MNDY vs NOW

There’s been plenty of great stuff written on this board about Monday.com, by Saul and others. I wanted to add my perspective so as to get some feedback since I am still on the fence about investing in it. First of all, I’m not a techie, far from it. And after reading many reviews of Asana’s and Monday’s (and other competitive collaboration software offerings) I am no closer to knowing which is better, or even which management team is better (although Monday’s founders are impressive). I’ve learned that business success is seldom about building a better mousetrap (see Bill Gates) but rather about building a successful go-to-market strategy and then making sure your happy customers remain happy. That’s why customer support is crucial to B2B software – yet it is often overlooked. But not, it seems, by Monday. As one Monday customer notes: “you do have a very robust support system. Every time I put in a ticket, someone replies within the hour.” Smartsheet, for one, doesn’t offer one hour service.

Monday’s user reviews are simply outstanding, and because of their growing use cases, their claim to being or becoming a “work OS” for business doesn’t seem that much of a stretch. On reading Monday’s blog, I was surprised to see they actually compare themselves to ServiceNow, a 100-billion-dollar (mkt cap) company. But then, when I saw the customer reviews on Gartner (in the Project Management category) I discovered they have almost DOUBLE the number of ServiceNow’s 5-star ratings! (The actual percentages are 48% vs 28%, based on 161 ratings and 144 ratings respectively.) In addition, a WHOPPING 84% of Monday customers were “willing to recommend” vs only 66% of Now customers. Here is the link: https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/project-portfolio-man…

I always thought Now was positioning itself this way, especially with their prime target, enterprise customers. But Monday is committed to fulfilling its own claim to be a work OS. Monday’s features and use cases and its no code/ low code apps — not to mention its ease of use and visually attractive product design and customer support may be separating it from its peers. Pricing wise they are a little higher than competitors, but users seem to feel the extra cost is worth it. Pricing is transparent (except for their “enterprise pricing” tier) unlike ServiceNow. In addition, Monday seems to offer a more intuitive and colorful interface than competitors and a huge array of features compared to most (although the choices can be overwhelming and send users down a rabbit hole for a while, which is a negative). Monday’s software works with every size team imaginable – from small to medium to large enterprise customers. Anecdotally, Monday seems to be taking business from its older competitors, and even some new ones, including Asana.

What surprised me most is that Monday’s offerings are also rated highly by plenty of single-person FREELANCERS. I guess they need to keep track of their suppliers and their workflow as much as anyone else! Net Dollar Retention Rate has been increasing over the past two years, from 116% to 125%, and, as per Saul, Monday’s recent 93% growth rate (having decelerated from well over 100 percent in prior years) coupled with its overall financials suggest the path to profitability looks promising, especially for such a recent IPO (June, 2021). Over $50k customers are growing impressively at over 200%, as Saul and others have noted, but it’s off a very small base (in the hundreds compared to TEAM which has over 8,000 $50K customers and is growing them at 40%!) Jira is complex and not particularly user friendly as it was created as a workflow tool for developers.
But guess what? That tells us how massive the collaboration software market really is. According to Markets and Markets research, the Enterprise Collaboration Market alone will be worth $85.8 billion by 2026. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/enterprise-c…. As an aside, every company in the world can use and benefit from collaboration software, which may be why Atlassian hasn’t needed to advertise very much over the years.

Monday integrates (or will integrate soon) with plenty of software solutions including Datadog (soon) and Jira and Asana (now) as noted by a previous poster). Again, leadership sees mass cross-pollination as essential to their long term growth as a ‘work OS’. There’s plenty of competition, and the product only becomes truly sticky in large org’s if and when executive leadership gets behind it (many of the project mgt s/w users on Reddit boards for example seem to be constantly searching to find the “perfect” one) because what’s the point if only one team in organization uses it and loves it, if other teams are happy using other products? But again, maybe Monday’s GTM strategy, intuitive interface and customer support commitment will win out because the combination puts it at a higher level. Asana has a higher valuation likely for no other reason than it is American, while Monday is, heavens above, an Israeli outfit. I only have a small position (3%) in Monday because of the impending lockup of millions of shares coming in early December but would love to hear any additional thoughts or insights as we move ever closer.

