monday.com Sales CRM Review
Monday.com is our choice as the best customizable customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Monday.com's most notable functionality lies in its extensive customization capabilities, which allow the team and sales managers to make the software their own. From custom labels and items to fully customizable dashboards, templates, workflows, forms, quotes and widgets, monday.com is a perfect fit for businesses with specific sales processes and close-knit departmental interactions.
monday.com Sales CRM
The Verdict
Monday.com's diverse feature set helps you manage the customer journey from lead capture to post-sale follow-up activities, while allowing you to modify the software to fit your particular needs, making it our top choice for the best customizable CRM.
Monday.com CRM Editor's Score: 9.4/10
| Pricing/value | 9.3/10 |
| Features | 9.6/10 |
| Customizations, add-ons and integrations | 9.8/10 |
| Ease of use | 9.3/10 |
| Customer service | 9.1/10 |
Why We Chose monday.com as the Best Customizable CRM Software
On top of offering core CRM features, such as sales pipeline and contact management, workflow automation, and email sync, monday.com gives sales teams and managers the power to customize almost every aspect, as well as connect to a plethora of integrations and the native API, to ensure the CRM fits the business's particular needs.
Unlike some CRMs that come with a predefined list of automations, monday.com allows sales managers to create custom workflows through modifiable formulas that reduce admin tasks, improve team collaboration and facilitate client communication.
What We Like About monday.com
- From lead scores and labels to visual dashboards and pipelines, you can easily customize your CRM workspace to fit your business needs.
- Your team members can create custom workflows that automate repetitive tasks like sending notification emails, advancing deals through the pipelines and changing contact statuses.
- Monday.com offers a native API and an extensive set of integrations (including Slack, Zoom and Zendesk), allowing you to further customize the CRM to fit your purposes.
What We Don't Like About monday.com
- While monday.com offers extensive support materials to facilitate the learning process, creating automated workflows does require a basic understanding of formulas.
- Considering its emphasis on parallel processes and cross-team collaboration, monday.com is not the best choice for solopreneurs and very early-stage startups.
- The Free and Basic plans have very limited lead and deal management features and no access to email functionality.
Did you know? Monday.com is available in 14 languages.
Ease of Use
One of the keys to a successful CRM implementation is ensuring that the software is easy to navigate, regardless of the user's technical aptitude or previous CRM experience. We like how monday.com offers that in spades right out of the box. During our demo of the software, we found that customer data is neatly arranged into folders that can represent different departments or aspects of the sales process. Each folder contains customizable dashboards for tracking leads, cross-departmental projects, campaigns, budgets, timelines and more.
FYI: You can import Excel spreadsheets (as well as Google Sheets, Trello and other popular spreadsheet types) into monday.com, and the software will automatically create a new board and add the data while retaining the original structure.
You can set up dashboards in many ways that adapt to unique business needs, or use templates – somewhat similar to the smart list templates in Zendesk Sell – to create new dashboards and sales pipelines quickly. Template choices include project management and workflow tracking, customer onboarding, support ticket management, invoicing and billing tools, and marketing campaign management. CRM-specific templates enable your team members to organize their contacts, manage leads and create optimized workflows. Further, monday.com offers a dedicated CRM template for real estate agents, a sales enablement kit and a sales materials repository. You can choose from over 200 templates, but it's easy to build a board from scratch in minutes with custom columns and rows if nothing quite fits the bill.
Business app integrations are equally easy to set up. Most can be added in a few clicks from the integration center – no coding required. In addition to popular choices like Mailchimp, Slack, and Zoom, you can connect to an extra set of apps through Zapier, find additional options in the connected marketplace, or use the open API.
Monday.com requires virtually no training, but the company offers a large knowledge base of resources, a community forum and a dedicated dashboard inside the app for users who run into glitches or want to learn more about monday.com's features and capabilities.
Monday.com Features
Monday.com offers a host of valuable CRM features and tools.
Customizable Sales Workspace
To be effective, it's essential that a CRM reflects your sales process and fits your specific business needs. One of the most powerful aspects of monday.com is its customization capabilities. When testing the platform, we found that from the very start, users can create custom dashboards for each team or sales stage. They can add as many as 10,000 rows and 200 columns per board (for enterprise plans, the number rises to 20,000 and 300, respectively), neatly arranging all the relevant data, such as leads, accounts, opportunities and activities. Similar to many other CRMs, you can create custom labels for deal stages or opportunity priority levels. However, in monday.com, these labels are color-coded to make it easy to grasp the key information at a glance.
