Be a project manager or not, getting the tasks done in time is really hard in today’s world UNLESS you have a far-reaching task management tool that backs you and your team up.
That’s why we’ll be talking about Gantt charts, custom pricing, sticky notes, and everything related to task management apps.
In short, this article will focus on the alternatives of monday.com one by one so that you can decide on the project management app that offers the essential features for your line of work without hassle.
Before we start, let’s see what monday.com offers from beginning to end.
What is monday.com?
monday.com is a software company that offers its users a cloud-based platform so they can make the most out of project management software; it was founded by Roy Mann, Eran Kampf, and Eran Zinman in 2012.
Essentially a Work OS (operating system), monday.com grants a great service to its users due to its multifaceted nature, which involves various use cases: project management, marketing management, customer relationship management, team management, and task management.
Thanks to the open platform monday.com provides, agile teams can create and shape any powerful tool they need to operate their work seamlessly on a single platform. With the tools they create, teams can design custom workflows, track these workflows and projects, visualize data, and perform real-time collaboration on complex projects.
Owing to monday.com’s several key features, you’ll only need 3 simple steps to hop in to start your journey. Firstly, you pick the template that suits your use case—you can customize it according to your workflow anytime you want.
Then, visualize the information you need within the template. Feel free to add texts, numbers, locations, and links in the columns. Next, invite your team to collaborate on project timelines, project views, or project roadmaps.
What are monday.com features?
Starting your journey is rather easy, but there are always extras that help you customize and redesign this journey according to your wishes; they might be considered advanced features. Here are a few powerful features that helped monday.com become an award-winning platform:
- enabling @mentions as swiftly as a messaging app
- all kinds of dashboard, planning, and tracking—such as activity, applicant, and communication
- enabling deadline management, thanks to features like alerts/notifications and time tracking
- bug tracking alongside bug/issue capture
- many useful business collaboration tools
- plenty of customization options, such as custom fields, custom workflows, and custom branding
- from task creation to database creation, offering space for creativity
- allowing advanced user management, document management, and expense management through unlimited boards, including private boards and message boards
- offering a wide range of pricing plans for businesses of all sizes
The project management software that will actually work for your team
Manage simple to complex projects and everything in between with monday.com
What is monday.com used for?
Elevating teams with ease via the advanced features above, monday.com is used for enabling communication and engagement by promoting transparency and aspiration at all times as a full-featured project management tool.
How it manages to do so is no secret since monday.com offers more than a simple to-do list; it offers an effective tool with which the delivery of quality tasks is no problem.
There is much more this customer-centric product promises to its 152,000+ customers, starting from the core integrations and custom automations to customizable templates and building blocks. Thus, this Work OS is always the primary option on our list.
Let’s get into more detail about monday.com as a task and project management solution, though.
With monday.com as your online project management solution, you can:
- plan, strategize, and deliver the project of your choice in a flash via the pre-built templates—which can be customized as well
- visualize your project with colorful Gantt charts to track and manage with ease
- reshape and monitor your task dependencies, task lists, task milestones, and many more throughout the project lifecycle
- make use of all kinds of dashboards by turning insights into data that will serve as your guide for your future business plans
- oversee your team’s workload to assign resources accordingly, thanks to real-time data
- use popular integrations to take your project to the next level
- and make use of the key features of monday.com (that I’ve briefly mentioned above) while adding custom items to your project
Additionally, it’s important to mention that this versatile tool has shed light on the workflows of many big names so far, including Uber, Adobe, Hulu, Unilever, Abbott, Canva, Coca-Cola, EA, and HubSpot.
monday.com Pricing
- Free plan: €0 (up to 5 seats)
- Basic plan: €8/user per month when billed annually
- Standard plan: €10/user per month when billed annually
- Pro plan: €16/user per month when billed annually
- Enterprise plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
monday.com Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“Monday.com has proven to be a valuable resource in my daily process. I like the system’s integration features since they allow me to streamline my work process and manage all of my accounts in one location. The UI/UX is simple and easy to use, making it easy to see where projects are and where they are headed. I particularly like how we can post summaries and project ideas in clearly accessible locations. Everything we do is documented, which is useful for both internal and external purposes.”
