What is our primary use case?
monday.com is our CRM and task management system. We also use Jira, which was formerly our core solution. The company syncs monday.com, Workforce, and Jira because everything in monday.com's CRM can be transferred to Jira. We have an on-prem Jira data center and use monday.com as a cover layer for our sales team and some of our biz devs.
We have several branches in Baku and Latvia. A small part of the business is in Moscow serving customers we have committed to supporting until the year's end. We have a multi-language team. Our primary language is Russian, but we also speak English, Serbian, Mian, and several languages. It helps us to cover all the processes at a company-wide scale. We currently have 50 employees using monday.com.
How has it helped my organization?
monday.com helped our company get organized. For example, we have a special sales funnel. Every business process is the same as before, but some features and sub-processes cannot be handled with a different tool. monday.com is flexible and compatible with how our processes work. We could finally automate our process, which wasn't easy with other CRMs. The other CRMs are more rigid. monday.com provides better insight into how long and difficult our process steps are.
The collaborative features are nice. monday.com lets us add extra users to our account, which is helpful when sharing data with customers and outside contractors. We can grant them limited access to our boards so that they can add or download data. It's free to add these additional users.
The platform helps managers make some decisions. However, not all decisions are based on process information. monday.com is helpful for middle managers, but executives also require some financial information that monday.com does not provide. Sometimes it's not secure to connect your system to your financial base. The top management bases its decisions on information from various sources.
While we don't use monday.com for project management, many of my customers have used it to control their budgets and project timelines. It also helped make their teams' capacities more understandable and transparent.
What is most valuable?
I like monday.com's automation capabilities the most, but the reporting is also excellent. Jira and our other tools provide decent reporting, but monday.com adds another layer. We can drill further down into processes, problems, and issues. These reports helped us to control our sales funnel.
Our non-technical staff members find monday.com highly accessible. The interface is nice and it's much more modern than others.
What needs improvement?
They have a private report, but it's a bit weak, and you cannot get everything you need from it. They could add some more dimensions to split the data into different slices. At the same time, I understand that monday.com isn't a BI tool, but it would be helpful as a senior manager to have sliceable data.
The data linkage could also be improved. For example, sometimes you cannot automate item creation when you link different items to each other. You cannot connect the data deeply from field to field. It's somewhat complicated to link a contact to some account fields and automate the contact's behavior based on the value of those fields. The data is sometimes not structured enough for deep processing.
To do automated decision-making, monday.com's main feature, it isn't enough to link one item to another. Depending on the field or number, you need to make the system act a certain way. The logic is plain and not configurable enough. However, we aren't only automating end-to-end processes. If you have WorkOS, which is positioned as a top level of every system in your company, you will need to automate end-to-end processes.
Depending on the process criteria, it isn't easy to get end-to-end reporting. At the top level, you aren't interested in who is assigned to a task. You want a helicopter view of your company, its goals, and how those objectives are achieved. Sometimes, monday.com doesn't provide the whole picture because automation, when the boards are connected, isn't easy.
In large enterprises, you must split your data into different boards to ensure your internal processes work as they should, and you will need to link those data sets to each other. You need to connect tasks from marketing, design, sales, production, etc. This linkage is not configurable and not reflected in the reporting.
They could also have more extensive tutorial articles to reduce the learning curve. For example, you sometimes can't find enough information in the knowledge base or the forums to help you when learning to create integrations. You have to figure it out alone or ask someone from monday.com or another integrator to explain how to do this. It was a little tricky for us at the deep tech level. However, I think the documentation is good enough for the average end-user.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used monday.com for a little over three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We've used monday.com for a long time, and the system has become unstable several times, but the issue was quickly fixed each time.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
monday.com is scalable, but large enterprises need to plan before scaling up. When scaling, you need to consider the design of the data, how it is stored, and the way processes are designed. The risk of mistakes increases as you add users and boards.
If you add a flawed process to the system from the beginning, the mistakes in the design will be replicated on a larger scale. You will succeed if you are thoughtful in your piloting and testing at the start.
We may expand our user base, but we are unsure. We are SOC 1-compliant, so there are limitations on where data can be stored. For non-production processes, we will probably switch several teams to monday.com because it's well-integrated with other tools. Our accounting and legal teams will also likely move to monday.com.
How are customer service and support?
I rate monday.com support a six out of ten. Explaining your issue to them can be frustrating because they make you go through these silly troubleshooting steps first. They ask you to check if your laptop is turned on and connected to a power source.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used to work in Russia and used local solutions like amoCRM, Wrike, and 1C. We had another solution, but it wasn't good enough. We gave up on trying to find anything until we discovered monday.com. monday.com stood out because of its features, and it had the flexibility to fit our process.
How was the initial setup?
Setting up monday.com is straightforward. We started by automating the critical areas, such as customer collaboration, billing management, and paperwork. For example, we want to see which invoices have been paid, so we don't lose some money on the way. This sometimes happens in our country. The initial setup and configuration took around a week, and we finished implementing the CRM in a month. The deployment involved three people, including me. I was the architect who built the data structure, and two contractors implemented it.
Platform maintenance is done via requests to the monday.com team. You can reach out if something isn't working as it should or if you need new processes, integrations, or features. Every user can submit a request, so you don't need an administrator to answer your questions. You will just write a separate one, and that's it.
It took us three weeks to create our first project, but it was a highly complicated one. The CRM took three or four weeks. After deploying the project, it only took some fine-tuning. You sometimes need to correct a mistake or address some unexpected behavior.
Once we completed the first project, It was much easier to scale because the templates were ready. They have templates, and you can copy the board. You can clone your settings and leave the board empty with only the settings fixed. It's a handy feature because several branches use identical business processes. We cloned our entire workspace and group of boards. It only took one day to repeat the process at another brand.
What was our ROI?
We see an ROI in time and resources. We spend a lot less time on tasks and have been able to assign additional tasks to our teams because monday.com freed up their time. Our capacity has increased dramatically since adopting the solution, so we generate more profit.
monday.com reduced manual work by around 40 percent because we previously spent a lot of time manually creating offers and collecting documents for tenders. Now, everything is automated, so our offers are generated automatically. We fill in the details about prices, the number of licenses, etc., and it produces the document. Before, sales managers needed to spend several hours creating an offer, but they can do it now in five minutes.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The enterprise plan looks expensive because we don't understand the value as monday.com users. The pro level and other packages seem reasonable.
What other advice do I have?
I rate monday.com an eight out of ten. monday.com is highly flexible, and you can shape your business processes using templates. However, if you have many users involved in your processes, you must think about the design first to avoid mistakes.
It has some limitations in data linkages, but I can't think of any other tools I would rate higher than seven. monday.com is still my favorite.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner