Monday.com Project Management Software – Monday.com Review

An introduction to Monday.com, an awesome Project Management Tool

Monday.com is a powerful and 100% customizable platform with killer Project Management (P.M.) features, hundreds of built-in integrations with the tools you love and an unlimited amount of powerful custom and prebuilt automations.

Actually, Monday.com ISN’T just a P.M. Tool. Rather, it’s a 100% customizable platform that you can use to build a killer no-code Project Management Tool with features and functionality you can tailor completely to your own needs.

But, there are tonnes of great P.M. Apps out there on the market today…so what makes Monday.com special and why should you consider it as your PM Solution?

Why Monday.com for Project Management?

I’m going to use an analogy that I am guilty of using a lot – but only because it is so apt. Try to think of Monday.com as the classic Lego of the software world (whereas almost all other software fits more into what I would call the Space Lego category).

Space Lego is awesome – if you want to build a spaceship. If you do want to build a space ship, it will allow you to build one quickly and easily with custom bits and pieces tailor-made for spaceships. However, if all you have is a Space Lego set but you decide you need to build a pirate ship, that Space Lego is going to make your life difficult. Maybe even impossible. 

Classic Lego, on the other hand, is comprised of a fairly limited number of simple colourful blocks, and only a few of those pieces have moving parts. You might tip your Classic Lego out on the table and think to yourself – this is so basic! What on earth could I possibly build with this? But with a little bit of knowledge and imagination, the options of what you can build with Classic lego is almost infinite.

Most software is like Space Lego – it’s designed to make it easy for you to setup systems in a certain way, but if those systems and workflows aren’t well suited to your business, you are going to have to either compromise on your ideal setup or continue the search for a solution.

Monday.com is the Classic Lego in this analogy.  Monday, like Classic Lego, is comprised largely of simple colourful blocks. But with those simple colourful blocks, a little experience and some imagination, you can build almost anything you can imagine!

Monday.com lets you create the right project management software for your organisation with all the software options you need to manage, automate and collaborate on simple or complex projects.

Monday’s flexible pricing makes it the perfect tool for small teams but it really is suitable for businesses of all sizes and large organisations will love the Enterprise Plan.

If I had to sum up as simply as I could the key features that I feel make Monday.com such a powerful project management solution, I would start with this;

• Monday features a very visual easy-to-understand interface.
• Total transparency is one of the things that makes Monday so powerful and easy to use. The default view of any Board is a table comprised of columns and rows that shows every single item and all the data they contain at a glance. No more searching, clicking or opening and closing to find the info you are looking for.
• You can save any and all types of data in Monday.com (ie no more siloed data contained in separate Apps that don’t play nice together).
• Not only this but you can also connect different pieces of data together so that you can easily find all related info with a single click
• Monday.com comes with hundreds of pre-built easy to use automations but you can also build your own from scratch. You can even create or modify one piece of data based on changes made to another piece of data.
• Monday also features hundreds of native integrations with the other Apps you love to use. (Goodbye Zapier and Make!).

Key Monday.com Project Management Features

If you asked for more reasons to consider Monday as your future project management app, I would tell you about the following Project Management Features;

• Team chat & Team Management
• Monday Work Docs (think Google Sheets or Microsoft Word but waaaaaaaay more powerful – especially when it comes to collaboration).
• The built-in time-tracking feature
• The built-in Quotes & Invoices feature
• Integrated emails if you’re on Gmail or Outlook (web) with email tracking, killer templates that can populate custom variables for you automatically and powerful automations.
• Workload View for resource management
• 24/7 support (depending upon your plan) from the Monday support team
• Workload View for resource management
• Unlimited boards
• Built-in time tracking (but also an excellent Toggl integration)
• Multiple teams and team members
• Formula Column
• Gantt chart
• Custom Dashboards that pull in data from multiple Boards
• Dependency Column for task dependencies
• Timeline View
• Gantt View
• Slack Integration
• CRM templates
• Email templates
• Custom Workflows
• 200+ Ready-made Templates
• Hundreds of pre-built & custom automations
• Powerful colourful project statuses
• Widgets
• Mobile app for iOS and Android
• Comprehensive searchagle knowledge base including tutorials
• Ability to customize anything
• Google Calendar Integration
• Task Management

Monday.com Pricing Plans / Monday.com cost

Monday offers a variety of Products all priced at 4 core Paid Plans. These are called respectively the Individual Plan (AKA the free forever plan), Standard Plan, Pro Plan and Enterprise Plan. Monday also offers a free Student plan (the Student Plan is more or less the free Individual Plan with 1 or 2 feature upgrades) and a Non Profits Plan (the Non-Profit Plan comes with mostly Enterprise-level features and is free of charge for up to 10 users) for qualified users/organisations. You can sign up for any paid plan on either a per user per month or per user annual pricing basis. All paid plans come with a minimum of 3 users, so make sure you select the right number of users and multiply the per user cost shown on the pricing page to calculate the real cost of each plan).

