It’s hard to make a decision between different project management tools – there’s just so many of them.
Right from the beginning, I fell in love with Monday.com.
So did my team. Zero training.
As far as Project Management, Reminder Lists and Time Tracking goes, there’s a lot of software out there.
In my career, I’ve spent a bit of time trying different software, because I do a lot of things professionally and personally, working both alone and managing teams. When exploring software-as-a-service, I’ve tried a lot, and been disappointed a lot.
Right from the outset, I compared Monday with Asana and Trello. The reason I wanted to try out Asana and Trello, is because these are the apps that all my friends were boasting about. But I was disappointed.
I’ve spent a bit of time looking through all the features, and become familiar with the tools. Monday by far is still my favourite. Back when Monday was called “DaPulse” I definitely wasn’t. But something changed.
They invested a lot in their platform, and they made work fun.
One of the things I love most about Monday is the fact you can tell instantly when you use it, that they’ve designed it to be scalable. All the features you’d expect out of the box are there, built-in. And it has automations too.
The shortlist – top 5 picks
Monday.com — Highly effective teams choose monday.com to manage their work.
asana — Asana organises work so teams are clear about what to do, why it matters, and how to get it done.
Hive — The tool for productive teams. Thousands of companies all over the world are moving faster with Hive.
Productive.io — Manage your agency in one place, end-to-end.
Project Express App — Over 35,000 people worldwide trust Project Express to manage projects, at work and at home.
Teamwork — At last, easy-to-use project management software you won’t outgrow
Trello — From high rises to the home office, the way your team works is unique—accomplish it all with Trello.
Wrike — Only Wrike’s work management platform gives your team full visibility and control over all your tasks and projects.
TickTick — Join millions of people to capture ideas, manage to-dos and make the most of your life with TickTick.
nTask — Project management software that enables your teams to collaborate, plan, analyze and manage everyday tasks.
Adobe Workfront — Connect, collaborate, and simplify workflows using Adobe Workfront to launch campaigns and deliver personalized experiences at scale.
Accelo — Accelo is a cloud-based software platform that helps businesses manage their projects, clients, and teams.
ProjectLibre — ProjectLibre is an open source project management software that provides users with a comprehensive suite of tools to help them manage their projects.
ProofHub — ProofHub is a project planning software with every tools your team needs to get work done faster, together. No per user fee. Free trial. No learning curve.
Workfront — Workfront is a cloud-based project management and work collaboration platform designed to help teams and organizations manage their work more efficiently.
JIRA — JIRA is a project management and issue tracking software developed by Atlassian.
Adam.ai — One place for teams to run efficient meetings, create collaborative agendas, record decisions, and assign tasks.
CobbleStone Systems — Cobblestone Systems is a software development company that specializes in creating custom software solutions for businesses. They provide services such as web and mobile app development, software integration, and cloud computing. Their team of experienced developers and designers work together to create innovative solutions that meet the needs of their clients.
Podio — Build powerful low-code business solutions to customize work and communication. Start for free.
Todoist — Join 25 million people and teams that organize, plan, and collaborate on tasks and projects with Todoist.
ClickUp™ — ClickUp’s mission is to make the world more productive – Tasks, Docs, Goals, and Chat.
HoneyBook — HoneyBook is the leading clientflow platform that enables independent businesses to book clients, manage projects, and get paid all in one place.
20NINE CRM — An alternative to cumbersome CRM for small businesses. Manage clients, sales, communication & documents from the mobile and computer!
Workpuls — Workpuls is an employee monitoring software that helps businesses track employee productivity, attendance, and performance. It provides insights into employee behavior and helps managers make better decisions. It also helps reduce costs and increase efficiency.
Hubstaff — Simple yet powerful employee work tracker with screenshots, ti…
ContractZen — ContractZen corporate governance software is ideal for contract management, board meeting management, entity management, e-signature & virtual data room (VDR).
ProofHQ — ProofHQ is an online proofing tool that helps teams collaborate and accelerate the review and approval process for any type of content.
Process Street — Process Street is a simple, free and powerful way to manage your team’s recurring checklists and procedures.
Smartsheet — Smartsheet enables teams to manage projects, automate processes & scale programs in one powerful platform.
Monday.com to be the most versatile and easy solution to get any job done, especially for small businesses with less than 500 team members working together everyday.
Marketing and social media content calendars
Sales funnels and lead opportunity management
Product build and go-to-market plans
Software design and development, and bug tracking
Staff and employee management
Technical implementation
Issue tracking and ticketing system
Gantt charts and progress reports
Risk management and mitigation plans
One of the best features of Monday.com (with the Standard plan), is the ability to add Guests to your account, so you can collaborate with people or teams outside your organisation or business – perfect for marketing agencies.
Why Monday wins
Monday.com has a lot of flexibility, some of my favourite features include the following.
Kanban by Monday
Turn any board into a Kanban cards using the status column, then drag-and-drop the cards through stages.
Kanban views – Source: MondayAdd a new View – Source: MondayCreate covers for cards – Source: Monday
Forms by Monday
Easily create Forms so that your customers can submit requests which automatically populate the board.
Support tickets
Feature requests
Schedule appointments
Source: YouTube
It’s easy to create a Form from any board.
You can then customise the form to suit the audience.
Source: Monday
Automations by Monday
Monday.com has an Automations feature, which helps you save time and helps teams do things consistently.
When a task is completed, move it to a different group
When a new task is created, email someone to notify them
Source: YouTube
In fact Monday’s implementation of the Automations feature probably has to be the easiest I’ve ever seen.
There are default notifications – easy to setup. Source: Monday
And for advanced users, you can customise Automations to suit your workflows.
Source: Monday
Monday.com in my opinion has the best design, simplicity, scalability and security.
With its consistent User Interface, everyday language and customisable fields, I fell instantly in love with Monday. So did my team. Zero training, zero convincing.
But remember, different niche have different needs.
Monday.com is the best tool for teams to collaborate on anything that needs to get done, and occasionally share with externals, executives. Anyone in any business can use it and instantly feel familiar with it. As they say, they’ve built “Work OS”. It’s the right balance between basic list tracking, collaboration and project management. It’s for EVERYONE.
Asana is great for agencies or software developers who want all the flexibility to integrate with all the different connectors. It’s for people or teams who already have deep and complex project management, who need all the customisation and integrations they can get. In my opinion, it’s for those types of people who would rather get a Samsung Android or a Microsoft Windows and customise everything.
Trello and Jira are great too, but in my observation it’s for teams who want to be incredibly verbose and document every. single. thing. so they spend so much time documenting the process rather than getting results. I incredibly dislike Jira and Atlassian products so much that the User Interface has made me scream. I can NEVER find what I need in Jira.
Verdict
If you use an iPhone and Mac because it’s intuitive and works, then you’ll love Monday.com. You don’t need to learn how to use it. And you can connect all your friends and they can use it, and it’s just easy. Tadaa~!
If you use Microsoft Windows so you can install all the custom software onto it and you want to change things and sometimes it does a Windows Update when you don’t want, you might find Asana is the best.
If you’re into software development, you might want to stick with Trello or Jira because you’ve invested so much time learning how to perfect those tools, you shouldn’t dare switch away to another tool.
My assessment
Here’s a list of all the things I could find to compare Monday with some of the other top vendors.
It’s clear that although Asana has so many external plugins and connectors, that maybe it’s not the best out-of-the-box solution.
With Monday, you pay the monthly rate and you get the features you expect.
