Monday vs Notion: Which Software to Choose in 2024?
Looking for an all-in-one workspace to speed up your workflows?
We’ve done the research and gathered user reviews to help you make the right decision for managing your project workstream.
Monday vs Notion may be your answer, depending on your needs and budget constraints. Monday is a popular project management software with automation tools, while Notion is a flexible platform with plenty of content management features.
Both tools have their own pros and cons, which we’ll be exploring in detail in our article.
If you realize that neither is your preferred choice (for example, you want to manage your agency’s financials or get in-depth business intelligence), we have a third alternative for you — Productive, a single platform for comprehensive agency management.
Keep reading to learn more!
Monday vs Notion: Key Takeaways
- Monday is a work management platform that supports customizable workflows for project management. It offers solutions for a variety of industries, including construction, manufacturing, and retail. It’s a good choice for teams looking for collaboration features but not the best for finances or business analytics.
- Notion is an online platform that helps you manage your business knowledge base. Like monday.com, it’s a flexible solution with extensive customization options but can be deceptively difficult to use. It’s best for information sharing and management but can be tricky to use for traditional project and task management.
- You can also consider an agency management option such as Productive. It offers professional services automation by helping you manage all aspects of your business management, from resourcing and finances to operative tasks. Unlike Notion vs Monday, it doesn’t offer a free version, but there’s a 14-day free trial.
Choose Productive for Agency Management
Predict your agency’s future with a comprehensive solution for daily and strategic business operations.
Monday – A Customizable Project Management Solution
Monday work management is a customizable tool for team collaboration and workflow automation.
Key features include:
- More than 10 workspace views, including Gantt and Kanban
- Create private boards by customizing dashboards with widgets
- No-code automations and task management with customizable status columns
- Time tracker tool across boards and planned vs estimated time reports
- Essential resource scheduling and allocation
Project managers use monday.com as a flexible platform for project progress management
Pros & Cons (With User Reviews)
Users enjoy using Monday as a versatile workspace for real-time collaboration and visual project tracking:
The high degree of personalization available on Monday.com is its most notable quality. Users are not limited by the platform’s predefined structure but rather can mold it to their own needs by constructing dashboards, columns, and workflows.
Source: Capterra
There’s also a free version of Monday available, though if this is something you’re looking for, keep in mind that it’s very limited — up to two seats and three boards only. Other tools, such as Trello or Asana, are more generous in that regard.
Additionally, automations, which many users consider a key feature, are only available in the Standard plan (with Basic being the cheapest of the pricing tiers).
When to Consider Alternatives
Monday.com’s flexibility can be a double-edged sword. Users report that it can take a while to set the tool up according to your workflows:
We wanted something more plug-and-play, but really, Monday is more or less a blank slate. You have to build out the whole thing out yourself, which is massively time consuming.
Source: Paraphrased from Reddit
Additionally, some advanced project management features are not integrated into monday.com. This includes time and budget management (time can be tracked across tasks but not linked to specific clients), which directly impacts the complexity of the reporting.
If you’re looking for a solution with advanced forecasting and budgeting features, Productive is the ideal choice.
Notion – A Knowledge Base for Project Planning
Notion is a knowledge management software with advanced features for complex workflows and task management.
Key features include:
- Collaborative docs with embedded images and various content types for note-taking
- Wikis with synced blocks, so your information is automatically updated across the platform
- Notion AI for content creation, translation, and auto-filling tables
- Three views for managing projects: timeline, table, calendar view
- Automations, filtering, and task customization with priority labels and status tags
:Notion is a unified workspace for team communication and documentation
Pros & Cons (With User Reviews)
Notion can be an excellent choice if you’re mainly interested in managing your information and knowledge. You can organize, filter, and customize your data in a wide range of ways, which can help you get more clarity and support productivity:
Notion will help you if you need to see a list of items with various characteristics, and it will be especially helpful if you want to arrange and rearrange that information in different ways.
Source: Reddit
When we compare Monday vs Notion, Notion is similarly a pretty powerful tool with a lot of customization options, but this comes with its downsides. It can be a difficult tool to grasp and even more challenging if you’re looking to get the most out of it (and truly tailor it to your specific preferences). Many reviews state that it’s easy to waste time optimizing and tweaking the platform instead of getting actual work done.
A blank canvas is great, but only if you understand how to use it. It took me several tries before Notion finally clicked. It can be clunky as a task manager, and though it’s functional, it’s not the most visually appealing.
Source: Capterra
Keep in mind that Notion’s AI feature is paid separately as an add-on (per user per month), so this will add some additional expense to your chosen plan.