Additionally, monday.com allows you to populate dashboards with custom widgets that can display calendars and timelines, pending tasks, your sales team's workload, key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets, and any other information that is relevant to your business. If you want to add some light fun to your sales management, you can even visualize your deals as wandering lamas and turn them green once the deal is closed. Who said sales management had to be all work and no play?
Workflow Automation
Automated workflows are an important CRM feature that businesses use to make sure no details fall off the radar and to free teams to focus on their work rather than on the minutiae of updating a CRM database. In monday.com, we like how you can use workflow automation to send emails and notifications, advance contacts and deals along the sales process, create reminders and tasks, and facilitate team management.
You can choose from an extensive list of predefined automations or create your own using trigger-condition-action formulas. Each dashboard has its own set of default automations. For example, you can decide to automatically send a custom email to a newly qualified lead or define the logic for moving deals between pipelines.
Tip: Use the built-in Automation Activity Log to track automations and see if they were executed successfully.
Full-Cycle Lead Management
The functionality of most CRMs ends when the sale is closed, forcing companies to deploy secondary software or other systems to manage post-sale activity and the associated work of other departments. In contrast, monday.com enables users to manage the entire customer journey from lead generation to invoicing, contracts and onboarding in one place. You can create custom dashboards to reflect your internal structure and set up custom automated workflows so that the contact effortlessly advances through the stages, which makes monday.com a great choice for all types of businesses, from real estate to software development.
Data Visualization Tools
CRM software is great for capturing and managing customer information, but its real value is in using that data to improve decision-making and develop actionable business strategies. Monday.com offers a number of ways to view your data and then share it internally or publicly. The Kanban view is excellent for drag-and-drop deal management, the files view organizes documents and images for easy access, and the Gantt view identifies timelines and dependencies at a glance.
In addition, you can easily create charts for tracking specific KPIs, monitor your team's workload for optimal performance, get a visual snapshot of key item information with the cards view, and even set up and display the information collected through the custom-made forms. You can add as many views and dashboards as you like to visualize the data that matters most to your business's success.
Team Collaboration
Individual teams and departments often rely on each other to accomplish their work, so everyone must have access to the same information. Monday.com's ready-made templates and customizable dashboards give teams the visibility they need, provide a single point of communication to keep everything on track and improve productivity. Companies can also provide guest access to specific boards and files, making monday.com a terrific choice for teams that regularly work with freelancers, contractors or hands-on clients who want to collaborate in real time. In addition, users can indicate whether they are working from home, out sick, on break or in a meeting by setting a work status, ensuring smooth and uninterrupted collaboration.
Integrations
An extensive library of integrations allows businesses to fill in the gaps where monday.com's functionality leaves off. You can connect the software to Slack, Zoom or Microsoft Teams to facilitate real-time communication and messaging; attach and share files from OneDrive, Box or Dropbox; or integrate Google's suite of business apps directly into your dashboards.
If you can't find the app you need, you can use the integration with Zapier and Make, which act as a gateway to thousands of additional options. While some of these integrations are available in other CRMs, monday.com offers a native Email & Activities app that allows users to track recent conversations and updates and set up custom activity triggers for smart workflow automations.
Monday.com Pricing
Monday.com offers a range of affordable service plans, with prices starting at $30 per month for three users. There is also a limited free plan that can be used by up to two users. All paid plans include unlimited contacts, pipelines, dashboards and documents, mobile apps and access to over 200 templates.
Plan costs increase based on a combination of the number of users (minimum of three) and the plan tier, and you can choose either monthly or annual billing. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial to get a feel for the software.
The prices listed below are for three "seats" (users) when billed annually.
- Free: This plan includes up to two users, web forms for lead capture, up to 1,000 contacts, 500MB of file storage, Kanban view and one data visualization dashboard.
- Basic: This plan costs $30 per month and includes everything in the Free plan plus unlimited read-only viewers, contacts, and customizable pipelines, as well as 5GB of file storage.
- Standard: For $42 per month, this plan includes everything in Basic plus two-way email sync with Gmail and Outlook; quotes and invoices; Gantt, timeline and calendar data views; guest access; up to 250 automations and 250 integrations per month; and 20GB of file storage.
