Have you been searching for the best project management software out there? You’ve tried this, you’ve tried that, but nothing really fits your workflow, projects, staff, clients or, of course, your budget. And if you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’ve come across Monday.com and you’re either curious about how it can help you with your projects or you already know what it is and need an alternative. Either way, keep reading and find out about Monday.com’s main features and the best alternatives and competitors out there.
What is Monday?Monday’s Main FeaturesWhy do People Use Monday?Main Monday Drawbacks and Why You Need a Monday.com AlternativeHow to Choose the Right Monday CompetitorTop Monday Competitors in 20231. Nimbus Platform2. ClickUp3. Asana4. Airtable5. NiftyRising Stars: 5 Less-Known Monday Alternatives to Keep an Eye on in 2023Wrapping Up
Monday.com is a popular project management software used by thousands of companies. Named after the first day of the week (which is kind of funny for a task management tool) it provides individuals and teams with the tools to run their businesses, manage their projects & tasks and track their progress on their online platform.
Since it was founded in Tel Aviv in 2012, Monday.com has established itself as an alternative to more traditional management tools, aiming to boost team productivity, alignment and management by allowing users to create and customize their own workspaces, boards and documents, making workflows efficient and suitable for a range of project needs.
However, Monday.com isn’t perfect and there are many people who might want to switch to a more suitable alternative. Despite its wide range of features and possibilities, it won’t satisfy everyone’s needs and (spoiler alert!) it is pricey, which is why many people are looking for a Monday alternative. So let’s take a look at its main features so you can decide for yourself.
Monday has a wide range of features for project and task management, but mainly they can be categorized into the following areas:
Monday.com allows you to create dashboards for your team where you can see at a glance different aspects of your projects, such as team members’ workloads, task progress, work calendars, charts, files gallery, etc. You can set up your own management dashboards by using different widgets, which act like blocks and shortcuts to different areas of your workspace.
One of Monday’s most powerful features is automations. This is not a unique feature to Monday, as most Monday alternatives have this too. However, the platform can boast about having one of the greatest (if not the greatest) range of automations in a project management tool.
With these automations you can easily and automatically do things like:
Now, the question is whether you and your team need a business management tool with such a range of automations or if Monday alternatives offer enough to suit your needs.
Not everyone is comfortable working with the same views nor does every view work for every project or business purpose. For this reason, Monday, just like many other apps out there, allows you to choose between the following main views:
The most common way to organize tasks in Monday.com is likely the table view, which you are probably already familiar with if you’ve tried the tool yourself.
In any project, there will inevitably be files that different team members need to have access to, and, obviously, Monday offers this. You can upload virtually any file format and have different edit and view possibilities depending on the format chosen. For some of them, you can even make annotations for your colleagues to see, or access file versioning, which can be handy in case your team needs to backtrack a few steps in a project deliverable. However, file management isn’t perfect in this platform, so if your project core is based on managing files and creating documentation, you certainly need a Monday.com alternative.
One of the most sought-after features in project management tools like Monday or its alternatives is integrations, and Monday.com has quite a few of them. From storage platforms to social media and communication apps, it integrates with most of the big names out there: Zapier, LinkedIn, Adobe Creative Cloud, Dropbox, etc. You name a big one; Monday probably has it.
In case you haven’t realized yet, Monday is a fully packed platform to create and manage projects and it’s one of the biggest online project management tools on the market. Here are some reasons people use Monday.com:
And here’s a fun fact: Monday.com Ltd. went public on June 10, 2021 and got backed by Salesforce.com Inc. and Zoom Video Communications Inc., who made a combined purchase of an astonishing $75 million in shares. Ka-ching!
So yes, Monday.com is a massive, feature-packed platform, which is both reliable and flexible, and used by many large corporations like Canva, Hubspot and Electronic Arts, among many others, according to their website. But it’s not the only great task management alternative out there, so don’t worry if it’s not for you. We’ve got you covered.
Yes, no doubt. Monday is a very good project management software. If used appropriately, it can boost team collaboration and alignment, streamline team coordination, drive productivity, etc. It can be used for virtually any kind of project: design, development, sales, marketing.
However, it isn’t for everyone, which is why you’re here, right? Don’t worry, we’ll get to the list of Monday alternatives in a minute or two. First, let’s take a look at the pricing.
When it comes to Monday’s prices, we have good and bad news for you. The good news is that there is a free tier; the bad news is that the cool features are not included in the free plan or even in the lowest paid plan. Yikes.
But don’t worry, we will later take a look at some very affordable Monday alternatives for you.
Here you have a breakdown of Monday’s five plans and the main things you might need to consider if you’re interested in switching your project management solution to one of the many Monday alternatives:
If you’ve read this far, you might have the impression that Monday is a little overwhelming. And you’re not wrong; it can feel overwhelming at first. However, once you get the hang of it, you can work wonders with it to set up your projects.
To put it simply, to manage a project using Monday.com you need to understand its basic units and how they relate to one another.
Following the order of the bullet points above:
Simple, right?
Right. But wait, there’s more. You can create a dashboard which can pull information from one or multiple boards; you can create task groups within the same board to have them properly organized and categorized; and, among other things, you can add custom attributes to tasks, which is quite cool. These would be the columns we see when we choose the table view.