When to Consider Alternatives
In comparison to other project management tools, Notion lacks some basic features for managing project timelines in a comprehensive way. While the sky is the limit with a customizable workspace like this, setting Notion up to do what other operations software can do out of the box can be an unnecessary time sink.
I found it excruciating for tasks and way too limited for any serious calendar work. I use it to capture basic deadlines and that sort of thing, but any other scheduling goes into a calendar. And all my tasks go into a proper task manager.
Source: Reddit
There’s also no built-in time tracking, Gantt charts, resourcing, or other functionalities for effective human resource planning. Basically, as a knowledge base, Notion can be a great pick. For more robust collaboration and work management features, it’s best to check out either Monday or Productive.
If you want to learn more about database tools, you can also check out our list of Airtable alternatives. For even more Notion-like software solutions, check out some top alternatives to Plutio.
Productive – An Alternative for Agency Management
Productive is a comprehensive platform for managing simple to complex projects in professional services businesses.
Key features include:
- Various options for project management views, including Kanban and Gantt views, with free guest access for clients
- A real-time resourcing module with drag-and-drop functionality that takes into account employee working hours and time off
- The ability to manage budgets within the platform, including hourly, fixed, and retainer
- Financial forecasting for revenue and profitability and team utilization insights
- Reporting templates with custom fields for business-specific metrics
- Collaborative documentation with Productive AI
- Various features for streamlining repetitive tasks, including automations, automatic time tracking, accounting, and custom permissions
TAKE YOUR BUSINESS INSIGHTS TO THE NEXT LEVEL WITH PRODUCTIVE’s reporting
Pros & Cons (With User Reviews)
Productive is a very strong contender in this list because it provides a structured approach to end-to-end project and agency management.
It goes beyond helping you manage task assignments and project goals to crucial aspects of strategic operations, like long-term resource planning and financials. Productive helps business owners expand their insights to support sustainable growth (and achieve cost efficiency):
Having a complete overview of projects, open tasks, team occupancy, and profitability—it makes project management so much easier.
Productive offers various ways of customizing your experience, from different ways to organize task lists, custom fields for reporting, to its automations and third-party integrations.
Productive can take a while to learn due to its extensive feature set; however, its customer service is often lauded as one of the best parts of the experience, so you can rest assured that you’ll be in good hands:
source: LINKEDIN
When to Consider Alternatives
Productive doesn’t offer a free version, though there’s a 14-day free trial you can check out to test the tool. Additionally, Productive is best used as an integrated platform — from time tracking, budgeting, to resourcing. While each feature can be used separately, you won’t be getting Productive’s full potential unless you’re willing to make it your primary management tool.
Choose Productive for Agency Management
Predict your agency’s future with a comprehensive solution for daily and strategic business operations.
We also have an article reviewing Productive vs alternatives, so you can check it out to learn more.
Monday or Notion or Productive: Features Comparison
- Project management: While Notion offers essential project and task management features, Monday and Productive take a more robust approach. Both offer more project views and include time tracking, workload planning and management into the mix.
- Documentation: Notion is the most robust option for managing documentation across the platform, including wikis with synced blocks and docs with a wide range of content types. Productive also offers built-in Docs with AI, which can be a great option for content creation and sharing.
- Overall features: Productive is the most robust option on this list. It’s the only tool that can support project financial management and accounting alongside seamless collaboration and productivity tools (check out our article on project budget tools to learn more).
- Usability: All three tools have their own particular quirks. Neither can be considered a fully beginner-friendly option, as it’ll take some learning and digging to get into them. However, Productive is frequently praised for its responsive customer service, which facilitates implementation and adoption.
- Integrations: Monday and Notion offer quite a lot of integrations. Some notable ones include Miro and Figma for Notion, and QuickBooks and Google Drive for Monday. Productive is more limited in this regard, but many of these features are built into the platform — some include QuickBooks, Slack, Google Calendar, and HubSpot (see more Integrations).
- Pricing: Monday and Notion offer free versions of their software, though each is limited — monday.com provides two user seats only, and Notion up to ten guests. Notion AI is also paid for additionally, unlike Productive AI, which is integrated into the pricing structure (learn more about Pricing). Productive also offers a free 14-day trial to test out the software.
Productive vs Notion vs Monday: The Best Tool for Workflow Management
Notion and Monday serve different business needs and purposes. They’re both flexible, but monday.com is better for project and task management, while Notion is more suited to database creation and managing knowledge bases.
A third option for businesses interested in an all-in-one tool is Productive. It combines robust collaboration features with customizable templates for your reporting and workspaces. You can use Productive to visualize and predict key financial metrics, like revenue and profit margins.
Book a demo with Productive to find out how to best support your agency’s future.
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