Monday.com vs. Jira: Which Is The Best Project Management Solution?

Two popular options for project management software are monday.com and Jira. Both software programs are used for similar purposes and offer a variety of features that are more than enough to handle anything thrown at them. However, despite their similarities, they follow fundamentally different philosophies and thus cater to different needs. 

monday.com is known for its intuitive and visual interface, making it easy for teams of all sizes to understand and use it. Moreover, the software is designed to be flexible and adaptable, allowing users to customize the platform to fit their specific workflows. Conversely, Jira is more geared towards Agile methodologies, offering a robust set of features for complex projects and a solid foundation for iteration. 

Thus, this article aims to provide a comprehensive comparison of monday.com vs. Jira, helping you make an informed decision about which platform is best suited for your team. By the end of this comparison, you should be able to choose the one that aligns most closely with your team's goals and requirements. 

Key Takeaways

• monday.com is a good fit for teams seeking an intuitive platform with extensive customization and automation features
• Jira works perfectly for issue tracking and iterative tasks, which makes this software more suited for Agile workflows

monday.com software stands out for its user-friendly interface and incredible flexibility. Unlike traditional project management tools with a rigid structure, monday.com utilizes a visual board system that's completely customizable, making it ideal for a wide range of industries and project types. 

However, that’s not all—in addition to its visual features, monday.com empowers teams to tailor the platform to their specific needs by making use of custom automations, seamless integrations, and various templates. Thus, monday.com remains a popular choice for small, mid-size, and larger enterprises seeking a user-friendly and adaptable solution. 

Monday.com Key Features

• Customizable dashboards that offer views, such as Kanban, Calendar, and Workload 
• An intuitive user interface that’s easy for users to grasp 
• ‘Pre-Built’ solutions and integrations that don’t require technical training 
• Monday workflows to automate tasks using triggers, actions and conditional statements 
• Collaboration tools such as file sharing, comments, and real-time updates 

Pros 

Tailored Workflows 

The ability to customize workflows according to your every whim makes monday.com stand out from its competitors. Specifically, tailored workflows help teams streamline processes, reduce errors, and enhance decision-making. This customizability also applies to many other areas, such as creating a sales pipeline, marketing campaigns, and HR processes. 

Comprehensive Reporting 

monday.com offers a holistic and up-to-date view of projects. It does this by automatically updating dashboards as soon as source data is changed. When combined with automated notifications, this feature streamlines task handoffs and eliminates the need to manually request reports from other departments. 

Extensive Automation Capabilities 

monday.com offers many features to help automate workflows, thus unburdening teams from redundant tasks and saving time and energy in the long run. To accomplish this, it allows its users to create custom automations with triggers, conditionals, and actions. In addition, monday.com also provides ‘Recipes’, which are pre-built automation that users can utilize for their purposes. 

Cons

Lack Of Certain Quality of Life (QoL) Features

Despite monday.com's overwhelming list of pros, it lacks a few basic QoL features as found in other software. Users must switch between views to access subitems and cannot use ‘wrap text’ for any attribute. Additionally, you cannot adjust or edit automated commands, forcing users to delete and reset automation when they want to make any changes. All these contribute to making the software a little cumbersome and unwieldy. 

Jira software offers a robust set of features that cater to the needs of complex projects, especially in software development and IT. Its structured approach, using lists, tables, and forms, provides a clear and organized way to track tasks, assign them to team members, and monitor progress. 

Jira's strength lies in its ability to handle intricate workflows, track bugs and issues, and provide detailed reporting. It's a popular choice for larger teams and organizations that require a powerful and customizable project management tool. 