“Because of Monday extremely configurable nature, setting your workplace precisely the way you want it might take some effort. Fortunately, Monday.com offers more than enough tools to educate you how to make Monday your own.”
Top 12 monday.com Alternatives
Here are the top 12 free and paid alternatives to monday.com for you to browse through:
Now, I’ll start briefly introducing each tool to you so that you can decide whether it’s a good long-term investment for the future or not. So, without further ado, let’s start with our first product:
1- Wrike
Wrike is a project management app that offers its help to marketing teams, customer service teams, and many more.
As a task-centralized workspace, Wrike provides third-party integrations even as free plan features, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Office 365.
Its generosity doesn’t stop here: Wrike offers you an interactive page of its own for the features it has, called Wrike Discover – which even offers courses so that users could quickly get themselves on board.
Despite the features above, Wrike might not be able to offer assistance to every concern of yours as its key features are not as extensive as monday.com‘s, especially the chat features that keep the workflow stable by enabling internal communication over an ongoing project.
Wrike Pricing
- Free plan: $0
- Professional plan: $9.80/month per user
- Business plan: $24.80/month per user
- Enterprise plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
- Pinnacle plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
*All the plans above include a 14-day free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Wrike Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“You can collaborate with your team member, giving them various tasks and you can take a look at the advancement. An apparatus assists you with getting sorted out an opportunity to be more proficient and accomplish objectives. You can work with various workgroups simultaneously. You generally will be refreshed with the situation with the activities you are working on. Controlling activities and assets. Show you botches all the while.”
“I do wish it was easier to navigate back and forth from projects to tasks (our Studio team members rely on a task-level view, while our other stakeholders rely on a project-level view). Additionally, it would be helpful if assignees could assign effort to individual days, rather than it being evenly allocated over task duration. An in-app chat function would be nice as well!”
2- Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a work management application that displays vital features of each project management app, such as task assignment, project progress tracking, and file sharing.
One particular thing separates Smartsheet from the others: its tabular look.
As it resembles Excel, people who’ve spent some time on Excel will already be familiar with its intuitive interface.
However, suppose you’re not one of those lucky people. In that case, you might need proper training to get used to this cloud-based project management tool, as its design isn’t like your ordinary project management tool with a user-friendly interface.
BUT if you’re accustomed to Excel and like it from the start, then Smartsheet might make the best monday.com alternative for you as they’re both practical tools that aim to increase productivity with many powerful features.
Smartsheet Pricing
- Free: Free for small teams.
- Pro plan: $7/user per month when billed annually (minimum 1 user, up to 25 users)
- Business plan: $25/user per month when billed annually (minimum 3 users)
- Enterprise plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
*All the plans above include a 30-day free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Smartsheet Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“You can quickly get started on putting together projects by using Smartsheet since it is easy to use and helps you to get started right away. It is now quite simple for me to keep tabs on all the moving parts of any current project as well as the personnel who are working on it. This makes it much easier for me to keep track of everything and ensure that everyone is doing their assigned tasks.
“The timeframe for the whole project is the only part of the timeline that may be amended; the schedules for individual tasks cannot be altered under any circumstances. Even while it is possible to receive automated emails, there is no option to change the sender, which may cause unwanted mailings to be sent. A large investment of both time and knowledge is necessary in order to get a sufficient understanding of the opportunities presented by the sheet.”
3- Zoho Projects
One of the products of Zoho, Zoho Projects is a project management platform designed for remote teams with stunning project boards.
Let me fill you in on the key project management features that this business collaboration tool includes:
- Task management features, such as dependencies, sprints, and reminders,
- Customization options, such as custom dashboards, custom fields, and tags,
- Team communication enablers, such as chat, mentions, and feeds,
- Automations, such as workflow rules, notifications, and blueprints,
- Time management features, such as timers, timesheets, and calendars,
- Charts and reports in the form of tasks, issues, and project dashboards.
There is more you could make use of via this platform, but this should be enough for you to grasp the main idea!
