monday.com is a popular project management platform that utilizes visual elements like grids and colors to provide an intuitive way to organize projects and tasks. Despite its visual appeal, users may seek more in-depth functionalities for managing complex and large-scale projects. The best monday.com alternatives include comprehensive features for workflow automation, time tracking, reporting, and team collaboration.
monday.com & Its Best Alternatives at a Glance
monday.com & Best Alternatives | Key Criteria | Learn More | |
|---|---|---|---|
 4.57 out of 5 |
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 4.56 out of 5 | ClickUp: Best Overall for Real-time Reporting | ||
$10 |
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 4.38 out of 5 | Asana: Best for Multi-project Management | ||
$13.49 |
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 4.32 out of 5 | Wrike: Best for Workflow Automation | ||
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 4.28 out of 5 | Freedcamp: Best for Budget-conscious Teams | ||
$2.49 |
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 4.13 out of 5 | ProofHub: Best for Team Collaboration | ||
$50 for unlimited users |
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ClickUp: Best Overall for Real-time Reporting
What We Like
- Real-time chat
- Unlimited storage on all paid plans
- All plans include time tracking
Where It Falls Behind
- Steep learning curve
- Integrations are limited to 49 apps
- Mobile app could be better
How It Compares to monday.com
- Both providers have the same monthly starting fee per user, but monday.com has a minimum requirement of three seats.
- ClickUp offers time tracking on all paid tiers, including the free plan, while monday.com unlocks the same feature on the fourth tier.
- Both providers support up to 11 project views like map, workload, Gantt, and calendar views.
- monday.com has a more intuitive and user-friendly interface than ClickUp.
We pick ClickUp as our best overall monday.com alternative due to its powerful reporting features for tracking real-time progress and managing resources effectively. Fully customizable dashboards include over 50 widgets for progress tracking, workload, sprints, and project overview. Workload and box views display your team’s daily work capacity, and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered activity reports show how your time is being spent.
Unfortunately, ClickUp’s native integrations are limited to 49 apps, making it less appealing to teams working with multiple third-party software. If you want to connect your app stack with a fully integrated project management tool, consider Wrike. This provider integrates with up to 400 third-party apps for customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence, and messaging.
ClickUp Monthly Pricing at a Glance (per User)* Pay yearly and save up to 37%.
- Free-forever: Free for 100MB storage, task checklists, templates, spreadsheets, custom statuses, 100 automations, multiple assignees, and dependencies, in-app video recording, real-time chat, integrations, and time tracking
- Unlimited: $10 for unlimited dashboards, unlimited file storage, custom fields, form view, Gantt chart, guest access, 1,000 automation, portfolios, recurring tasks, delegate reminders, and milestones
- Business: $19 for unlimited teams, custom reporting, 10,000 automation, goals folder, workload management, mind map, timelines, and public sharing
- Enterprise: Contact sales for white labeling, 250,000 automation, team sharing, unlimited custom roles, and document tags
ClickUp Features
ClickUp allows you to add embeddable content to your documents like spreadsheets, websites, and apps. (Source: ClickUp)
- Super-rich editing: Create a document or Wiki using nested pages and format options. Collaborate with your team by editing docs in real time, tagging users, assigning action items, and converting text into trackable tasks.
- Time estimates: Add time estimates on tasks and subtasks to determine the total time needed for any project type. This improves forecasting on future projects and compares actual time against your expectations.
- Nested subtasks and checklists: Create checklists within tasks and break down projects into levels of subtasks. The drag-and-drop tool lets you organize checklists with ease, while templates speed up the creation and re-use of old checklists.
Asana: Best for Multi-project Management
What We Like
- Clean and intuitive platform
- Rich collaboration features
- Built-in writing assistant
Where It Falls Behind
- Expensive monthly per-user fees
- Lacks native time tracking feature
- 24/7 support is limited to Enterprise users
How It Compares to monday.com
- Asana has richer task management features than monday.com. For example, you can add tasks to multiple projects.
- monday.com has a better plan progression than Asana because it has five subscription tiers, while Asana only has three.
