Top Features of monday.com Easy Project Management Software in 2024

Great project management tools not only automate routines and processes but they also help manage new unfamiliar projects. They allow you to meet unfamiliar activities and projects that may just pop up. These projects may range from planning an R&R to building a new office, to facilitating mergers & acquisitions. Thus, you need to choose the most robust and flexible yet easy project management software to use.  The top features of monday.com may be just that for you.

In this article, we are going to discuss the top features of monday.com and the benefits users get from them. The discussion will include some use cases for some features of this easy project management software.

If you are in the market for a project management platform, you really have to be careful and diligent with your choice. There are consequences to adopting new software. Some are good. Others, not so much. In a study by PMI, they found that 75% of high-performing PMOs had to redesign their processes to keep up with technological trends. So, you can expect changes to yours when you finally do. Additionally, you cannot really rule out a total overhaul.

Also, 50% of PMOs reported that they started to require new measures of risk, progress, and success because of technological adoption. Furthermore, 48% reported that project management tools have modified the scope and methodologies of traditional management.  Some 14% of them even reported that project management engagement and morale decreased.

Of course, there are also advantages when adoption goes right. Some 35% of PMOs, for example, found that their relationships with strategy management or similar offices have strengthened.

Technology adoption can take a long time depending on the learning curve and the company culture. People’s attitudes play a big role too. It doesn’t matter whether you get one of the top three project management solutions if you don’t get to use them effectively.

When choosing the best platform, keep in mind that not only should the features of the platform fit your needs but also the company culture. Some organizations don’t value having project managers, for example. So expect some pushback at the beginning.

Many project managers have found monday.com to be a good fit for them. If you want to investigate the features closely you can easily do so when you sign up for monday.com free trial here. 

Top Features of monday.com

It Prioritizes People Management

Many project management solutions out there don’t let you manage people per se. Primarily, they focus only on projects themselves. They offer a pure top-down view of the tasks, subtasks, and interdependencies. People are regarded as just resources that need to keep up with the projects. They are not visible and reachable. Furthermore, traditional tools even require you to manage the project management platform itself by updating tasks, subtasks, and interdependencies. As a result, traditional project management tools are going out of favor.

This is not just for managers but also for their teams. This approach is so detached from actually leading people to complete projects with quality.  Tasks, completion dates, billable hours, updates, and others are the only things you face regularly. You don’t get to guide and lead your team to achieve organizational goals. For team members, they just have no way to collaborate.

From the start, monday.com was designed to bypass this traditional approach. As a result, monday.com is designed to be people first. It is a tool that works well. One that users could love to use.

Firstly, users love its simple and customizable interface. Furthermore, there are many different templates to choose from when creating their first boards.

Secondly, people can let each other know what they are working on and where they are on a project.

Thirdly, its communication, collaboration, and analytics features allow users to be on top of their projects.

All of these things increase the feeling of ownership. Thus, it helps everyone to be more efficient. Let’s break down the monday.com top features that put people first.

It Comes with Intuitive User Interface

monday.com dashboard is highly visual and highly customizable

So, what’s the use of a tool when people don’t really like using it? In able for someone to use a tool proficiently and regularly, one must like to use it. That is on top of the fact that the tool should really help that person achieve objectives. This is the primary metric.

However, likability and ease-of-use come as a close second. The user interface of monday.com’s is by far one of the best-looking ones among project management platforms. Plus, it also houses a very comprehensive set of helpful features of a top app.

The best thing about monday.com’s dashboard is that it is customizable. People have their own preferences when it comes to visualization. Some like Gantt charts or timeline-based tracking boards. Others prefer different types of charts. In monday.com’s main screen, you can choose to view every project board you create using different visual tools. You can choose from  Kanban-style views to maps.

Despite being having one of the most robust project management systems, its design remains clean and intuitive that there is really not much training needed to get used to it. It is an easy project management software to fall in love with. Many monday.com users share their insights and boards with each other to help each other with productivity. Others show off how well they use the tool.

