Best monday.com Alternatives 2024: Our Top 5 Picks

Still looking for the perfect all-in-one project management tool? You're setting yourself up for disappointment: the perfect platform doesn't exist — and even our top pick, monday.com, isn't ideal for everyone. But if not monday.com, then what?

We present some of the best alternatives to monday.com, highlighting what they do better (or worse) than our top choice.

monday.com takes the top spot in our comparison of the best project management tools due to its versatile task and project management features, combined with an intuitive interface that suits various project types and team sizes.

However, this doesn’t mean that monday.com is perfect or the right choice for every team. Some of its drawbacks include:

If monday.com isn’t the best fit for you and/or your team for these or other reasons, you’ll need an alternative. But which one?

We extensively tested eleven popular project management tools. While almost all of them promise essentially the same benefits — enhanced team productivity, better task overview, seamless workflows, reduced administrative effort, and so on — each platform takes a different approach towards achieving these goals.

Here are our top 5 alternatives to monday.com:

ClickUp* positions itself as an all-in-one productivity platform. This self-proclaimed “one app to replace them all” aims to provide everything in one place: task management, communication, documentation, and more. It really tries to appeal to as broad an audience as possible — with solid results.

ClickUp stands out for its adaptability: almost every feature, view, and button is customizable to some degree. This allows you to tailor the platform to different organizational and working methods, creating workflows that meet your team’s specific needs.

ClickUp's range of features is impressive, including standard functions and views as well as advanced tools like chats, whiteboards, and collaborative document editing.

ClickUp is overall more flexible and comprehensive than monday.com. Here are some aspects where ClickUp excels:

ClickUp isn't without issues of its own, most of which are typical of one-size-fits-all platforms:

Finding ClickUp too complex and unfocused? Then Asana* might be the better alternative to monday.com. Developed by former Facebook employees, this U.S.-based project management tool emphasizes swift and intuitive usability.

Asana's interface is among the best on the market: it's modern, elegant, and easy for beginners to understand, providing a level of dynamism in task management that we find lacking in more cumbersome tools like ClickUp.

But Asana isn't just about a sleek interface. It backs up its offering with a solid set of features, a variety of views, and advanced task management tools that can handle complex workflows.

Asana is very similar to monday.com in many respects, with differences mainly in the details. Here are some aspects where Asana excels over monday.com:

When it comes to less process-oriented approaches, Asana is not as flexible as monday.com. Additionally, Asana shares some of monday.com's weaknesses:

While monday.com is a generalist catering to a wide range of user groups, Teamwork.com* focuses on a specific audience: teams working on client projects, such as agencies. This focus results in features that are more tailored to client work, including budget, collaboration, and time tracking tools.

Teamwork.com stands out with its comprehensive and well-designed budgeting features. You can assign a budget to each project, track the time spent accurately, and monitor task by task whether you're meeting your financial targets. At the end of the project, you can even convert billable hours directly into invoices within the Teamwork.com platform.

Teamwork.com also excels in standard project management features, supporting key views, field types, and task management tools. This makes it a versatile project hub, particularly suited for agencies and other teams that work directly on client projects.

With its focus on client projects, Teamwork.com offers several features that are either missing or less developed in monday.com:

Teamwork.com's specific focus compared to monday.com and other solutions comes with a few disadvantages:

Notion* is a departure from the solutions mentioned so far. Unlike monday.com and similar platforms, it's not purely a project management tool. Rather, Notion is a platform for creating knowledge databases — which can also be used to organize projects and tasks.

Notion is incredibly versatile. It combines note-taking, document management, databases, wikis, task management, and project management into a single, highly customizable platform. This allows you to create everything from simple company wikis to complex project plans.

Even though project management features are not the core of Notion, they are far from marginal. Notion covers all the basics: you can view your projects in different ways, customize tasks extensively, add subtasks and dependencies, and sort and categorize data with numerous filters.

Thanks to Notion's flexible page structure, you can design project management views according to your preferences and organize them in a wiki format. This adaptability lets you build each page to meet the exact needs of your project or team.

It's hard to compare monday.com and Notion since the platforms are fundamentally different. Notion’s main advantage is its broader scope:

Notion's broad functionality has its downsides, such as:

Airtable* is another hybrid solution that combines database, spreadsheet, and project management features into a unique and versatile platform. While it’s not just a project management tool, its capabilities make it a powerful central hub for data-intensive projects.

Airtable stands out thanks to its enormous flexibility and adaptability, making it a powerful tool for data-intensive projects.

Airtable’s biggest strength lies in its ability to organize complex database structures in an intuitive and user-friendly way. You can easily create searchable libraries of data, customize them extensively with a wide range of custom fields, and filter them by various criteria. It also supports key views such as tables, Kanban boards, and timelines.

Airtable's versatile database features set it apart from monday.com and other project management tools:

Of course, Airtable has a few shortcomings when compared to monday.com and other solutions:

There are plenty of other project management tools that might make a good alternative to monday.com. Here are a few examples:

Wrike* is a versatile and easy-to-use project management tool for teams that's quite similar to monday.com. It's a bit lacking in the custom field types department, and its collaboration features are limited.

Trello* specializes in the Kanban method, allowing you to visualize your projects using Kanban boards and a few other views. Its narrow Kanban-focus makes Trello particularly user-friendly and suitable for beginners, but less versatile than monday.com and other platforms.

Similar to Airtable, Smartsheet* is a spreadsheet-based platform ideal for data-intensive projects. While task management isn’t its primary focus, Smartsheet does quite well as a project management platform, though it requires some understanding of spreadsheets.

Basecamp* is a relatively simple project management tool for small and growing teams, focusing on fixed structures and sequences rather than customization. These limitations make Basecamp very intuitive but less versatile and scalable than other tools.

MeisterTask* like Trello, focuses on the Kanban method but takes this focus even further: it doesn't support alternative views at all. Therefore, it is suitable only for simple projects that can be organized using Kanban.

Here is the overall ranking of the project management tools we've tested, with links to our detailed reviews:

If not monday.com, then what? That depends on what you need from a project management tool:

For detailed reviews of these and other project management tools, check out our guide to the best project management software.