- When it comes to monthly starting fees, Asana is pricier than monday.com by $3.49.
- monday.com has a built-in time tracking feature, while Asana relies on third-party integrations.
Asana is a popular alternative to monday.com for managing multiple, complex projects. It has a workflow management tool to manage work and communication in one place. For instance, you can add the same task to multiple projects so that other users across different departments have the same visibility. If you’re managing several teams, the Portfolios feature lets you track the progress of each separate project team in a single view.
However, Asana might not be a fitting choice for budget-conscious teams looking for cheaper alternatives to monday.com. Asana has the highest monthly per-user fee on this list, so you may want to consider a low-cost option like Freedcamp. For as low as $2.49, you get full access to project planning and collaboration tools, such as Gantt charts, milestones, and calendar sharing.
Asana Monthly Pricing at a Glance (per User) Discounted annual pricing is available.
- Basic: Free for calendar view, unlimited tasks, messages, and storage, board view projects, and 100-plus integrations
- Premium: $13.49 for forms, workflow builder, timeline, reporting, custom templates, and unlimited dashboards
- Business: $30.49 for custom rules builder, workload, portfolio, time tracking, advanced reporting, forms branching, and approvals
- Enterprise: Contact sales for custom branding, unlimited bundles, and advanced security and governance
- Free trial: 30 days
Asana Features
Asana lets you use colors on custom fields to analyze task status at a glance. (Source: Asana)
- Custom fields: Add labels to tasks to easily sort and track projects you’re looking for. Add your own custom field or choose from different field types like dates, numbers, people, and text. Use color coding to make your tasks look more scannable.
- Inbox: Receive automatic updates for direct messages, new tasks, mentions, and task updates. Inbox notifications are customizable to receive notifications only at specific times or days.
- Forms: Standardize work requests to get all the information you need and minimize friction and back and forth. For each new request, you can instantly assign, organize, and schedule work for your team.
Wrike: Best for Workflow Automation
What We Like
- Up to 400 third-party integrations
- Robust project automation tools
- Extensive project management features
Where It Falls Behind
- Confusing to navigate
- Lacks monthly billing option
- Paid plans have user count limitations
How It Compares to monday.com
- Wrike supports up to 400 third-party integrations, while monday.com only has over 200.
- Wrike is better than monday.com in terms of free plan offerings like unlimited user capacity, 2GB file storage per account, and work intelligence tools.
- All monday.com’s paid plans allow unlimited user subscription, while Wrike has user limits for the Team and Business plans.
Wrike is the best free alternative to monday.com for tech-savvy teams wanting to automate routine work, streamline processes, and deliver project deliverables faster. While almost all project management software has automation, Wrike has a richer offering for creating rapid content, summarizing long discussions, and generating action items from notes. It also has machine learning capabilities for identifying frequent project issues and risk factors.
Similar to monday.com, Wrike’s collaboration tools are limited to document editing, file sharing, and guest access. If you want an all-in-one project management platform with built-in communication tools, try ProofHub. This provider offers a wealth of features for collaborating in real-time or asynchronously, including discussions, threaded comments, announcements, and group chat.
Wrike Monthly Pricing at a Glance (per User) Pricing is based on a monthly subscription but must be paid annually.
- Free: Free for 2GB per account, task management, custom work views, work intelligence, project templates, and enterprise-grade security
- Team: $9.80 for up to 25 seats, custom fields/workflows, calendars, dashboards, Gantt chart, work schedules, analytics view, request forms, and automation (50 actions)
- Business: $24.80 for up to 200 seats, 5GB storage, portfolio, live reports, custom templates, approval, time tracking, and folder hierarchy
- Enterprise: Contact sales for up to unlimited users, 10GB storage, automation (1,000 actions), and advanced security controls
- Pinnacle: Contact sales for 15GB storage, advanced analytics, automation (1,500 actions), capacity planning, and locked spaces
- Free trial: 14 days
Wrike Features
Creating a new task blueprint in Wrike involves adding the due date, assignees, subtasks, and deadline. (Source: Wrike)
- Blueprints: These are templates for creating new versions of the same task, folder, or projects that recur regularly. The use of templates lets you quickly create a work item with previously specified attributes.
