Item: monday.com
Rating: 4
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with monday.com

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I don't use monday.com in my own organization, but I've helped deploy and train users on it—plus build a bunch of monday.com automations to support their business processes—for my biggest client. That client benefits from the increased org-wide visibility into other teams' work and progress on shared tasks, and the ease of commenting on tasks and tagging others in context. They've adopted it for basic task management and collaboration, and I'm in the process of helping migrate several automated request intake and management systems into monday.com too.

The IT team has started using it to track computer inventory and assignments, the HR team for tracking new hire onboarding tasks, and more! Another client of mine uses it for tracking program participants and their medical claim status, as well as their staff and contractors' contact information and assignments.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Relational database functionality (via Connect Boards and Mirror Columns)
The UI is reasonably user-friendly - not too overwhelming, compared to other platforms in this space
Making automation more accessible to non-technical folks using natural language for the recipe builder

Cons

The sales process was rocky and almost felt like a bait-and-switch (rep promised various features we needed were possible natively, but ended up being wrong about some big ones)
The reliance on third-party apps to fill some fundamental functionality gaps is frustrating—monday.com support seems to think that if there's an app that does what the user is asking for, that's the solution (even when that app may carry its own cost and/or fail to meet security benchmarks). monday.com also pushes third-party apps far too much, popping up and recommending them to users "proactively" even in HIPAA-compliant orgs that cannot use them
It feels like monday.com nickels-and-dimes its customers—when a new feature is developed, it seems like the first thing they ask themselves is "how much extra can we get people to pay for this?" while other platforms take a more holistic approach to dividing features between subscription tiers
I feel the quality of support is usually terrible (at least for power users. I could see it being okay for new people with very basic questions)
The notification of an automation or workflow failing is severely lacking, and when you look at an automation's run history, virtually no helpful troubleshooting information is made visible
Its integrations are typically EXTREMELY limited and non-customizable, making many of them useless in practice

Return on Investment

Positive: makes it easier for different teams/departments to collaborate and provide visibility into task progress
Positive: connected boards allow for agile matching of static items with often-changing items (e.g., computer inventory with assigned users)
Negative: sometimes automations fail for no reason whatsoever, and there is insufficient notification when this happens. This can lead to something important falling through the cracks!
Positive: Dashboards make it very easy to display helpful metrics that update themselves in realtime—this wasn't possible at all for my client before adopting monday.com

Usability

I'm choosing 5 not because it's "middle of the road" overall, but because there are a LOT of great things about it, and a LOT of wildly frustrating things about it. Same goes with intuitiveness: there was clearly effort spent on making the platform user friendly, but there are an odd handful of features and limitations that are very counter-intuitive and confusing. Baffling, even! I have a love/hate relationship with monday.com (on behalf of my clients, and of myself when I'm building systems in it).

Support Rating

I've had a couple of good support interactions once I managed to get routed to specialized support. The front line support tier has been consistently horrible. I will go to great lengths to spell out my issue, including sharing all of the troubleshooting steps I've already tried, and they'll just totally ignore what I wrote and tell me to try one of the FIRST things I already tried. Sometimes they'll contradict themselves or one another. They don't seem to have any personal stake in how well their interactions go—it seems like they genuinely don't care. Some of the most infuriating SaaS support interactions I've ever had have been with Monday reps. As I said previously though, I could imagine that the experience might be better when it comes to newer users reaching out with very basic questions. (I'm a power user and it takes WAY too much time and repetition to get to someone useful.)

Reliability & Availability

Uptime has been pretty excellent—I can only recall one or two brief outages in my couple of years using it. Reliability, however, is not good. There are far more completely inexplicable issues and bugs than is acceptable for gold master software. It has often felt like they publish (non-beta) half-baked features and then just leave them alone forever, letting third party app developers solve for their arbitrary limitations. The community forum shows countless threads of literally thousands of users asking for a few basic features over the course of SEVERAL years with no action taken in response—and there's no real visibility into the product roadmap. I have, unfortunately, grown to distrust the platform when it comes to its ability to power core business processes. The lack of proper board backups/ data retention (even on Enterprise) is a big issue there too. Of the project management platforms I've used myself and in working with my clients, I find monday.com to be the least reliable.

Alternatives Considered

Asana, Basecamp, Microsoft Planner, Trello, Zendesk Suite and Slack

monday.com is far superior to Microsoft Planner and Basecamp, and arguably superior to Trello and Slack Lists as well. Asana (for work management and Zendesk (for request management) put it to shame. My main monday-using client selected it primarily because of its slightly lower cost, and partly because of its "prettiness".

Key Insights

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

Not sure

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

Yes

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

Did implementation of monday.com go as expected?

Would you buy monday.com again?

Other Software Used

Zapier, Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Workspace, FreshBooks

Likelihood to Recommend

This actually depends HEAVILY on the colleague's needs, technical acumen, and other available tools (and those of their organization.) If relational database functionality is needed, it's up there with AirTable in ease of use. That's lacking in some competing platforms (though they usually have other methods of providing the desired functionality, like allowing a given item to exist on multiple boards simultaneously).

If the colleague's processes are simple, with light automation needs, it'll do the job. If the colleague is a power user and heavy automator, and they don't already have an iPaaS tool available, they should not adopt monday.com.

Even when the fit is perfect, I will always share warnings alongside my recommendation (like the third-party app thing, the fact that items can't exist in more than one place, the extremely limited form functionality, and the lack of generosity when it comes to making useful features only available to the most expensive subscribers.

monday.com Feature Ratings

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

LoveHate Relationship Some Excellent Features and Some Baffling Shortcomings