The 7 Best monday.com Alternatives in 2021: Paid & Free Options
Do you like monday.com but are looking for a program that will better meet your needs? We’ve put together seven of the best monday.com alternatives to get you on the right track.
monday.com leads our ranking of the best project management software, but it’s not meant for everybody. Whether you can’t get along with its interface or just plain don’t like it, there are plenty of reasons why you’d want to try another project management tool instead. To get you started, we’ve put together these best monday.com alternatives.
Key Takeaways:
- Our top pick for a monday.com alternative is Asana, as it offers a very similar experience, but with some nice extras.
- If you just want something that can get the job done, but that’s cheaper than almost any other project management suites, check out Bloo or nTask.
- If you prefer something a bit more old-school, Wrike and Airtable might be good options. Both offer a spreadsheet-based experience, but with an upgraded interface. Wrike also has amazing reporting capabilities.
- If you just want something for nothing, Asana is again the best pick. We also like to mention Freedcamp and Trello, as both allow you to have unlimited users. They’re perfect for large companies that need basic project managers.
Which one will be the right monday.com alternative for you of course depends very much on what you need it for, but hopefully our picks will get you on the right track. If not, you could check out our selection of the best project management software for small business for some other ideas.
What Are the Best monday.com Alternatives?
Below you’ll find our list of the seven best alternatives to monday.com, more or less ranked by overall usefulness, with some exceptions.
- Asana — Shares many of monday.com’s functions, and then some
- nTask — Offers a solid feature set at a low price
- Bloo — Though not as powerful, has a great pricing scheme
- Wrike — Old-school rules with great reporting features
- Trello — The best kanban board around, plus some supporting options
- Freedcamp — A great free monday.com alternative for large teams
- Airtable — A great pick for people who like spreadsheets
All our picks are fully fledged project management tools that offer a wide array of features and functions. If you’re looking for something a bit more modest in scale, we recommend you check out our best project management software for freelancers article instead.
monday.com has a free plan, but it’s not very good. It offers only the most basic functionality, and only for two users. You’re much better off checking out Asana’s free plan.
Yes, but no: Trello is clearly trying to be more than just a kanban board, offering all kinds of fancy views on its paid plan. This may make it seem more like monday.com, but Trello’s offerings are a lot weaker than monday.com’s. At least, that’s the case right now; it could very well change.
Microsoft does not offer project management tools, unless you count its awful Microsoft To-Do program, which you should not.
Top Alternatives for monday.com
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What Is monday.com & Why Do I Need a monday.com Alternative?
Of course, you may be wondering why you’d even need a list of monday.com alternatives; after all, we recommend it in most of our roundups, so why would you need anything else?
In short, the answer is that monday.com is the best project management suite for most people, most of the time, but that does not make it perfect. As much as we like monday.com, we don’t use it ourselves at Cloudwards: Trello meets our needs just fine.
Pros of monday.com
Then what is so great about monday.com? Well, it boils down to a few factors: for one, we really like the project management features it offers. As we describe in our monday.com review, it has a solid package that should let any team, regardless of size, do what it needs to do.
On top of that, we also really like its interface. monday.com is colorful, but with a purpose: thanks to the riot of color it employs when you divide tasks, you can easily get your bearings and know what needs to be done and when. It’s really good.
monday.com also offers a decent, mid-range plan at $10 per user per month (if paying annually), meaning you get a solid set of features for a price that’s smack-dab in the middle of the market.
Cons of monday.com
That’s the good of monday.com in a nutshell. However, there’s some bad too, mainly in the pricing. While we like the Standard plan a lot, the free and Basic plans are pretty bad. The free plan is a stripped-down joke of a plan that’s barely a shadow of the best free project management software, while the Basic plan is ridiculously expensive for what it offers.
The plans on the upper end aren’t much better, and there are several other services that offer more for roughly the same amount of money. On top of that, monday.com’s feature set is a little lacking in some areas. For one, the Gantt chart isn’t very strong, and the kanban board could be a little better, too.