- Pro: For $72 per month, this plan includes everything in Standard plus private boards, sales forecasting and CRM metrics, time tracking, chart and workload views, email tracking, up to 25,000 automations and 25,000 integrations per month, and 100GB of file storage.
- Enterprise: This plan, which requires you to call for a quote, includes everything in Pro plus enterprise-grade security, advanced CRM reporting, lead scoring, team quotas, up to 250,000 automations and 250,000 integrations per month, and 1TB of file storage.
Implementation and Onboarding
Monday.com is cloud-based software, so you can use it anywhere that has internet access. All of the technical heavy lifting is done behind the scenes, so new users can log in, create new boards from scratch or with a template, and begin adding tasks. Customers who prefer a computer-based work environment can download monday.com's desktop app for Mac or Windows and follow the same setup process to get started.
Monday.com offers a video-driven Getting Started course that can be accessed from within the CRM. Paid assistance is available via monday.com's partnership program for businesses that need additional setup support or training. Pricing varies by the services needed, the size of the team and other factors; customers can contact the company for a quote.
Customer Service
Monday.com offers 24/7 email customer support with all plans; a self-service knowledge base filled with tutorials, guides and other reference materials; and a community forum. Additionally, the company offers daily live webinars on various aspects of the software and how to optimize its features. Live and on-demand webinars are currently offered in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Hebrew. Currently, the company is in the process of rolling out a chat support option.
Monday.com's Enterprise plan also includes a dedicated customer success manager to assist with onboarding and training. The plan also includes continued personalized support for the duration of the subscription.
The customer service department was helpful and friendly when we contacted monday.com to learn more about onboarding and training options. A representative responded immediately with detailed information on how to get a quote and learn more about the company's partnership training program.
Limitations
While monday.com's software is easy to understand, its pricing structure is surprisingly complex. It changes based on the number of seats, which is common for CRM software. But rather than calculating pricing based on the exact number of users, the company makes customers choose in increments of three, five, 10, 15, 20 and so on. Those tiers change the price of individual plans accordingly, making it a bit challenging to select a plan that aligns with your budget and accommodates enough team members.
Monday.com is extremely customizable, allowing users to shape every aspect of the CRM to their needs. However, the product's greatest strength has its downsides, as some users may find themselves spending more time tweaking settings than actually using the software. Some businesses may be better served by choosing a CRM with fewer customization options, as we found in our review of Keap.
A big part of customization is dependent on the use of if-then formulas. While monday.com offers support materials to facilitate the process, newcomers not familiar with the functions and formulas might find this aspect of the CRM somewhat challenging.
Methodology
This review is based on our comparative research of dozens of software solutions in the CRM category and an extensive product review process that included a demo from the company's representatives; correspondence with the customer support team; a trial to evaluate the product's functionality; and review of numerous on-demand webinars, tutorials and support materials. As part of the review, we took a close look at monday.com's features and available functionality, including contact and deal management, sales enablement, workflow automation, team collaboration, analytics, available integrations, and flexibility.
FAQs
Is monday.com a CRM or a project management tool?
Monday.com started as a project management solution but has since developed a suite of focused products, including a sales CRM, as well as marketing and software management platforms. The platforms can be interconnected, providing a holistic business management solution.
Does monday.com CRM have a free plan?
Yes. Monday.com's free plan allows up to two users and offers basic CRM features like contact management, limited file storage, web forms, Kanban view and a single visual dashboard.
Is monday.com good for one person?
Monday.com has a limited free plan that supports up to two users. It is suited for entrepreneurs and ultra-small teams that are looking for basic contact and deal management features and have a relatively small database. Those looking for advanced CRM functionality, sales analytics, workflow automation and integrations can choose one of the paid plans. However, the minimum number of users allowed on a paid plan is three, bringing the minimum monthly cost to $30 when paid annually.
Bottom Line
We recommend monday.com for …
- Businesses that need extensive customization options to fit their sales processes.
- Sales teams looking to manage the entire customer journey in one place.
- Companies that need their CRM to support multiple languages.
We don't recommend monday.com for …
- Businesses looking for advanced CRM tools and features in a free solution.
Solopreneurs and business owners who need a CRM for a set number of seats
monday.com Sales CRM
The Verdict
Monday.com's diverse feature set helps you manage the customer journey from lead capture to post-sale follow-up activities, while allowing you to modify the software to fit your particular needs, making it our top choice for the best customizable CRM.