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Monday integrates (or will integrate soon) with plenty of software solutions including Datadog (soon) and Jira and Asana (now) as noted by a previous poster). Again, leadership sees mass cross-pollination as essential to their long term growth as a ‘work OS’. There’s plenty of competition, and the product only becomes truly sticky in large org’s if and when executive leadership gets behind it (many of the project mgt s/w users on Reddit boards for example seem to be constantly searching to find the “perfect” one) because what’s the point if only one team in organization uses it and loves it, if other teams are happy using other products?

I own Monday stock, but I honestly don’t get how they get so many sales. It just doesn’t seem like something that valuable to me. We use MS Teams / Atlassian for the most part at my company. Project Managers are using whatever hodgepodge they need to excel, MS project, Jira, etc. Why would we pay presumably tens of thousands for another add on system? I looked at the SW dev page and it seems like a cleaner Jira, but we already have Jira integrated with the rest of atlassian, SW builds and releases, so I’m not clear on the benefit there.

So that is my view, however, I will say there are 2 or 3 other R&D directors out there always trolling for the next thing to roll in and then forget about. We use Atlassian as I said, for like 90%, so we use confluence, but we also have notion and another whiteboard system that no one uses but one group who had to have it at one point, etc, we also have 3 or 4 other add-ons to Jira that are sporadically used, points estimators, things like that. Some people like to spend time on the process instead of doing the work, if management doesn’t refocus them the process becomes bigger than the work.

I asked the VP of Project Management and he had never tried it, but his right hand person had implemented it at her last company, he didn’t seem too interested in it though. I just read through their examples again and maybe it is focused on quick PM, projects that take a few months, we’re generally taking years to do something (regulated) so maybe that is what I’m missing. The examples they have are like marketing campaigns and contracts.

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I own Monday stock, but I honestly don’t get how they get so many sales. It just doesn’t seem like something that valuable to me. We use MS Teams / Atlassian for the most part at my company. Project Managers are using whatever hodgepodge they need to excel, MS project, Jira, etc. Why would we pay presumably tens of thousands for another add on system? I looked at the SW dev page and it seems like a cleaner Jira, but we already have Jira integrated with the rest of atlassian, SW builds and releases, so I’m not clear on the benefit there.

Let me take a stab of the differences and benefits between Jira’s and Monday’s tools. Others, please correct me if you have a different understanding.

Atlassian Jira is a very effective tool for ticket and task management. I used Jira and Confluence extensible for 7 years for this purpose and it later became widely adopted across my company by other departments. Jira even allows you to customize the ticket/task workflow schema and customize the input displays for creating/modifying a ticket. You open and close Jira tickets/tasks. You can control authorization of access and visibility on a ticket basis. And there is an Agile developers process extension. One critical advantage of Jira is it is a shared ticketing/tasking system that is always current and can be changed collaboratively by others in real time. I am a strong proponent of Jira and a former stockholder of TEAM (though I sold it a little too soon perhaps).

MS Project is a very effective tool for fine grained project management of complex task and resource complexities. Jira is not the best tool for this. When I say complex, I mean a granular control of resources (both human and material), time windows, and task dependencies. For this, my tool of choice is MS Project. Here you have considerable input of information per task and intra task dependencies. You can report in many ways such as resource loads (is a person’s hours overloaded any day/week/month?) and visually identify potential bottlenecks using the Gannt chart view, etc. The you can jump between entry formats such as spreadsheet, Gannt, and resource availability (part time, vacation time, etc.) for the most expeditious method that suits you and the job. When a task is delayed, the schedule impact can be visually seen across the project and resources. MS Project plans are created on your computer device and then shared on a server (e.g. Sharepoint) periodically viewed by others. Linking of projects can be a bit cumbersome. MS Project is mostly used by larger engineering projects

Monday is more like a cloud-based MS Project than Jira, though Monday offers you a task management capability like Jira. Albeit people are purchasing Monday to do both. Monday is a cloud service that supports fine grained project management with full real time collaboration albeit without the high per seat cost of MS Project. Further, other teammates can work concurrently on the same project plan.

Why buy the Monday service? It is a more collaborative project planning service that is cloud based. You can do both task/ticket management as well as fine grained project plans. The cloud interface seems designed to facilitate plan development beyond the typical engineering realm into areas such as IT, Operations, and Marketing. Cost and budgeting are supported.

