monday.com alternatives when you need less setup and more focus
Three monday.com alternatives for smaller teams and solo work, with fair trade-offs, official prices and how to keep or move your boards without losing track.
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The short answer
monday.com gives teams flexible boards with columns for status, dates, people and much more. People look elsewhere when they work in a small group or alone, when seat-based pricing adds up, or when they want their own day planned rather than another board to update. Here are three options and a careful way to move.
1. Thendoo
Free during early access; paid plans come later
Best for: People who keep monday.com for team work, or leave it, and want a personal Today view with meetings, tasks, habits and money.
Strengths
- Today combines Google Calendar meetings, time blocks and a Top 3 card, so it is clear what fits before the day starts.
- The same rule as every Thendoo work tool, the outside tool owns the task and Thendoo owns the time, so the team board stays the source of truth.
- Custom statuses and fields on Lists, with Board, Table and Timeline views for personal projects.
- Missed tasks show as Carried over, never as an overdue wall.
Trade-offs
- monday.com is not connected yet. A live connection and a monday.com importer are both planned, with the importer in the second import wave.
- Single-user only, with no shared boards or team dashboards.
- No native phone app yet, and reminders only pop up while a Thendoo tab is open.
2. Asana
Free Personal plan; Starter $10.99 per user per month billed yearly, or $13.49 billed monthlysource
Best for: Teams that want structured projects with sections, timelines and dashboards, and a free plan for one or two people.
Strengths
- The free Personal plan includes list, board and calendar views with unlimited tasks and projects.
- Starter adds Timeline and Gantt views and removes the seat limit.
Trade-offs
- Priced per user, like monday.com.
- Fewer free seats than Trello's free plan.
Best for: Small groups that only need cards moving across a board, with a free plan that fits up to 10 collaborators.
Strengths
- Unlimited cards, and up to 10 boards per Workspace for free.
- Standard costs less per user than most project tools.
Trade-offs
- Fewer column types than a monday.com board, so complex tracking moves to Power-Ups or Premium.
- Calendar and Timeline views need Premium.
monday.com is popular because a board can track almost anything. Status, dates, owners, numbers and links all become columns, and the board turns into a shared picture of the team’s work. Its free plan covers up to 2 seats and 3 boards, and paid plans start at Basic. For teams that need that flexibility, it does the job well.
Common reasons people look around
- Setup takes time. Every board has its own columns, so someone has to design and maintain them.
- Seat pricing adds up. Paid plans are priced per seat, which matters for a small business or a growing group.
- A board is not a plan. Seeing every item does not tell you what you will do between today’s meetings.
- Solo work feels heavy. Freelancers and owners working alone may want something lighter than a team workspace.
If monday.com works for your team, keep it. Switching only pays off when the reason is clear.
Leave, or add?
Decide this first. If the team stays on monday.com, the board should stay the source of truth. What you may want is a personal planner on top. Thendoo is designed for that, with the outside tool owning the task and Thendoo owning the time, but the monday.com connection is planned, not built. Today you would copy your next few days of items by hand.
If you are leaving
- Structured team projects with timelines: Asana.
- A simple shared board on a budget: Trello.
- Just you, wanting one calm daily plan with calendar, habits and money: Thendoo, with open items added by hand until the importer ships.
Export your boards before you change anything, and move only open work. Write down what each status column means on your main boards, because the labels differ from board to board. That short note makes it much easier to map statuses later, whether you copy items by hand or use an importer when it arrives.
Moving from monday.com to Thendoo
- 1Decide whether you are leaving monday.com or just planning your own day elsewhere. If the team stays, keep the boards as the source of truth and copy only your next few days of work.
- 2Export the boards you need from monday.com to Excel and keep the files.
- 3In Thendoo, make a Space for each client or area and a List for each board you still own. Map your status column to List statuses.
- 4Re-add open items through Capture (⌘K or Ctrl+K), or upload the Excel file to Thendoo's general Excel importer (Settings → Import), which brings items in as flat rows without groups or subitems. A dedicated monday.com importer is planned for Thendoo's second import wave.
- 5Keep the old boards read-only for a week before you archive them.
Questions
Does Thendoo sync with monday.com?
Not yet. A connection that brings in items assigned to you, with status and dates both ways, is planned. Today, Thendoo connects to Google Calendar and ClickUp.
Can Thendoo import my monday.com boards?
Not with a dedicated importer yet; one is planned for the second wave of importers. Meanwhile, the general Excel importer can read the board export as flat rows, without groups or subitems, or you can add open items by hand with Capture.
Which option is cheapest for a small team?
Trello is free for up to 10 collaborators per Workspace. Asana's free plan covers one or two people, and monday.com's free plan covers up to 2 seats, according to their pricing pages.