Jira Key Features

• Users can track issues to constantly monitor tasks and requirements throughout the entire project lifecycle 
• Robust reporting capabilities allow users to track project progress, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions 
• Customizable workflows that are tailored to your team's specific processes, ensuring that the project progresses as smoothly as possible 
• Integrates seamlessly with other popular tools, including Git, Confluence, and Slack 
• Can be used for projects of any size, making it suitable for all kinds of teams 

Pros

Issue Tracking 

Jira's issue-tracking capabilities are unparalleled. It offers a comprehensive platform for managing and tracking tasks, bugs, and features throughout the development lifecycle. This ability to track issues from inception to completion, combined with its adjacent features, such as its sheer configurability, make Jira applicable for a wide variety of project management cases. 

Extensive Integrations 

Jira offers integrations with popular third-party software, including Git, Bitbucket, and Slack. These integrations help enhance its appeal for Agile teams since the platform streamlines workflows and incentivizes collaboration. In other words, those integrations help align Jira further with Agile methodology principles. 

Agile Design 

Jira offers a host of features that are designed to help streamline Agile practices. These features include Kanban boards, sprint functionalities, and burndown charts. Finally, Jira's primary function regarding issue tracking and assigning tickets means that the software lends itself naturally to an iterative approach, making it more suited for Agile teams. 

Cons

Optimization 

At times, Jira can get slow or unresponsive due to handling very large but poorly designed custom workflows. Moreover, compared to other lightweight software, Jira also takes up more resources on systems. 

1. Pricing Plans 

Monday 

monday.com offers a set of pricing plans with an increasing number of features per tier. While all the essential features are included in the free plan, the advanced features are only available in the paid tiers. Examples of these advanced features include automation, roadmap planning, and Agile reporting. 

As such, monday.com offers the following pricing plans starting from 3 seats at least: 

• Free - $0 (free forever for up to 2 Seats) 
• Basic - $12/seat/month
• Standard - $14/seat/month
• Pro - $24/seat/month
• Enterprise - Custom Pricing

Disclaimer: Pricing is subject to change 

Jira

Jira offers a similar pricing model: lower tiers offer basic features such as reports and dashboards, and higher tiers offer advanced features such as unlimited storage, audit logs, and sandbox. However, unlike monday.com, Jira offers automation in every plan, instead of restricting it to higher tiers. 

As of now, Jira offers the following pricing plans: 

• Free - $0 (free forever for 10 users)
• Standard - $7.53/user/month (up to 50,000 users) 
• Pro - $13.53/user/month 
• Enterprise - Custom Pricing 

Disclaimer: Pricing is subject to change 

Winner: Jira wins this category as it provides automation in all its pricing tiers while also keeping its price point low. 

2. Workflow Mangement 

Monday 

monday.com utilizes various tools to help streamline workflows and free up team members from repetitive tasks. It does this with the help of extensive automation, integrations, and templates. However, the primary method by which monday.com manages workflows is a feature called monday workflows. 

It is an all-in-one tool that incorporates automation and integration, allowing users to build a workflow using a series of ‘blocks.’ These blocks often represent a specific aspect of your workflow and can be connected to other blocks to create automatic processes and help teams automate redundant or tedious tasks that can often take up a lot of time. 

In addition, these processes have a lot of applications and are not confined to only one department. For instance, an IT team can use the workflow for resolving common IT requests. Conversely, an HR team can use it to screen out applicants that do not fit the required criteria. 

Jira 

Jira’s modus operandi revolves around issue tracking. Thus, to enable this sort of workflow, Jira uses three elements to streamline this process: status (the position of the issue), transition (any action that changes status), and resolution (issue completion).

These elements, combined with the dashboard (a tool to help visualize workflow), make it possible to track issues as they move through the project lifecycle. Users can also flag specific concerns, create child issues and set permissions, which can help prioritize tasks and work more efficiently. In addition, Jira makes use of a Workflow Editor—a graphical tool that allows users to create, visualize and edit the steps and transitions of a workflow. 

Winner: Both monday.com and Jira have different but effective ways of managing workflows. Therefore, the final choice depends on what the team needs. If they prefer a more visual method that’s suited to Scrum practices, Jira is the way to go. But if they want to rely on automating large parts of their workflow, then Monday.com is the better fit. 

