| Functionality | 7 <p>Monday.com offers almost all the functionality most companies need to manage tasks and projects effectively. It has rich functionality natively such as robust automation, customizable forms, time-tracking, analytics, and even invoice creation. This allows teams to streamline their workflows and enhance productivity without relying heavily on external integrations.</p><p>However, it's missing the advanced customizability and automation that larger teams require to manage complex task and project relationships e.g. creating multiple layers of subtasks, meaningful project portfolio management functionality and sophisticated workflows with branches.</p> | 8 <p>Smartsheet has all the functionality that companies will need - including some more sophisticated functions required only my large companies. Smartsheet offers: excellent portfolio management features, cell history, strong automation and some nifty team capacity reporting features.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 7 <p>Monday.com offers a generally user-friendly experience, with an abundance of templates and smooth onboarding that lowers the barrier of entry for non-technical, new users.</p><p>However, when delving into more advanced features, the platform's ease of use starts to wane. There's foreign terminology such as adding a "Problem Framing" quickies block to your docs, or enabling "battery view" for your board. The interface can also become cluttered as you use projects scale and more features are utilised.</p><p>For the average SMB employee, it might take 1-2 days with minimal guidance to become comfortable with the platform.</p> | 5 <p>Smartsheet is designed to function in a similar way to a spreadsheet. If you are comfortable using these or have used them before, learning your way around Smartsheet will be easier. However, even if this is the case, processes can be a bit fiddley compared to other project management tools. We estimate that average start-up employee and would require a few days and some guidance before being able to use the product fluently.</p><p><br></p><p>Key information and processes are generally easy to find but not always easy to perform.</p> |
| Look and feel | 7 <p>Monday.com emphasizes visual management with bright, engaging colours and customisable icons. While this visual approach makes it easy to understand project statuses at a glance, it could also quickly get cluttered and busy, Page loads are quick (1-2 seconds).</p> | 6 <p>Smartsheet lacks colour and is generally a bit plain to look at. That being said, the software is visually acceptable and for the most part has fast loading times (~1 second). When first creating a new project or workspace, loading times can be slower (upwards of 6 seconds) - but this is a one off occurrence.</p> |
| Customisability | 8 <p>As an all-in-one tool, Monday.com offers a high level of customizability suitable for most teams, allowing you to tailor boards with custom columns, statuses, and automation without needing to code. Individual cards can be anything from tasks, projects to deals, employees and client. However, it doesn't match the advanced customization capabilities of tools like JIRA —such as creating multiple layers of subtasks or defining complex task relationships—which may limit larger teams managing complex projects.</p> | 8 <p>Smartsheet has some very strong customisation features. The most impressive being their forms which are customisable in almost every way - from question type to, condition logic, to cosmetics etc. Automation is also nicely customisable with a vast array of action and trigger functions, as well as conditional logic available. Smartsheet could benefit from a few more task views - other similar project management tools offer far more!</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 9 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, because it has a very rich library of templates. Full setup should take less than a day.</p> | 8 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, because it has a very rich library of templates. Full setup should take a day or two at most.</p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p>Monday.com offers personalised live chat within the platform. When contacted, it was extremely quick to connect with an agent who was decently helpful - although there still seems to be a tendency to send us Help Centre articles. Self-help resources on their Help Centre are high-quality and extensive.</p> | 6 <p>Personalised support is available via email and and in-app chat. The in-app chat feature is not something to rely on too much as responses are not always fast. Email agents are very accommodating, useful and fast (relies in less than 6 hours). </p><p><br></p><p>Self-serve materials are strong but not exceptional. They do not have 'how to's' for every feature. This is likely to drive traffic to their paid 'Smartsheet University' where they charge to teach you basic, intermediate and advanced functions in Smartsheet. </p> |
| Integratability | 9 <p>Monday.com has a vibrant app marketplace with hundreds of plugins and integrations with the most relevant third party apps (e.g. CRM, marketing, developer tools etc). Its standout feature is its pre-built automation templates with most of these apps, which can be added with one-click. It also has an API for custom integrations.</p> | 7 <p>Smartsheet offers integrations with most third-parties that companies will need. However, some notable exceptions are Notion, Github and Zendesk.</p><p><br></p><p>Smartsheet also offers can API that allows teams to build custom integrations where necessary.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 8 <p>While you can self-serve export data to formats like Excel, not all information—such as activity logs or certain file attachments—transfers seamlessly. Like other PM tools, custom fields and complex workflows might require manual rebuilding in the new platform, and these limitations can complicate migration efforts for teams with intricate setups. </p> | 8 <p>Key data and custom reports are available self-serve to export to a CSV file.</p> |
