppose you’re a business owner looking to manage IT requests, problems, and incidents. You can get started with the ‘IT service desk’ template. It has a built-in ticketing system and necessary ITSM tools for the job.

Similarly, whether it is a campaign creation workflow or product launch workflow, all templates are pre-loaded with the specific process’s views, stages, labels, and other essentials.

Also, just like other project boards, you can view processes using different views, customize task cards, drag and drop cards, and automate workflows.

A unique addition is monday.com’s customizable forms. You can create and share forms to receive service requests, collect feedback, gather purchase orders, and more.

5. Team Time and Workload Management

With monday work management, you can keep track of the team’s productivity and workload so things don’t overwhelm you. 

You can add a time-tracking widget to each task from the’ Column Widgets’ center. When someone starts with the task, they can simply start the timer. 

In addition, you can use Workload View to visualize each team member’s workload over a specific period. You can add 30+ widgets to this view, such as charts, batteries, velocity, planned vs. unplanned work, etc.

6. Project Portfolio Management

Just like ‘Project Boards,’ the monday.com work platform has ‘Portfolio boards, ’ which provide a high-level, at-a-glance view of all your projects in one place.

The board automatically syncs relevant project details across teams and departments. You can monitor and manage project health in real-time, with options to drill down for more information.

The Portfolio board also has three default views: Gantt, Health Snapshot, and Risk Insights. All three are exclusive to Portfolio management. 

• The Gantt view allows you to see the timelines across your projects in an interactive high-level view.
• Using the portfolio health snapshot, portfolio managers can see the percentage of completed tasks in each project, the planned vs. actual timelines, and much more.
• The Portfolio Risk Insights uses AI to automatically analyze data from project boards for potential risks. 

However, Portfolio Management is part of the Enterprise plan. I wish it were available for lower-tier plans as well.

7. Managing Approvals

We’ve set up automated approval processes for tasks like budget approvals and content reviews, cutting the average approval time from 3 days to less than 24 hours. We’ve also integrated it with Slack, so approvers receive notifications directly in their messaging app.

— Burak Özdemir

Not natively, but monday.com has dedicated apps in its marketplace to facilitate and manage approvals. 

My favorite (and the top recommended) for managing approvals on monday.com is the ‘Approvals for monday.com.’

The installation and setup process is nice and smooth. An approval section is added by default to every task.

All I need to do is assign an approver to the task. The approver receives a notification, and when it’s time, they can accept or reject approvals. They can also add a note answering the ‘Why’ for their decision.

However, because of the app add-on, my project board became a bit laggy. The wait times throughout the process are visible (above). 

Also, if you’re a creative or content agency, I recommend the ‘PageProof app’ for fast feedback and approvals. The app includes on-file annotations and mark-up, versioning, side-by-side comparison, and everything for the creative heads.

monday work management Pricing

monday work management offers a generous free forever plan that is limited to two users. Other than that, you get a lucrative pricing model starting at $9/seat/month (annual billing).

The table below compares the offerings of all the plans offered by the monday work management platform.

Parameter/Plans	Basic	Standard	Pro	Enterprise
Monthly price (billed annually)	$9	$12	$19	Custom
Key features	List & Kanban views, Templates, Unlimited boards & docs	Integrations & automations, Multiple views, Complete AI access, Zoom integration	Advanced integrations & automations, Time tracking, Workload optimization	Private workspaces, Advanced reporting, Robust security controls
monday AI (Trial AI Credits)	NA	500 AI credits(eligible for credit add-on)	500 AI credits(eligible for credit add-on)	500 AI credits(eligible for credit add-on)
Support	Online help center, 24/7 live support	Online help center, 24/7 live support	Online help center, 24/7 live support	Dedicated customer success manager

I’ll be honest—monday work management software is an efficient choice for many.

monday work management Alternatives Comparison

In the table below, I’ve made a quick comparison of monday work management alternatives such as Asana, Wrike, and Notion.

monday work management Integration

monday work management offers native integrations to 200+ third-party apps, including:

• Communication apps: Slack, Gmail, Twilio, MS Teams, Zoom, etc.
• Collaborations app: Google Drive, Google Calendar, Zoom, etc.
• CRM and finance apps: Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, etc.
• Marketing apps: MailChimp, Miro, Figma, Visme, etc.

You can always extend integrations with third-party apps using Zapier, the monday.com app marketplace, and APIs. 

Who Should Use the monday work management?

monday work management platform is best for project managers, team leads, and businesses seeking a customizable and scalable work management system. 

You should use monday work management if you’re a: 

• Small team or startup looking to manage projects and tasks.
• Business focusing on cross-functional collaboration.
• Software development managers looking to plan sprints, track development progress, and manage releases.
• Marketing agency looking to manage multiple clients and campaigns, track content production, and coordinate marketing strategies.

Who Shouldn’t Use monday work management?

I don’t recommend monday work management for:

• Individuals or freelancers with simple needs. Instead, try Notion or Trello.
• Remote teams looking for an inbuilt Chat. Unfortunately, monday.com doesn’t have it yet. You should try ClickUp instead.

monday.com Ratings and Recognitions

monday.com work management software has received high recognition from users across review platforms:

• G2: 4.7/5 (12,800+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.6/5 (5,300+ reviews)
• TrustRadius: 8.5/10 ( 4,800+ reviews)
• Geekflare: 4.8/5

monday work management Verdict

After trying and testing the monday.com work platform for a while, I’m sure it’s a solid work management tool.

monday work management platform receives the Geekflare Editorial’s Choice Award. Its key strengths lie in its intuitive interface, customizable workflows, visual boards, and automation capabilities. Plus, the ability to integrate with various apps and track progress through detailed dashboards is a big plus.

However, the monday work management platform falls behind on two fronts. First is the immediate learning curve for new users, especially when customizing the platform and trying to master advanced features. Next is the lack of advanced reporting, integrations, and automation features in the lower-tier plans.

But overall, for teams looking for a customizable, flexible solution to manage work, monday work management platform is definitely a strong contender.