Zoho Projects Pricing
- Free plan: €0 (up to 3 users)
- Premium plan: €4/month per user when billed annually
- Enterprise plan: €9/month per user when billed annually
*All the plans above include a 10-day free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Zoho Projects Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“The calendar is intuitive, and customization is excellent in Zoho. The collaboration features are good. It also supports multi-project management, hence is cheaper for smaller teams.“
“The only thing that I found difficult with Zoho People is that it takes time for a user to get used to it. The user interface should be improved, there are so many features that are not known by many users.“
4- Asana
Asana is a comprehensive task management platform that is available on both web and mobile. It shares the same basic features as monday.com, such as kanban boards, to-do lists, timeline views, and calendars.
With the cheapest plan of Asana, you might easily operate a rather complex project, set project schedules, and manage project budgeting.
However, there is one downfall of Asana—not getting enough improvements in order to achieve the type of flexibility that each centralized workspace should have.
For example, many users have been expecting changes regarding its steep learning curve and ability to assign multiple users to the same task.
Asana Pricing
- Basic plan: $0
- Premium plan: $10.99/per user month when billed annually
- Business plan: $24.99/per user month when billed annually
- Enterprise plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
*All the plans above include a 30-day free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Asana Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“My favorite feature of Asana is the simplest: the fact that I can add any tasks to my to-do list along with all the information I collect along the way. It also allows me to track what I have done, which I am terrible at doing myself, so it can be a great asset for professionals who want to build esteem in their craft and also be able to measure the outcomes of their contributions.”
“As said above, initially Asana might not be everybody’s cup of tea. It has loads of features, which might be a bit confusing and depending on what you are trying to achieve potentially could be an over-kill. Personally I love them, but for that very same reason, I’ve been struggling at times to convince other colleagues to use the same task management tool.”
5- ClickUp
ClickUp is another platform that allows all kinds of teams to easily plan, manage, and track their work.
This so-called work can be your time, tasks, clients, and even your everyday actions; it is possible to use ClickUp as your personal planner.
Giving you a birds-eye view of all tasks across your entire organization enables you to track work from any angle, not giving you room to miss anything important.
Although ClickUp makes a good alternative to monday.com, there is one specific area that ClickUp users suffer from: speed. Many of its users are complaining about pages taking a while to load, causing a slowdown in their overall process.
ClickUp Pricing
- Free plan: $0
- Unlimited plan: $5/month per user when billed annually
- Business plan: $12/month per user when billed annually
- Business Plus plan: $19/month per user when billed annually
- Enterprise plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
ClickUp Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“Click Up has nailed so many features. It’s intuitive use of different views, the dashboarding, the user management, the automation… it’s all there. The product is intuitive to use for new users but has all the features a serious power user would want. Their licensing is also really fair, enabling us to invite externals to collaborate on specific projects without paying through the nose for additional seats. Overall, it makes collaboration a breeze.”
“It can be buggy but we are patient – it often glitches and we have to refresh or wait ages for lists to load. And the app doesn’t always allow comments – you type then but it then submits it as grey and you cant even copy and paste you have to retype :(.”
6- Airtable
Airtable is an innovative cloud-based project management tool that accelerates the project delivery process, thanks to its interactive user interface.
Having close basic features to the other online project management solutions, Airtable makes a difference by adding futuristic features to its repertoire, such as an interface designer requiring no code.
But, don’t get too excited because the tiny downside of Airtable is its mobile app, more like the lack of convenience when it comes to using it as a mobile project management app.
Thus, when you are out, you are out. Literally.
Airtable Pricing
- Free plan: $0 (up to 5 users)
- Plus plan: $10/month per user when billed annually
- Pro plan: $20/month per user when billed annually
- Enterprise plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
*All the plans above include a 14-day free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Airtable Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“Airtable is a fantastic tool, and there are several ways to customize it to meet the needs of your organization. I enjoy how we can customize and monitor several Airtable databases. In fact, even the free form provides a plethora of redo options. Another feature I like is the limited number of view options; this tool allows us to see information in a variety of ways. It includes a visually appealing user interface with different spaces for graphic work operations and messaging.”