Note: Monday is in the process of altering it’s pricing structure.  You can view their fill pricing here.  I will do an updates post detailing everything you need to know about Monday pricing in 2024 and will share it here ASAP.

Monday.com does offer a 14 day free trial with no credit card required. By default, the free trial is of their Pro Plan – so make sure you know what plan you will likely end up signing up for after the trial and keep in mind that the feature set may be different to the Pro Plan you trialed.

Use Cases

I use Monday.com myself to manage my 2 businesses and I have created a large number of Boards (along with the corresponding automations and integrations) to manage almost every aspect of my business. Below are some of the key Boards I use in Monday to manage my work;

Tasks

It took me a while to set this Board up the way I wanted it to work. Recurring tasks were a particular pain in the neck to get right and are an example of how somethings that are so easy with “Space lego” take a bit of patience and imagination when you are building them with Classic Lego. But now my Tasks Board in Monday.com works better for me than any Task Management app I have ever used (and I have used a lot – Todoist, Nozbe, Swipes, Google Tasks, Any.do, Omnifocus, TickTick, the list goes on and on…).

Biggest wins for me with my Tasks Board in Monday? I can create tasks automatically triggered by almost any other piece of data. So a lot of my tasks are created automatically for me, not requiring me to make a single click to create them, set the due date, context etc.

The transparency of the default Main Table View in the Tasks Board and awesome filtering, sorting, searching and bulk edit functionality combined with the highly visual and colourful nature of Monday’s Status column means the Tasks Board is actually a pleasure to use.

Deals

Favourite aspects with this Board is the ability to set up whatever Pipeline and automations I want and also the ability to automatically add new cashflow entries when a Deal is created/ booked.

Content

Amongst other things I list all my web pages and posts here, SEO titles, Meta descriptions etc and link each to a focus keyword and secondary keyword in the Keywords Board.

Keywords

I can add Keywords, search regions, keyword difficulty, search volume and so much more – makes optimising my content so much easier.

Social Media

I use the completion of deals and tasks to automatically create draft social media posts complete with pre-populated relevant hashtags and profile tags.

Activities

When I receive a web form inquiry or log a call or meeting, it gets logged here. Super helpful for seeing how much time I’m spending on things like meetings and calls.

Cashflow

I tried so many Apps and struggled for so many years to find a better solution for managing my (very up and down) cashflow. For years I resorted to a complex Google Sheets sheet with loads of formulas but all it would take was one corrupt formula and the whole cashflow forecast could be out by thousands (nasty surprise!). Now Monday automatically adds booked deals to my cashflow forecast and does most of the work for me. Plus, I just have filtered view that hides paid items so as soon as I mark an item as paid it goes “Poof!” and disappears and my new balance is calculated.

Contacts

Pretty obvious, but the addition of profile tags, hashtags and whatever other data I need is a game changer.

Companies

As above.

Conclusion

Monday.com has been a complete game-change for me and my business and I can’t imagine ever using anything else. (And I am that guy who ALWAYS gets bored and wants to try something new, so for me to say this is HUGE!).

However, the full power and features of Monday.com (and what they could do for my business) didn’t become clear to me until I really did a deep-dive into the platform.

When I first dabbled with Monday.com many years ago, I didn’t test it enough to get to the point where I really “got it”. And consequently, like many others who have tested it but not properly, I thought it was nothing more than a colourful spreadsheet – a Christmas version of Excel.

And now? Now I am constantly blown away by what I can achieve with this powerful and fully-customizable no-code platform.

So, if you are looking for the ultimate Project Management Tool for your business, I strongly recommend you give Monday.com a solid nudge. Once you start “getting it” I am confident that you will have that same light-bulb moment that I did and from there on it only gets better!

Good luck with your Monday.com journey and if you have any questions don’t be afraid to reach out.

Patrick