Happy users include teams from Discover Channel, lonely planet, and the City of Waterford. The list of happy monday.com users spans from consultants to academic researchers. Professionals working from finance to video production use it to track their workflows.

Whatever industry you are in, your team or even your organization can profit from monday.com’s very flexible dashboard and boards. Thanks to its highly customizable deployment, you can truly make it your own.

What’s more, you can customize a board and save a certain “view” for each individual member.

It Lets You Easily Manage Workloads

monday.com has a map view to help you mark relevant locations easily

On monday.com, you can arrange tasks in groups. Then you can assign each task to a person in your team or you can assign a whole team for a task (or a pulse). The coolest thing about these groups and tasks (or pulses) is that you can add extra columns.

You start off by having items on a horizontal bar. Then you can add relevant columns. There are many column types in monday.com’s column center. Some are just as simple as checkboxes or a hyperlink.

Others are quite unique such as maps, progress tracking, timeline+status, and even a phone among many. This “phone” column allows you call your contacts directly from monday.com! How cool is that?

Individual Workloads

On monday.com, you can assign a person to an item by firstly adding a people column. The people column allows you to assign a team member for a specific task. When you click on it, you will see your team members’ names on a drop-down and you can choose who to assign for a task item. Also, you can type the team member’s name in the quick search function of the column’s drop-down.

If you want to track what each member is doing to help the group, you just add a timeline column to see who is working on what and for how long. It is a visual breakdown of your team’s workload by time. Also, the time tracking column allows you to track the time spent on each item, group, and board.

There is also a split view where you can see the timeline and the group tasks together. Also, for every task item or pulse, you can write an update, notes, files, and even conduct a Q&A. You can engage and manage a specific team member for each of their tasks. As you can notice, the core philosophy of monday.com shines in this feature. You manage the person and not the project.

Team Workloads

The team column allows you to assign a whole team into a task. If you are running a multinational operation, there is a country column to keep tabs of where your teams are located all over the world. There is also a map column to help you and your members visualize locations.

If you run multiple boards with the same members, you can arrange your workloads and communication by using tags. Tags categorize items across boards that belong in the same thread. This could be a “#productname” to keep track of every task about a certain product across divisions.

Of course, just like individual workloads, you can track the progress of each team task through the progress tracking column. There are also what monday.com calls “Deadline Combos” to track progress like “Date + Status” and  “Timeline + Status”. Managing the workloads of your teams will now be easier with these visual tools.

There are also columns that allow team members to vote and rate things visually. You can do this in the case of choosing logos or even letting your team vote for the venue of your next family day.

Furthermore, you can customize automation like as complex as changing a task dependency whenever a status change, or as simple as notifying a team member when a task status reaches something. These are easily arranged in a card-like fashion which is very easy to understand and use.

It Makes Collaboration Efficient

monday.com’s task and timeline view

As mentioned, team members can update and comment on each task item. They can even run a Q&A that records the train of knowledge being created for each item. These features help increase the communication between each team member or team.

The file-sharing feature and hyperlinks can be used by multiple users to view and edit important files. However, monday.com’s communication and collaboration do not stop with these. There are other features that make working with others using monday.com easy and enjoyable.

Two of these features are the phone and email columns. You can add phone numbers of your team members or clients and you can call them directly from monday.com. Once you click on them the default apps on your computer will make the call or lets you start writing an email.

Integrations & Automations

Of course, monday.com in and of itself is limited in some ways. The most obvious thing is that it does not have a word processing system, an eCommerce system, and a host of other apps. You can’t really collaborate with other meaningful operations within it. However, monday.com makes up for these by seamlessly integrated with other apps.

monday.com’s comprehensive set of automation features

If you run an eCommerce site and manage your team via monday.com, you can set automations and notifications about your eCommerce system. For example, you get a new order in Shopify. You can set monday.com to notify you when a new order is being created.