Even if you take that out of the equation, though, there’s still the simple matter of taste. Maybe you just don’t like how monday.com handles, or how it manages tasks or team members. Whatever the case may be, there’s a solid alternative out there for you.
What to Look for in monday.com Alternatives
What we’ve tried to do in putting together our list is to make sure that one or more of monday.com’s weaknesses are compensated for by each of our entries. Though that probably means you’ll get a different weakness in return, hopefully the trade-off will be worth it for your particular case.
Luckily, all our entries have either a trial or a free plan, so you can decide at leisure which is the best pick for you.
What Are the Top Premium monday.com Alternatives?
On our list, you’ll find a few options that have much of monday.com’s functionality but presented differently, like Asana and Airtable, or options that are just a lot cheaper, like nTask and Bloo. We also have an option that could potentially be completely free (Freedcamp), or at least partially free, like Asana or Trello. Altogether, we’ve put together seven contenders.
With the preamble out of the way, let’s go over our favorite monday.com alternatives, starting with Asana.
1. Asana
More details about Asana:
- Pricing: Free; $10.99 per user per month for the Premium plan
- Website: asana.com
Pros:
- Great interface
- Extensive features
- Better for large organizations
Cons:
- Pricey
Our top monday.com alternative is Asana, a great project management tool that loses out to monday.com by a hair in our general ranking. Asana is arguably even better in a few key areas, but as a general task management tool we’re a little more comfortable with monday.com. We go over the details in our Asana vs monday.com article.
When it comes to ease of use, Asana is comparable to monday.com for all the right reasons. As you can read in our Asana review, its workflow is built around the list, from which you can switch to a kanban view and a few others. It’s a solid approach, and both monday.com and Asana apply it well.
Advanced Task Management
What sets Asana apart, though, is that it has more advanced options. For one, it has a better Gantt chart (though it’s nowhere near as good as a dedicated tool — read our TeamGantt review for one example). Other tools include a timeline, workload planning and more long-term planning options. As such, we recommend it over monday.com for large teams.
However, bigger and better tools come with a bigger price tag: As you can read in our article on Asana’s pricing, it’s not cheap and all its plans are more expensive than comparable tiers with monday.com. However, it’s not all gloom: Asana also has a great free plan, making it a fantastic alternative to monday.com for teams of fewer than 15 people, as they won’t have to pay a penny.
- : Up to 15 users
- : Price is per user. unlimited users, expanded features
- : Price is per user. unlimited users, even more features
- : Custom pricing, advanced security features
2. nTask
More details about nTask:
- Pricing: Free; $2.99 per user per month for the Premium plan
- Website: ntaskmanager.com
Pros:
- Cheap
- Well-rounded feature set
Cons:
- Quirky navigation
- Privacy policy is a bit iffy
Our second pick is nTask, which isn’t quite as useful as either monday.com or Asana, but makes up for it in price. It’s by far the cheapest option out there, with the exception of Bloo and Freedcamp. At under $3 per user per month, you can’t beat nTask for price, especially considering your first three team members will only set you back a single buck per month each.
Basic Project Management Tools and Then Some
However, nTask’s overall feature set falls a little short when compared to the big boys. While it has everything you need to run most projects, a lot of the quality-of-life tweaks that monday.com offers are missing.
At the same time, though, it also offers options you won’t find with most competitors, like a meeting planner and a note-taking tool (though it’s no match for our best note-taking apps).
Still, at the prices nTask offers, you’ll forgive it a lot. We break it down in our nTask review, but its cost per team member can’t be beaten by anybody, not even a budget option like Bloo. On top of that, it has a pretty solid free plan for up to five users, meaning small teams can use this great project management tool without spending a penny.
- : Maximum 5 team members.
- : Minimum 3 team members. First three users are only $36 per year for all three.
- : No minimum or maximum team members.
