Basecamp vs. monday.com

Basecamp is a wonderful tool for teams of varying degrees of technical knowledge, teams managing lots of different types of "agifall" and waterfall projects, and teams that are remotely distributed. It's probably less useful for more strictly agile-focused development teams, compared to other more flexible software applications like Jira and Asana.

Incentivized

monday.com has very clear default views that are easy to follow, simple to update and amend. Automations are really easy to set up, but you need a good idea of what you want to do and the order it needs to be done in. The options available on Automations are improving all the time.

Incentivized

• Task management - It is very easy to add, organize and discuss tasks within Basecamp's interface.
• The "Campfire" function is great for communicating when you just have a quick question for someone on the team.
• Notifications - Basecamp lets you decide how often and about what you'd like to be notified. The ability to respond to messages in Basecamp directly via email saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

• Automation/integrations - Choosing from template automation or creating your own, integrate across platforms.
• Dashboards - Different views i.e. kanban, gantt chart, tables, forms.
• All info in one place - Add all of the necessary files for each task inside of Monday; don't need to go looking for ages in different folders on our internal system, add comments, and add assignees to each task—very content-rich way of presenting information.

Incentivized

• High Learning Curve. It's true that it can be easy to use, but to use well and effectively takes some time to learn. It's recommended to have an agreed-upon system in your team of what tools to use and when.
• Notification Overload. If people aren't careful they could send a notification to everyone when only a couple people were meant to be prompted. And since emails are sent by default, you could have your mailbox overloaded with unnecessary updates. This is where it takes a bit of training in your team to have an agreed-upon system.
• Lack of organization with Archived Projects. I will often need to reference an archived project to make a new one, but there is only a list of archived projects in alphabetical order, with no way to organize by archive date, or even search.

Incentivized

• The billing model is awful for small businesses! monday.com makes you feel like they are doing you a favour. You literally pay for seats you don't use. The billing model should be a per seat model!
• There are too many addons from monday.com and 3rd party vendors that you have to pay for. The value of those addons is debatable are often rebuildable outside of monday.com in a single use spreadsheet (which pay monthly for an addon that you only need to use once in a while?) or organisations are already using something else in their tech stack for that addon.

Incentivized

When I bring new people onto a project, it's immediately obvious how to use Basecamp. I don't have to worry about teaching them the features or walking them through it, it's just incredibly user-friendly. For this reason, I'll continue to renew my subscription even as new people are brought onto production jobs or the client changes.

Teams involved in content creation, such as marketing or editorial teams, could use monday.com to manage the entire content lifecycle. Boards might track content ideas, assignments, drafts, reviews, approvals, and publication schedules, helping teams collaborate and keep content production on track.

Incentivized

Basecamp is a little tricky to learn. I've used it for quite a while but I feel like there's still so much I don't know. It took me a while to learn but having used it in college definitely helped me integrate it into my work career.

Incentivized

The templates are great because it gives you a starting point and then you're able to tailor it to the way YOU want it. I use a lot of trial and error in figuring out how to do certain things, but did learn last week that I'm able to reach out to Monday support and set up a call and they help me with what I'm wanting to accomplish.

Incentivized

I've never experienced downtime while using Basecamp, or been unable to access it when I needed it. That's not to say they've never had downtime, but I've been lucky enough not to encounter any, and I work odd hours, including late nights when maintenance is often undertaken.

Incentivized

There have only been 2 instances in the past year where monday.com was down.

Incentivized

Everything performs fairly well. Every now and then there are user errors where an employee will not click "ok" on a note they've created and simply exit out (I do wish that something was in place to prevent this, such as a pop "are you finished?")

Incentivized

For the many reasons I've given, Basecamp is a very strong program. There are a few features I can imagine that might make it even better, but I don't have a basis for comparison to be able to say that there is definitely a better one out there. I've noticed that Basecamp has evolved a bit from the time I started using it until now, so that makes me think that the producer of this program values it and believes in continuous improvement. If you could use the features offered by Basecamp, I would think you could use it with confidence.

Incentivized

Fast response from a human, when a human is needed. AI bot gives initial response to my question. Often, the bot response is all I needed to proceed. Best feature is the AI Assistant for writing one-line programs in the Formula columns. The AI Assistant is much smarter than me and adds in well-appreciated items for my formulas. Including column checks and Function suggestions

Incentivized

To have someone walk you thru the features and capabilities of Monday.com is priceless. Someone also coming along later in the contract to see if you are maximizing the program to suit your company needs is beyond helpful. The staff that have provided this training are fun, creative and very patient.

Incentivized

Decide the process before implementation - i.e. when it's due 8/9 does that mean 8am, noon, 5pm, 11:59pm? Check your to-do list frequently Set-up templates - just not with the dates (they can be funky)

We signed up for the accounts. Created the accounts. Ran the trial version and tested it live while we were running multiple projects and found that it was fitting our needs perfectly. When the trial ended and we were asked to purchase the full version, we did. We have found other ways to use it and it's a breeze.

Incentivized

Pretty good, but [Basecamp] has its drawbacks. Honestly I find the interface non-intuitive and sometimes have trouble figuring out how to change the status of a task. Perhaps it has something to do with the way it was originally set up by the admin, but I'm not sure. I liked Jira's drag and drop obvious functionality, but the project management side of the software was lacking. Smartsheet has excellent project management functionality, but the task management isn't as good.

Incentivized

We used an excel spreadsheet to track our month end close process previously which created a lot of issues around only one person being able to be in the checklist at any given time. Additionally, we were unable to have excel notify us when a task we need to have completed was done, but Monday.com has completely changed that for us!

Incentivized

For it to work across multiple departments and sites, I would like to see improvements made with integrations and automation. For this question, I am acknowledging not only the addition of internal triggers/automation, but also an expansion on external ones.

Incentivized

• It has saved me time when having to get the same message out to multiple restaurants
• It has helped us make smarter operational decisions because we can all collaborate on an answer in a shorter amount of time (instead of calling a meeting!!!)
• The calendar function allows us to plot out our marketing agenda for the month and add/change it together as needed. The chef will post his recipe, the managers will cost it out, the social media manager will post pictures on it, and ultimately we will get that information out on an info sheet to the staff by printing the page.

Incentivized

• My favourite example? We used it to take a failed start-up, one where the prime investor was considering pulling out - to being a listed business (EURONEXT) within 18 months. That business now has a market cap at around $200m.
• Turnaround of a struggling health tech venture that was buried under endless spreadsheets by its investors - from loss-making to £2M EBITDA in two -years.
• Offshoring - Through the adoption of Monday as a key workstream management tool (moving off JIRA) we were able to reduce resource costs by over £2m per annum, without any change in efficiency or quality.

Incentivized