The best alternative to Monday

The software is not very user-friendly. It can be overwhelming initially due to the wide range of features. A user within the e-learning industry with 2-10 employees ^[1].

Task breakdown is limiting. Sub-items are not the same structure as their parents and aren’t actually tasks, so they don’t appear on the sprint board. Story points can’t be both editable or sum of parts, so you have to manually add it. There is no cross-linking of documents. The documentation editor is clunky and in beta, for example, a line must be completely clear for me to use a /h1 command to give something a Header formatting. Folder sharing permissions can’t be set as a group, each page has to be updated manually ^[2].

The app is slow at least once a week, and that breaks the workflow. A user within the retail industry with 1001-5000 employees ^[3].

This is a good to-do list manager, but not a project management tool. It overpromises and vastly under-delivers. Bugs lurk everywhere. It is difficult to trust the tool is working as you would expect it ^[4].

Building CRM-like functionality on top of Monday would not be a good fit. It is schema-less, so you just don’t have the same transactional integrity as you will have with other CRMs ^[5].

The advice from support was bad. The software is built on boards connecting, and one of the recommendations was to clear the connection and start again. I asked them to confirm this was 100% as relinking all the jobs was a cumbersome process (8 hours of manual relinking). They said yes. We did this, and the problem still persisted. Automations only sometimes work. Non-existent support, each ticket takes weeks to even be reviewed properly ^[6].

It took a while for everyone on the team to understand how to take advantage of all the functions. The learning curve for automations requires technical knowledge ^[7].

The way they are using it is so inefficient and redundant. Something that would typically take me five minutes is taking me an hour. I’m having to wade through so much information. People are having entire comment thread conversations on Monday that could just be a simple message between two people. All of this back and forth messaging could have been a five-minute meeting. A user within the advertising industry ^[8].

The mobile app isn’t great. It lacks in flexibility. The desktop experience is much better. The my tasks section doesn’t allow us to easily add filters to see what we want. For example, I’m a manager so sometimes I want to see what my team is going to do that day, but I can’t filter per person. It’s just by day and for you. The knowledge base is hard to find ^[9].

The free plan is very limited in functionality. If you need decent project management features like a timeline view, dependencies and integrations then forget about the free plan, you’ll have to sign up for a tier with at least three seats. If you need something that does more than just the basic manual time tracking you’ll be out of luck because Monday lacks timesheets and invoicing capabilities ^[10].

The UI can become an obstacle when you have too much information in the system. Items that fall to the bottom of the lead tracking list get easily forgotten. The biggest weakness of the system is its general lack of reporting functions. There is no easy way to produce reports that can be sent out to clients. The desktop version for mac is troublesome compared to the online version and is annoying ^[11].

The pricing is confusing as it’s based on team size rather than per user ^[12].

From the pricing model, where you’re forced to pay for 15 seats, to the lack of ability to have a task description within the task, and the cap on automations, it’s just not worth the headache ^[13].

Some of the advanced task management features, such as task dependency and time-tracking tools, are only available on the Pro and Enterprise plans^[14].