- AI Work Creation: Uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify tasks in plain text like meeting notes or project plans. This helps in transforming scribbled ideas into action items in the form of parent tasks or subtasks.
- Job roles: Create custom work roles using your employees’ job titles in Wrike. This allows you to distribute work among the team while taking note of their time and workload.
Freedcamp: Best for Budget-conscious Teams
What We Like
- Very affordable per-user fee
- Open-source platform
- Password manager for securely sharing passwords
Where It Falls Behind
- Limited project views
- Usability could be better
- Few app integrations
How It Compares to monday.com
- With a monthly starting fee of $2.49 per user, Freedcamp is significantly cheaper than monday.com.
- Freedcamp is an open-source project management software, while monday.com is a work operating system (OS).
- monday.com is more feature-dense than Freedcamp in terms of task management, collaboration, productivity, and security.
- monday.com has over 200 third-party integrations, while Freedcamp has no native integrations and relies on Zapier and application programming interface (API) support.
Freedcamp is our best low-cost and free monday.com alternative due to its generous free plan inclusions and affordable monthly plans starting at $2.49 per user. This is ideal for startups and small teams that don’t want to invest in a full-featured project management platform. There are several add-ons to choose from, so you don’t need to upgrade to higher tiers to access a specific feature. Plus, the price gap between plans is not too high, making it easy to scale.
Investing in software with multiple project views enables teams to modify the platform to fit their individual preferences. Unfortunately, Freedcamp doesn’t support as many project views as monday.com. You may want to consider Wrike, which offers up to 10 project views, such as calendar, Gantt chart, table, and board. This works for companies with a diverse workforce that want to accommodate each team member’s unique approach to project management.
Freedcamp Monthly Pricing at a Glance (per User) Save up to 25% by paying annually.
- Free: Free for unlimited projects, unlimited storage, 10MB file size limit, public projects, tasks, discussions, calendar, files, milestone, time, and password manager
- Pro: $2.49 for 25MB file size limit, email-in, cloud storage integration, tags, table view, subtasks, recurring tasks, multiple assignees, milestones, and calendar sharing
- Business: $8.99 for 100MB file size limit, reports, custom fields, custom status, invoicing, and project overview
- Enterprise: $19.99 for 250MB file size limit, white label, two-factor authentication, single sign-on, and dashboards
- Free trial: 14 days
Freedcamp Features
Freedcamp’s time application record provides a direct link to a task or issue. (Source: Freedcamp)
- Wiki: Freedcamp offers a centralized knowledge base for all your projects, clients, or tasks. Customize your Wiki by creating custom workflows, storing documents, and embedding YouTube videos.
- Time tracking: Stores the running tally of the time spent across all projects, issues, and tasks. Get full visibility of how long tasks take to complete, the most efficient team members, and the types of projects that take the longest.
- Issue tracker: A reporting system to manage issues and bugs. Gather customer feedback and create tickets to monitor all the issues being worked on.
ProofHub: Best for Team Collaboration
What We Like
- Flat-rate pricing—no per-user fee
- Rich team chat functionality
- Rich customization for dashboards, roles, workflows, and reports
Where It Falls Behind
- Integrations are limited to eight apps
- No free plan offering
- Interface could be more user-friendly
How It Compares to monday.com
- ProofHub is more budget-friendly for large teams because it doesn’t charge per user, unlike monday.com.
- ProofHub has more collaboration features than monday.com, including group chat, announcements, and discussions.
- With over 200 third-party apps, monday.com has more native integrations than ProofHub, which only integrates with eight apps.
- Both monday.com and ProofHub lack budgeting, billing, and invoicing features.
Collaboration features in project management are often limited to file attachments, document sharing, and guest access. With ProofHub, you get an all-in-one project management and team collaboration with group chat, announcements, discussion boards, and event planning. These tools ensure a smoother workflow as teams collaborate both in real time and asynchronously. It also eliminates the need to purchase separate third-party software for team communication.