- : Self-hosted option. 50 team members minimum.
3. Bloo
More details about Bloo:
- Pricing: $50 per month, or $500 per year
- Website: bloo.io
Pros:
- Flat pricing
- Flat learning curve
Cons:
- Feels a bit unfinished
- No free plan
Our third entry is Bloo, a relative newcomer that we were very impressed with when writing up our Bloo review. Its biggest gimmick is that it offers a flat price of either $50 per month or $500 per year regardless of how large your team is, which is pretty rare among project management software and its per-user rates.
It’s not a great deal for small teams: We figure most project managers charge about $10 for their standard plans. That means you need at least five team members to make Bloo worth it, or even as many as 15 to 20 if you use nTask as your benchmark. Freelancers and tiny teams best steer clear of Bloo, unless you really like spending money.
Light on Advanced Features
That reservation aside, Bloo offers a lot for its low cost. While it’s clearly still a work in progress in some parts, everything you need to keep track of tasks and run projects is here. Though it’s light on the bells and whistles of other services, people who like their software straightforward will love Bloo.
It also comes with some fairly unique team management and social functions that will help facilitate communication among your team, though we have a feeling it won’t supplant communication tools like Slack or Basecamp (read our Basecamp review). Overall, we really like Bloo and we recommend that anybody who likes cheap software give its 14-day trial a spin.
- : All features,Unlimited users,Unlimited projects
4. Wrike
More details about Wrike:
- Pricing: Free; $9.80 per user per month for the Professional plan
- Website: wrike.com
Pros:
- Solid tool set
- Gantt chart
- Great reports
Cons:
- Not the belle of the ball
In fourth place we find Wrike, a powerful piece of project management software with some serious old-school vibes. As we describe in our Wrike review, this is both good and bad: the good is that its file structure and navigation come with some old-fashioned simplicity. The bad is that it picks function over form, so it doesn’t look all that great.
A Complete Project Management Tool
Still, though, there’s a lot more good than bad here: Wrike is a very solid tool, and we like how well it scales. You could run a small company with it, a large corporation or anything in between. Its boards, lists, sheets and everything else will grow with your company. It also has better Gantt charts than monday.com does, as we discuss in our Wrike vs monday.com article.
However, what really sets Wrike apart from all our other entries on this list are its excellent reports. Wrike can produce more data, and with more criteria, than most other project management software, and makes it look easy too. If you have a lot to keep track of, Wrike definitely deserves a close look.
When it comes to Wrike’s pricing, it’s fairly middle of the road at only a few cents cheaper than monday.com on the mid-range plan. However, it has a far better free version than monday.com does. Though the features are a bit basic, it allows for up to five users, which is pretty decent. Overall, Wrike is a solid choice for any company, big or small.
- : Maximum of 5 users. Basic features.
- : Price is per user. Plans for 5, 10 and 15 users.
- : Price is per user. No monthly option. Plans for 5 to 200 users.
- : Plans for 5 to an unlimited number of users.
5. Trello
More details about Trello:
- Pricing: Free; $10 per user per month for the Business Class plan
- Website: trello.com
Pros:
- Great kanban board
- Intuitive interface
- Good free plan
Cons:
- Jury’s still out on the paid plans
- Integrations are hit & miss
In fifth place we find the best kanban app on the market, Trello. We use it ourselves at Cloudwards, and if you’re planning to run all your operations using only kanban project management, this is definitely the option for you. It’s very easy to use and the free version might very well be enough for you.
If you need more than just a kanban board, though, the choice between monday.com vs Trello is easily made, as monday.com has a much better, more complete tool set. At least it did until late 2020, when Trello got a massive upgrade that gave it a large number of new views and features that put it on par with full suites like monday.com — or for that matter, Asana.
Manage Projects With Multiple Views
As we describe in our Trello review, the new additions are pretty solid, and take Trello away from its former reliance on third-party integrations. On top of the board, users can also create tasks in a list, a timeline and a calendar. It all works pretty well, though the kanban aspect still steals the show.