You can even set your dashboard to notify you whenever stocks on Shopify drops below some number. All sorts of integrations and automations can be done with communication apps like Gmail, Outlook, and Slack. More integrations are also coming to monday.com such as Salesforce, Harvest, and SurveyMonkey.

monday.com has a full suite of integrations with other popular applications. Also, more integrations are coming soon like with Salesforce.

Moreover, you can all do this at the comfort of either your browser, application, or even phone. It has its native apps for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. It doesn’t matter what device you, your team members, or your clients use. You can all work together as one with monday.com as the glue.

It Comes with Reporting & Analytics

As you may know, monday.com is not a fan of traditional project management. It takes what the creators find to be the best features from traditional systems and put their spin on it. This is apparent in the timeline feature that tracks people instead of tasks like that of the Gantt chart. There is also a Gantt view if you want to keep it traditional.

But as you know from this article, columns are the stars on monday.com. Some of them help you track progress in real-time and can render data in many different views. But for reporting, it is the filters that make generating visually-stimulating and easily-understandable reports a breeze.

monday.com has many different views such as various charts that you can use to filter and highlight data for analysis

For instance, you can filter for the deal size and commissions of your sales teams. For this, you need to use a combination of features like the formula column and your choice of view. Then, you filter for the data you want to include on your report and monday.com easily gives you a visual report of what you need.

Furthermore, when you choose a view like a pie chart, Gantt, or timeline among others, it doesn’t just give you a good visualization. You can also export them into an excel file should you need a formal written report for safekeeping or for presentation. Get monday.com to be your excel wiz!

You can do this for a team, a person, multiple projects, or an overview of your organization. Of course, it takes a little while to be at an advanced level with these features and the good people at monday.com know this. That is why a good knowledge base for support is available that includes tutorials. When you log on, you will be able to view tutorials on how to make reports such as user engagement and storage capacity.

With these features, you can use raw data and process it to help you generate actionable insights with relative ease.

It Provides Excellent Support

The top features for monitoring, collaboration, reporting, people management, tracking, and others discussed earlier are rounded out by undeniably stellar support features. Again, the platform is first and foremost people-centric. It was designed to be an effective and flexible tool that one loves to use.

One big factor for this is accessibility. This is not in terms of the user interface or being ergonomic. But this is about the pricing and other support features. With these, monday.com becomes an undeniable top-tier product that’s becoming a go-to platform for many teams across different industries.

The pricing scheme makes it easy for teams to use monday.com for their projects. The basic plan starts off at only $39 USD/month for five users (annual plan). This is very accessible, especially for a top app. This basic plan already includes unlimited viewers and unlimited boards.

Among other top-three platforms in this category, this may be the best value you can get. Plus, you also get a self-serve knowledge base and get 24/7 email & phone support whole year-round. Your account also gets a 2-factor authentication security system to keep all of your projects and information secured. This helps you minimize your SaaS security risks.

More advanced plans include additional features and capabilities. They include a full suite of integrations and automations.

With these supporting features, monday.com is not just easy to use and comprehensive. It is also accessible to many kinds of teams of different sizes.

What Security Features are Provided by Monday.com?

Security is critical for businesses using online project management platforms like Monday.com. The platform offers robust security measures to protect user data, making it a trustworthy tool for teams handling sensitive information.

Here are the key security features that Monday.com provides:

• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Monday.com employs two-factor authentication, adding an extra layer of security to user accounts. This means that even if someone obtains a password, they still need access to the second authentication method (like a mobile device or email) to log in.
• Data Encryption: Monday.com uses encryption for data in transit and at rest. This ensures that data exchanged between users and the platform is securely encrypted, preventing unauthorized access. HTTPS ensures that communication over the platform is encrypted, protecting sensitive information.
• User Access Control: The platform offers detailed access controls, allowing administrators to assign specific permissions to different team members. This helps ensure that only authorized users can view or edit sensitive project details, enhancing internal security.
• Regular Security Audits: Monday.com conducts regular security audits to ensure its platform remains secure against evolving threats. The platform strives to stay ahead of potential vulnerabilities by continuously reviewing and updating its security protocols.
• GDPR Compliance: For users in the European Union, Monday.com is fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This ensures that businesses handling EU citizens’ data adhere to strict privacy and security standards.