“Sometimes the boards can be a bit confusing, especially when you have large work teams, perhaps a little more work is needed in the organization of the sections. I would like to set notifications on posts or logs for a longer period of time. Right now I can only set a reminder until the next day. Also, I would like to set deadlines and reminders for specific task deadlines.”
7- Basecamp
Basecamp is another versatile project management tool alternative to monday.com with its only premium plan which includes unlimited users, meaning unlimited team members for no fees.
What is great about this service is that it also offers what a basic plan does: premade templates to use for similar projects, project schedules, file sharing, and a live chat option.
Though, the pretty features and cheaper price cannot cover the fact that it somehow lacks service as a business collaboration tool since real-time collaboration on the same sheet is a difficult action to perform as the system doesn’t update automatically for each assigned user.
Basecamp Pricing
- Basecamp Personal plan: $0
- Basecamp Business plan: $99/month (unlimited users)
*Basecamp offers a 30-day free trial to try it out before purchasing.
Basecamp Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“Basecamp comes with dozens of collaboration capabilities, including real-time communication tools that eliminate the need for third-party applications, because it’s a remote work platform. Other project management software restricts communication to task or card comments, but Basecamp incorporates group chat, message boards, and pings.”
“Basecamp isn’t as collaborative as I’d like, it’s difficult to work with team members on the same sheet at the same time and the system doesn’t update automatically for each user like online Excel documents I think it would be nice if there was a tab like Excel. I would like to be able to copy and paste data from an Excel spreadsheet, but importing it will ruin the data already in Basecamp. It also simplifies the selection and formatting of column and row functions.”
8- Trello
Trello is a software that exhibits views, automations, power-ups, templates, and integrations in its core plan to support teams during their work hours.
One big benefit of Trello is that it has a page dedicated to its features, explained through gifs. However, no matter how important these pages are, Trello’s no.1 lack will never be ignored—lack of reporting and analysis.
Without correct reporting tools, some projects are doomed to fail; therefore, it’s important to bear this fact in mind when choosing a project management solution that suits your interests.
Trello Pricing
- Free plan: $0
- Standard plan: $5/month per user when billed annually
- Premium plan: $10/month per user when billed annually
- Enterprise plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
*All the plans above include a 14-day free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Trello Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“1) I can invite people to do certain tasks for me such as updating the software or modifying some functions.
2) It is easy to keep track of a project in conjunction with another department and maintain good contact.
3) Ability to integrate with one or more applications
4) The analysis of projects and tasks are accurate and easy to understand.
5) 100% stable platform with zero bugs found.”
“1) There are certain projects which require more analysis, control and tools that Trello does not have.
2) There are times when recorded data is difficult to play back due to high network load.
3) Subtasks are a bit difficult to track.”
9- Teamwork
Teamwork is a task management and team collaboration software that aims to help teams work productively and collaboratively.
The platform allows resource management, automations, project time tracking, and many more to support you throughout creating a new project roadmap fully.
However, as a product that is still in development, it causes some minor inconveniences regarding operations.
These can be an incompetent mobile version, non-existent essential features, and complex UX—according to some verified users.
Teamwork Pricing
- Free plan: $0 (up to 5 users)
- Deliver plan: $10/month per user when billed annually
- Grow plan: $18/month per user when billed annually
- Scale plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
*All the plans above include a 30-day free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Teamwork Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“Teamwork is an essential part of any organization and any task that needs to be done amongst team collaboration. Now, Teamwork helps teams all around the world to be more at ease and comfortable with their platform helping them with automation, customization, and ease in the workflow.”
“I do not like that Teamwork can’t automate task list creation. For example, if a task list needs to be completed on the 1st of every month, we have to manually put that task list into every project which takes a very long time. Additionally, when a task list is completed it lives on the lefthand side of the project forever.“
10- Scoro
Scoro is an award-winning work management software famous for streamlining all aspects of work together – making it effortless for project managers to maintain an agile methodology on top of all.
This versatile tool is able to put out creative projects by providing an entire team with a platform on which they can collaborate.