Why buy the Monday stock? It has accelerating revenue growth and good net revenue expansion. Monday should be a good SaaS pony to ride until it is not.

-zane

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jck101,

I own Monday stock, but I honestly don’t get how they get so many sales. It just doesn’t seem like something that valuable to me. We use MS Teams / Atlassian for the most part at my company. Project Managers are using whatever hodgepodge they need to excel, MS project, Jira, etc. Why would we pay presumably tens of thousands for another add on system? I looked at the SW dev page and it seems like a cleaner Jira, but we already have Jira integrated with the rest of atlassian, SW builds and releases, so I’m not clear on the benefit there.

I had the same question. As someone who works in software and uses Jira daily, I couldn’t see why Monday is a great investment opportunity at first.

Then I realized - Monday is valuable precisely because it aims to improve the productivity of non-software projects.

Atlassian makes money on software project management. Look at their product: Jira, Confluence, BitBucket. Recent acquisitions like Trello. They are made for the software development lifecycle. Jira, for a lack of better word, is an issue tracker first, then a project management tool. You found a problem or a bug, make a ticket and track it. Everything is a “ticket.”

This is not and should not be the case for projects outside of software.

Once I realized that the day to day workflow can be very different for people not in software (yes, sounds easy to realize but took me a while), I saw that Monday/Asana have enormous TAM.

Our HR department still tracks stuff with Excel. So is finance. Why are we still sending Excel spreadsheets to track work? The challenge multiplies when you factor in remote work being the new norm.

There was a quote I really liked when looking for stuff to automate with software - when there’s Email and Excel, there’s opportunity.

As a concrete example: go to Monday’s product page and see what kind of teams they sell to:

https://monday.com/product/

HR, Marketing, Media and Production. They are right there with Software Development. Their TAM is huge.

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Great feedback. I think you nailed the reason why monday and asana and others are growing like weeds. It’s the massive TAM. They’ve simplified project management software and pulled it from its roots as a niche IT tool (ticketing/ bug resolution/progress reporting function)and turned it into an all-in-one collaborative tool for virtually ANY business function/operation/process. Back in 2017, 4 years before their IPO, monday published a post explaining in simple terms “Why monday.com is so different from every project management tool on the market.”
Here is a key excerpt:

…you can use monday.com to manage all your projects, but you can also use it as a CRM, to manage your ad campaigns, to track bugs, to manage customer projects, and to manage video production. There are probably several different hundreds ways to use it, and we’ve found teams use it for just about everything: from teachers planning their lessons to engineers building airplanes.

Bottom line: Instead of hundreds of use cases, there are thousands.

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Hi jonnyghost, I was curious myself and being a tech guy, I started a free trial and decided to help my wife and test it to build up a CRM system for the Nonprofit where she works. What would have taken no less than one month of work, and having to read and sift through a lot of documentation, I was able to accomplish on Monday.com in a couple of seatings during the weekend. Granted, it won’t ever be a full fledged CRM solution, as you would have with the major players, but then again, it was perfect ROI for the nonprofit, in terms of implementation and usage. It will be a breeze to use for them, very easy. I was even able to see all of the contacts on a map, even with color graded pins, without doing anything on my part, I’ve just clicked on an address icon and voila, all of a sudden I have a map based contact list!

From the experience, I can resume the “why Monday”, with one example: Think about all of those business organizations that use excel everyday to do almost anything. Well, monday.com is the next generation of those excel spreadsheets. Suddenly those spreadsheets come to live, you can tailor them to manage specific processes, you can add automations, integrate them with the rest of the software you use, all with clicks, not code. And you can accomplish this literally in hours, not weeks or months. And everything is connected, real time, from your desktop, browser, or mobile. I really like the “Work OS” metaphor they use. I even had a couple of doubts regarding licensing, and I’ve gotten an answer seamlessly. The online community is awesome and it is very easy to find the answer you are looking for online, fast. There is a growing ecosystem of partners, consultants and developers on top of Monday.com as a platform, which is very healthy for growth.

I am nevertheless a bit intrigued about how fast large corporations adopt it on top of other cheaper, incumbent alternatives (like Microsoft for example). I would put a close attention to those use cases, understand real life users of those big ticket sales and how they benefit and why they choose it. I can firsthand say it is way simpler, faster and easier to accomplish than on Office, but somehow I am still intrigued.

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