Is Project Management Software monday.com for You?

The features of monday.com including its pricing and customer support have been designed to be people-centric. It keeps everything simple especially the technical aspects of the program. Furthermore, it renders complex information into highly-visual versions of them.

This really allows you to concentrate on managing people and not the project management platform itself. Everything is built around cohesion. Thus, we get to have collaboration & communication tools on the platform. Of course, this will only work when you effective communication strategies for online collaboration.

Furthermore, collaboration is further enhanced by being interfacing seamlessly with other oft-used applications. It really can be the catalyst that makes every project, task, and person in an organization work well together. Also, it is very enjoyable to use.

What’s really surprising about it is that it is so flexible that you can sometimes replace other management software out there with monday.com. This is especially so when you run a small team. With the right monday.com skills and customer service-savvy, you can even use it as a replacement for a CRM.

Essentially, you are free to create your own management software with monday.com.

Our experts rank this app to be in the top three of all project management tools. Some of them rank it as second or third but they are far and few between. Most of our experts rank monday.com as the top cat. It is likely to stay there for a while especially with the new integrations and automations in the pipeline. An appealing test drive of all software features is available to you when you sign up for monday.com free trial here. 

Key Insights

• People-Centric Design: monday.com emphasizes managing people rather than just projects, fostering better communication and collaboration among team members.
• Intuitive User Interface: The highly visual and customizable dashboard of monday.com makes it user-friendly and adaptable to various preferences and needs.
• Effective Workload Management: Users can easily assign and track tasks, manage individual and team workloads, and use various column types like timelines, maps, and progress trackers.
• Enhanced Collaboration: Features such as file sharing, Q&A, phone, and email columns facilitate seamless communication and collaboration within teams.
• Comprehensive Integrations and Automations: monday.com integrates with numerous apps (e.g., Gmail, Slack, Shopify) and allows users to set up complex automations to streamline workflows.
• Robust Reporting and Analytics: The platform offers diverse visualization options for data, making it easy to generate reports and gain actionable insights.
• Excellent Support and Accessibility: With affordable pricing plans, a comprehensive knowledge base, and 24/7 support, monday.com ensures users receive the help they need.

FAQ

1. What makes monday.com different from traditional project management tools? monday.com prioritizes people management over task management, offering a more collaborative and communication-friendly environment. Its intuitive and customizable user interface allows users to tailor the platform to their specific needs, making it easier to manage workloads and track progress.
2. How can monday.com help in managing team workloads effectively? monday.com provides features like task grouping, assigning tasks to individuals or teams, and visual progress tracking through columns such as timelines and progress bars. These tools help managers and team members stay organized and aware of each other’s responsibilities and progress.
3. What types of integrations are available on monday.com? monday.com integrates with various popular apps and platforms, including Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Shopify, Salesforce, Harvest, and SurveyMonkey. These integrations help users streamline their workflows and automate tasks across different systems.
4. Can monday.com be used for industries other than project management? Yes, monday.com is highly versatile and can be used across various industries. Its customizable dashboard and boards make it suitable for fields such as finance, academic research, video production, and more. Users can adapt the platform to meet the unique needs of their industry.
5. What kind of support does monday.com offer to its users? monday.com provides a comprehensive self-serve knowledge base, 24/7 email and phone support, and a 2-factor authentication security system. These support features ensure users can get help whenever needed and keep their projects and information secure.

By Stephanie Seymour

Stephanie Seymour is a senior business analyst and one of the crucial members of the FinancesOnline research team. She is a leading expert in the field of business intelligence and data science. She specializes in visual data discovery, cloud-based BI solutions, and big data analytics. She’s fascinated by how companies dealing with big data are increasingly embracing cloud business intelligence. In her software reviews, she always focuses on the aspects that let users share analytics and enhance findings with context.