There is no defining this team since it could be a sales team looking into customer data to get a better view of them; it could also be one of the best options for design teams as it eliminates complex workflows while ensuring good quality of work.
Boosting team efficiency, Scoro might be the digital space you’re looking for.
Scoro Pricing
- Essential plan: $26/month per user when billed annually (minimum 5 users)
- Standard plan: $37/month per user when billed annually (minimum 5 users)
- Pro plan: $63/month per user when billed annually (minimum 5 users)
- Ultimate plan: For this plan, please contact Scoro’s sales team.
*All the plans above include a 14-day free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Scoro Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“I like that Scoro is cloud-based, so we can access it from anywhere. Having our projects organized, and being able to track time to subtasks within the project is so helpful for us to collaborate and track our time efficiency.“
“I wouldn’t say I like Scoro because it’s not the most user-friendly platform for managing IT projects. We haven’t yet developed a simplified file structure, and the client display can get cluttered with completed activities and time entries, making it challenging to find specific client information.”
11- Nifty
Nifty is a great workspace for ideas to bloom as an agile project management tool on the market.
It has several advanced features that bring a lot to the table, from knowledge hubs to file storage, which affect the way teams work in a positive manner.
Create subtasks, celebrate milestones, ensure that teams stay on track, create customizable dashboards, and change the way you see work by selecting one of the views Nifty offers: Kanban, Gantt chart, list, swimlane, timeline, and calendar.
Moreover, you could use this all-in-one project management tool to your advantage in terms of saving time when creating tasks and getting instant reports, as you wouldn’t need to switch from one platform to another.
Nifty Pricing
- Free plan: $0 (unlimited members)
- Starter plan: $39/month when billed annually (up to 10 members)
- Pro plan: $79/month when billed annually (up to 20 members)
- Business plan: $124/month when billed annually (up to 50 members)
- Unlimited plan: $399/month when billed annually (unlimited members)
*All the plans above include a 14-day free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Nifty Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“The best thing about Nifty is its in-built chat feature, one-click zoom meeting option, time tracking option, different views (including priority view), the ClickUp-like interface, smoothly project management options and everything I might need for my business.”
“I wish they would expand their automation options. I especially would like to see more integrations with external tools. Also, a few more client reporting options would be helpful. I also found that the email task creation won’t work no matter what I try.“
12- Workfront
A product of Adobe, Workfront is a project management software that you can integrate with other Adobe programs without any hassle.
Let me define what it’s capable of; with Workfront, you can benefit from work automations, ensure goal alignment, perform scenario planning, manage workflows, utilize proofing and approvals, implement the agile methodology, and employ instant reporting and dashboards.
So, if you’re a frequent user of Adobe Creative Cloud, this tool might work in your favor the best.
Workfront Pricing
- Pro plan: For this plan, please contact Workfront’s sales team.
- Business plan: For this plan, please contact Workfront’s sales team.
- Enterprise plan: For this plan, please contact Workfront’s sales team.
*All of the plans above have custom pricing; thus, you should get in touch with Workfront’s sales team.
Workfront Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“It is a platform that contributes significantly to project management within our organization. It contributes greatly to communication between my colleagues and me and how we collaborate to move all our projects forward. Its user interface is simple and friendly, and its functions help us to work in an organized and efficient way.”
“The cost of Workfront was extremely high based on the fact that we didn’t use everything that it has to offer. We manage 600-700 projects a year on average. However, project management isn’t the only thing that Workfront can do. Therefore the cost was unjustified.“
Conclusion
Looking for an alternative to monday.com?
Look no further because this article includes each alternative with its pricing plans, trial times, most important features, and trustworthy reviews so that you can find the most effective tool to manage your projects and team at the same time.
So, to stick with monday.com or not to stick with monday.com—that is the question.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best alternative to monday.com?
The best alternative to monday.com is Asana.
Is monday.com the same as Asana?
monday.com is the same as Asana in terms of the service they provide; however, monday.com has a lot more to offer in the long term.
Does Google have a project management tool?
No, Google doesn’t contain a fully-designed project management tool, yet you might use Google Sheets as a project management tool til you’re ready to move on to more comprehensive and effective tools.