As for Trello pricing, it’s about the same as monday.com’s, meaning there’s no financial reason not to make the jump from monday.com to Trello. If your project management strategy relies heavily on kanban boards, Trello should definitely be on your list to take for a spin.
- : 10 boards, Unlimited users, 1 power-up
- : Unlimited personal boards, 1 user, 3 power-ups
- : Unlimited boards, Unlimited users, Unlimited power-ups, Added views
- : Enhanced security options
6. Freedcamp
More details about Freedcamp:
- Pricing: Free; $17.88 per user per year for the Pro plan
- Website: freedcamp.com
Pros:
- Unlimited users on free plan
- Very economical paid plans
Cons:
- Sluggish interface
- Feature set isn’t as well-rounded as others
In sixth place we find Freedcamp, an interesting project management tool because it offers very cheap plans, as well as unlimited users on the free plan. It’s an odd combination, as it sort of dissuades people from signing on, but it makes Freedcamp a great pick for large teams with low project management needs.
As we talk about in our Freedcamp review, this is because it can do a lot, even in the free version and the lower tier paid plans. We especially like the calendar and how it works with the kanban board. It’s also very user-friendly and comes with a great dashboard that lets you keep track of multiple projects, recurring tasks — whatever you want, all at a single glance.
Free and Paid Project Management Software
For some reason, though, the first upgrade after the free version only gets you some integration with cloud storage services and a few other less useful doodads, so we’re not sure what you’re paying for here. The Business plan and Enterprise plan have a lot more to offer, but also cost a lot more.
Whether or not the upgrade is worth it is something individual businesses will have to decide, but overall we like Freedcamp enough to recommend that anybody with a large team and a small wallet give it a whirl.
- : Unlimited users,Unlimited projects,Basic functions
- : Price per user,Storage integration, Table view
- : Price per user,Templates,Gantt charts,Custom fields
- : Price per user,Security options,14-day trial
7. Airtable
More details about Airtable:
- Pricing: Free; $10 per user per month for the Plus plan
- Website: airtable.com
Pros:
- Easy to learn, easy to use
- Great project templates
Cons:
- Bit stingy with features
- Some pricing oddities
We finish up our list with Airtable, another solid project management tool that lets you do a lot for free. In fact, we praise it in our Airtable review for the fact that it offers an almost complete suite of features for free, limiting only how much you can use it. Though you will hit the ceiling pretty quickly, it still makes Airtable a great pick for small teams.
Spreadsheet-Assisted Task Management
The basis for Airtable is the spreadsheet, which is a pretty old-school way of handling things. Unlike Wrike, though, it actually has upgraded its look a lot. This means it’s only old-fashioned behind the scenes, which is nice. In fact, we like Airtable a lot for how it shows you the ropes, definitely making it a top pick for anybody unfamiliar with project management.
However, if you dig a little deeper, you quickly run into Airtable’s limits. A lot of advanced features are locked into the more expensive plans, and even those tiers feel like they could do with some filling out. It’s no Asana, that’s for sure.
This is made even more glaring by its pricing. Airtable charges industry-standard rates, but offers a lot less. As such, we can only recommend its free plan; should you need to upgrade, there are better options out there.
- : All views (except Gantt),1,200 record,2GB file storage
- : 5,000 records,5GB storage
- : Gantt view,50,000 records,20GB storage
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking for an alternative to monday.com, there are plenty of options to choose from. Though our overall favorite is Asana, thanks to its usefulness and some great extras, our other six picks have plenty to recommend them. From the cheap plans of Bloo and nTask to the great reports of Wrike, there’s something here for everybody.
What are your experiences with monday.com? Will you stick with it or try out one of our alternatives? Did we miss a particularly good option that you’ve been using? Let us know in the comments below and, as always, thank you for reading.
