Monday.com Reviews: An Honest, No-BS Assessment
Monday.com has become one of the most recognizable names in project management software. With over 127,000 customers and a colorful, visual interface that's hard to miss, it's clearly doing something right. But is it right for your team?
After digging through thousands of user reviews, comparing pricing tiers, and looking at what real users love and hate about the platform, here's our honest take on monday.com.
Monday.com at a Glance
Monday.com is a cloud-based work management platform that started as an internal tool at Wix back in 2012 (originally called dapulse). It's designed to help teams plan, track, and collaborate on projects using visual boards, automations, and integrations.
The platform offers multiple products: monday work management for general project management, monday CRM for sales teams, monday dev for software teams, and monday service for service desks. For this review, we're focusing primarily on the core work management product since that's what most teams are looking for.
Monday.com Pricing Breakdown
Let's get straight to the numbers. Monday.com uses per-seat pricing with a minimum of 3 seats on paid plans:
- Free: $0 - Limited to 2 users, 3 boards, 200 items. Good for testing, not much else.
- Basic: $9/seat/month (billed annually) - Unlimited boards and items, 5GB storage, but no automations or integrations.
- Standard: $12/seat/month (billed annually) - 250 automation/integration actions per month, timeline and Gantt views, calendar view.
- Pro: $19/seat/month (billed annually) - 25,000 automation/integration actions, time tracking, private boards, formula columns.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing - 250,000 automation/integration actions, advanced security, dedicated support.
If you pay monthly instead of annually, expect to pay about 20-30% more. For a team of 10 on the Pro plan billed annually, you're looking at roughly $2,280/year. That adds up fast.
For a deeper dive into specific plan costs, check out our monday.com pricing breakdown.
What Users Actually Like About Monday.com
Visual Interface That's Easy to Navigate
This is monday.com's biggest strength, and users consistently praise it. The colorful boards, drag-and-drop functionality, and visual project tracking make it genuinely pleasant to use. Unlike some project management tools that feel like spreadsheets with extra steps, monday.com's interface is intuitive enough that most team members can start using it without extensive training.
Flexible Views and Customization
Monday.com offers over 27 different ways to view your projects - Gantt charts, Kanban boards, calendars, workload views, timelines, and more. This flexibility lets different team members work in whatever format suits them best. Marketing might prefer Kanban while project managers stick with Gantt charts.
Strong Automation Capabilities
The automation features let you eliminate repetitive tasks without writing code. Set up triggers like "when status changes to Done, notify the manager" or "when a due date arrives, send an email." Users report these automations save significant time once they're set up properly.
Extensive Integrations
Monday.com connects with Slack, Google Drive, Zoom, Salesforce, and dozens of other tools. This helps centralize work and reduce context-switching between apps. The integration ecosystem is one of the more robust options in the project management space.
What Users Hate About Monday.com
Pricing Gets Expensive Fast
This is the #1 complaint. The per-seat model with minimum seat requirements means costs escalate quickly as your team grows. Worse, you can't add seats one at a time - you have to buy them in blocks (5, 7, 10, etc.). A small business owner reported it was "financially impractical to pay for 20 seats when they only needed 16."
Essential features like time tracking, private boards, and meaningful automation limits are locked behind the Pro plan at $19/seat. Many users feel nickeled-and-dimed.
The Free Plan Is Basically Useless
Two users, three boards, 200 items, and a 7-day activity log. No automations. No calendar view. It's enough to test the interface, but that's about it. If you need monday.com for real work, you're paying.
Customer Support Is Hit or Miss
Reviews are polarized here. Some users report excellent support, especially on Enterprise plans with dedicated success managers. But others describe slow responses, getting passed between departments, and difficulties resolving billing issues. One common complaint: the chatbot makes it difficult to reach a human agent unless you have a payment problem.
Learning Curve for Advanced Features
While basic task management is intuitive, setting up complex automations, building dashboards that pull from multiple boards, and configuring advanced workflows takes time. Users report needing to "set time aside to learn how the system works" before getting full value.
Mobile App Limitations
The mobile app handles basic tasks but doesn't match the web experience. Users describe it as slow, lacking features for task creation and automation, and less intuitive than the desktop version. It's fine for quick check-ins, not full project management.
Who Monday.com Is Actually For
Good fit:
- Mid-sized teams (10-50 people) who need visual project tracking
- Marketing and creative teams managing campaigns and content calendars
- Agencies juggling multiple clients and projects
- Companies willing to invest in the Pro plan for meaningful features
- Teams already using tools that integrate well with monday.com
Not a good fit:
- Solopreneurs or freelancers (the minimum seat requirements don't make sense)
- Very small teams on tight budgets
- Healthcare organizations needing HIPAA compliance without Enterprise pricing
- Teams needing deep, specialized project management (complex dependencies, critical path analysis)
- Anyone expecting robust features on the free or Basic plans
Monday.com vs. Alternatives
How does monday.com stack up against the competition?
vs. Asana: Monday.com has a more visual, colorful interface. Asana has stronger task dependency features. Both are similarly priced at higher tiers. Asana's free plan is more generous.
vs. ClickUp: ClickUp offers more features at lower price points and doesn't limit users on its free plan. However, some find ClickUp's interface cluttered and overwhelming compared to monday.com's cleaner design.
vs. Trello: Trello is simpler and cheaper for basic Kanban-style project tracking. Monday.com offers far more functionality for complex project management needs.
For a detailed comparison, see our monday.com vs Asana breakdown or explore other monday.com alternatives.
Real User Review Scores
Here's how monday.com rates across major review platforms:
- Capterra: 4.6/5 stars
- G2: 4.7/5 stars
- Gartner Peer Insights: 4.4/5 stars
- Trustpilot: Mixed reviews (3.4/5 stars), with billing and support complaints more common
The pattern is consistent: users love the interface and core functionality but have concerns about pricing structure and support.
The Bottom Line
Monday.com is a genuinely good project management tool with a polished interface and strong feature set. The visual boards, automations, and integrations can legitimately improve how teams work together.
But here's the honest truth: you need to be on at least the Standard plan ($12/seat) to get basic utility, and the Pro plan ($19/seat) for features like time tracking and serious automation capacity. Factor in the minimum 3-seat requirement and the block-based seat additions, and costs add up faster than the initial pricing page suggests.
If you have the budget and need a flexible, visual work management platform, monday.com delivers. If you're a small team watching every dollar, explore the alternatives first.
Try monday.com free for 14 days to see if it fits your workflow before committing.