Item: monday.com
Rating: 5
Author: Lunda Wright

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use monday.com across our entire business to keep track of work deliverables in a coordinated, ordered and accountable fashion. Since our organisation adheres to the ISO 31000 risk management framework, we get to break down objectives in monday.com into specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timebound sub-objectives. In this way monday.com facilitates our creation and maintenance of value. Without monday.com, or using alternative products (with one competitor product excepted), we would deliver less value and deliver slower.

Pros and Cons

Allows for customisation in terms of our risk management framework
Outlines outstanding work under "My Work"
Allows for notification of colleagues in an clean and smooth way.

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.

Return on Investment

Time savings
Coordinated delivery

Usability

On the surface, monday.com looks easy to use - it is indeed easier to use than almost all competing products. (There is one exception where they are on par.) But, I've come across so many organisations that start well with monday.com and then struggle because of the disorganised mess that is created. You have to have clear frameworks *before* you adopt monday.com as the ones that come out of the box are too simplistic for the average organisation. Otherwise, you need a system owner internally who can guide and help the organisation with monday.com adoption. At our organisation we have both.

Support Rating

monday.com only really care about accounts that have 20 seats or more. While this is great for monday.com, it pushes smaller organisations to evaluate alternatives. We rate monday.com highly in our organisation because key staff have already got good experience with the application and we know we will get to 20+ seats one day. But, till then the billing model and lack of permanent enterprise features is a dread.

Reliability & Availability

We have few issues here though some advanced features need better usability. They are almost always in the addon space where various addons do not support all the use cases that are relevant to an organisation. E.g. Time tracking addons are not easily translatable into customisable reporting - you take what you get out of the box.

Alternatives Considered

Asana, Jira Work Management, ClickUp, Jotform, Zoho CRM, Google Sheets, Google Forms, Google Drive and DocHub

I'd put monday.com and Asana on par, then ClickUp and lastly Jira. Jira would be more appropriate for exclusively technology engineering teams. Jotform offers better choices for forms use cases especially ones with complexity. Zoho makes more sense when you have the full suite, but you should still prefer monday.com or Asana for productivity management. Of course, Google Workspace is the bedrock of organisational productivity and Sheets/Forms/Drive are the goto for once off monday.com addon equivalents, and DocHub for signature management and signed document vaulting.

Key Insights

Do you think monday.com delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with monday.com's feature set?

Did monday.com live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of monday.com go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy monday.com again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Google Workspace, DocHub, Microsoft 365

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking to bring order to deliverables across your organisation, then monday.com is a good starting point. But the billing framework at the small business end is a detractor - monday.com only makes best money sense when you start using it with 20 seats on an enterprise licence so you have to have very good reasons to use it if you have no need for 20 seats.

Great but the billing model is awful

Overall Satisfaction with monday.com