And finally, you can assign users to different workspaces or projects with different levels of permission, which is really convenient if, for instance, you don’t want your SEOs assigning tasks left and right to your devs or designers. We know it happens…
Once you understand these organizational units and possibilities, you can choose to set up your projects in different ways. For example, within a digital marketing agency, you can set up a workspace per department (Design, Sales, Development, Email marketing, SEO, Social Media, etc.) and then a board per project or client. Or you can create a workspace per client and a board per department or per project. Or any other way it suits you and your team.
But if this still seems confusing, read on, because we’re about to drop quite a few awesome Monday alternatives for you.
Monday.com is a great project management software, but, as you must have realized by now, it’s definitely not for everyone. Like every other tool out there, it has its drawbacks, among which we can highlight the following:
For these reasons, and probably some more, there are many users (like yourself!) who might decide to go for an alternative solution after experiencing or reading about Monday.com’s pros and cons; something that better suits their needs.
When you set out to choose an alternative to Monday.com, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
Only when you’ve identified your project management requirements and how Monday doesn’t satisfy your needs can you begin to choose the perfect Monday alternative. So here are some things you need to consider:
Apart from these questions, jot down any other concerns or requirements you have regarding what task management tool to choose. That will help you decide and pick the best Monday.com alternative to work towards achieving your business project goals.
Once we’ve identified the main disadvantages of Monday.com and what you need to be asking yourself when setting out on the seemingly endless quest of finding the right task management tool for you and your team, let’s take a look at a list of features you can look for in the different Monday alternatives:
You probably don’t need all of the features above, but probably some of them, and these are things that Monday either doesn’t have or is not particularly good at doing, so you’ll be thankful to find them in one of the alternatives you decide to choose.
You will notice, as you read on, that we have curated a list of alternatives in which we include some big, renowned names but also some lesser known ones, that is, some smaller apps that are on the rise and may well fit your needs perfectly. So without further ado, let’s dive right into our list of best Monday alternatives in 2023.
Nimbus Platform is a suite of tools which empowers companies to handle their business projects with a special focus on content and information management, team & client collaboration and real-time communication. Nimbus platform consists of three main apps and extensions which integrate seamlessly to offer a well-rounded project management experience:
As a Monday alternative, Nimbus Platform has a completely different approach to project management, but definitely one worth exploring if Monday’s concept is not to your liking. This all-in-one alternative is fully packed with project and content management solutions which might fit your business even better than Monday.com.
Nimbus Platform offers three plans to manage your projects:
ClickUp is another big name in the project management industry and one of the main alternatives to Monday. With similar features, ClickUp aims to provide a slightly friendlier user interface without sacrificing functionality and doing so at a much lower cost.
Founded in 2017, ClickUp has been in constant development and growth, becoming one of the largest Monday competitors out there. In fact, they’ve raised generous amounts of funding through Series A, B and C, and are set to continue improving in the foreseeable future.
ClickUp has 5 pricing plans and they even allow you to “make a deal” with them for the Unlimited plan, in case the pricing and conditions don’t suit you.
As you can probably see from the pricing description, this Monday alternative’s Unlimited plan is probably the sweet spot for most SMBs willing to invest in a project management solution. If we compare it to Monday, it is quite affordable and many of the features that the former locks out in lower plans are included even in ClickUp’s free plan.
Asana is a large project management app which was launched by two ex-Facebook engineers in 2011. It soon grew exponentially and became one of the industry standard project management tools on the market, with 12 offices spread across the globe. In fact, given Asana’s popularity and track record, Monday actually may be considered an Asana alternative, rather than the other way around.
Besides its wide range of project management features, Asana stands out as an alternative for its simplicity in use, clear user interface and smooth user experience. It can do almost if not everything that Monday.com does. It offers other features that Monday lacks and it has a much more generous free plan, being a very suitable alternative for most SMBs on a budget who still need a project management tool to track progress and productivity.
Asana offers the following 4 pricing plans:
Airtable is another project and task management tool that can sit at the big boys’ table (pun intended!). If you like working with spreadsheets and tables for business management, Airtable will be your best alternative to Monday.
This alternative’s greatest strength is data management, which makes it perfect for projects involving large amounts of data that need to be categorized and stored into rows and columns. It basically allows you to create and customize your own user-friendly database and manage your business operations from there. Airtable makes it easy to store, edit, transform and reorganize information by setting up your own custom attributes and views.
However, its plans aren’t the most generous of these Monday alternatives.
Airtable offers the following pricing plans:
Nifty is a relatively new project management tool which is already ranking on some popular review sites as a strong alternative. And it is not surprising. In some areas, it beats Monday any day of the week (yep, pun intended!).
Nifty offers 5 different tiers and, unlike Monday.com and most of its alternatives, its paid plans include a set number of members, which can work out well or terribly wrong if your team is larger than that number.
While we believe that the list above includes the best Monday competitors and alternatives available right now, you might also want to explore the following rising platforms:
In conclusion, there are tons of things you ought to consider when choosing the right alternative to Monday.com for you and your team. The range of this type of tools is in constant growth and there are many great alternatives out there. Some of them are new while others are well established players, but the important thing is that you take into account what you really need to find in the Monday alternative you choose. If you’ve paid attention to this article, the list of alternatives, and you do your due diligence, we’re sure you’ll make the right choice in the end.
So good luck on your quest. And don’t forget to share this awesome list of alternatives so others can benefit too.
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