While ProofHub’s flat-rate pricing is extremely budget-friendly for large teams, it doesn’t have a free plan version for those wanting to try its services without charge. If you’re looking for a feature-rich, free monday.com alternative, try ClickUp. This provider offers more project management capabilities than other monday.com competitors, including sprint management, in-app video recording, workload profiles, and up to 14 project views.
ProofHub Monthly Pricing at a Glance*
- Essential: $50 for unlimited users, 40 projects, 15GB storage, tasks, forms, project templates, Gantt, custom fields, integrations, one-on-one chat, proofing, file approval, documents, forms, and calendar
- Ultimate Control: $99 for workflows, custom roles, white labeling, reports, manage trash, activity logs, and API access
- Free trial: 14 days
ProofHub Features
Time report provides accurate time information for the time logged for billed, billable, and non-billable tasks. (Source: ProofHub)
- Milestones: Mark changes, checkpoints, and stages of your project development to measure, track, and share progress with your team. This helps in breaking down projects into manageable steps and managing the team’s goal expectations.
- Custom reports: Visualize your team’s progress and different project aspects, including tasks, milestones, and time data. This is useful in analyzing individual performance and progress.
- Project export: Create a backup of your projects, tasks, and discussions so you can take all your files wherever you go without logging into your ProofHub account.
How We Evaluated the Best monday.com Alternatives
We handpicked a variety of project management software based on popularity, industry sentiments, and functionality ratings among users. From there, we designed a six-category rubric to accurately evaluate and compare all the providers we will cover. After computing the final scores, we selected five providers based on which ranked the highest.
Learn how we evaluated the best monday.com alternatives by clicking on the tabs below:
20% of Overall Score
We examined the subscription plans of all our top picks and gave points to those charging less than $15 for the base plan. We explored the feature inclusions of providers offering free alternatives to monday.com as well as their paid plans (entry-level to enterprise tiers). We also gave more weight to those offering volume discounts, cheaper annual fees, and a lengthy free trial for the paid plans.
25% of Overall Score
We looked for capabilities typically found in a project management app, including file storage, task reminders, time tracking, and a mobile app. We also checked if all plans support two-factor authentication to ensure account security.
20% of Overall Score
Many providers offer industry-specific capabilities to support unique project management needs. We looked for specialized features like data export, milestone tracking, and calendar management. We also reviewed the number of third-party integrations available and automation tools.
10% of Overall Score
We assessed the usability of each software by testing it ourselves and analyzing customer reviews from reliable websites. We reviewed the feedback of recent users and checked for learning curves during the setup and configuration phase.
10% of Overall Score
For each project management software, we checked the type of customer service channels offered, like phone, live chat, email, and helpdesk. We gave higher points for 24/7 coverage.
15% of Overall Score
We assessed the performance of monday.com competitors by looking at its standout features and user-friendliness. We also considered their level of popularity and value for money.
Frequently Asked Questions
monday.com’s pricing scheme is complex for small businesses because you cannot add more than two users for the free versions, and paid plans have predefined user numbers—you can buy either three seats, five seats, 10 seats, etc. While time tracking is an entry-level feature for most competitors, monday.com unlocks it at the fourth tier, with a monthly starting price of $24 per user. Also, team collaboration features are limited to whiteboard and document sharing.
Asana is the closest competitor of monday.com because it shares many similar features, such as dashboards, custom templates, and automation. Both support a variety of project views, like Kanban, timeline, calendar, and Gantt chart, and are also highly versatile as they support various use cases for marketing, operations, IT, sales, and HR.
monday.com work management offers a user-friendly environment where teams can manage the high-level and detailed elements of their work processes. It serves as a central hub for all work-related information, projects, resources, and action plans, allowing teams to stay organized and achieve specific goals efficiently.
Bottom Line
A flexible and user-friendly project management software like monday.com enables teams to create customizable workflows to fit certain organizational needs. However, its complex pricing and free plan limitations make it less appealing to small businesses on a budget. After careful consideration, we pick ClickUp as the best alternative to monday.com due to its feature-rich plans, unlimited storage, and robust collaboration capabilities.
Sign up for its free-forever plan to explore its services before upgrading to a paid plan.