3. Customization 

Monday 

One of monday.com’s most prominent features is its ease of customization. It allows users to build custom boards that can accommodate any type of workflow. As a result, boards can be configured to add columns that hold various types of information. Users can adjust the data types to add information such as status, people, timelines, etc.

This level of versatility can lead to tailored workflows with various applications, such as organizing records or tracking or monitoring progress. The addition of custom automation enhances this configurability and ensures that users can get the most out of the software. 

Jira 

Like Monday, Jira is no slouch when it comes to configurability. Users can customize dashboards to display information differently with the help of dashboard gadgets. They can also add various transitions to grant total control over the way work items and issues flow throughout the project.

In addition, users can also opt for custom fields with diverse data types and gain a comprehensive view of their project. This way, Jira enables its audience to create the workflow that they need instead of trying to fit everything in the default presets. 

Winner: Each software has unique strengths when it comes to personalization, so they are tied for this category.

4. User Interface 

Monday 

monday.com's UI is known for its intuitive and colorful design. It utilizes a board system, where information is displayed in customizable sections. Its boards provide a clear and visual representation of project progress, making it easy to understand task dependencies and deadlines. In addition, the platform offers multiple views to suit your needs, like calendars, timelines, and Kanban boards, all with a focus on clarity and ease of use. 

Jira

Jira's user interface is generally considered clean, intuitive, and easy to navigate. Its visual design is focused on providing a clear overview of project information and facilitating efficient task management. Like Monday, it offers a customizable dashboard that acts as a hub to view pending tasks as well as share reports. Users can also choose from different project views to help them visualize certain key metrics in a new light. 

Winner: Monday’s user interface slightly edges out Jira due to its ease of setting up a new project, combined with all sorts of visual aids such as colorful icons. 

5. Collaboration and Communication Tools 

Monday 

monday.com’s primary mode of collaboration is its boards. These boards act as a central point for all projects, allowing users to easily view the status of every task and track progress. In addition to this, the timeline column helps its users manage deadlines by visualizing how each task is connected to another. 

To facilitate real-time communication, monday.com offers all the standard communication features found within other project management software, such as email, sync meetings, chat and Skype calls. 

Jira 

Jira’s collaboration features are designed to incentivize communication between teams. In addition to comments, mentions, and notifications, it also offers Agile boards, which can facilitate further communication, especially within Scrum projects. 

To further organize communication channels, Jira offers features such as swimlanes (to assign work to all the relevant categories) and child issues (to set a priority for certain subtasks). This meticulous approach to communication is particularly helpful for large projects and helps teams keep their work organized.

Additionally, Jira authorizes permissions settings, allowing users to access only the approved parts of the project board. Integrations with third-party software such as GitHub and Slack help extend the software’s communication capabilities. 

Winner: Jira’s extensive communication capabilities, while increasing the complexity of the software, ultimately offers more options than monday.com, making Jira the clear winner here. 

6. Project Templates 

Monday

monday.com offers a vast number of project templates. It provides a pre-designed framework for various project types, allowing you to quickly set up boards and workflows. These templates are customizable, enabling you to tailor them to your specific needs and project requirements. Monday's templates often include pre-defined columns, statuses, and views, making it easier to get started and track project progress. 

Jira 

Like monday.com, Jira offers a wide range of pre-built templates to cater to various project scenarios. These templates can be customized to fit specific project requirements, such as Agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban. Additionally, Jira's templates can be shared and reused across multiple teams, promoting best practices and improving collaboration. 

Winner: It is a tie, as both are evenly matched in this regard. 

7. Reporting And Analytics 

Monday 

monday.com’s basic reporting tools include formula columns, filters, charts, and more. These tools help users perform several actions, such as manipulating data (formula columns), narrowing down information (filters), or visualizing data (charts and dashboards). 

Moreover, monday.com also offers more advanced tools for reporting such as pivot tables, workload view, and word cloud. These tools help users identify textual sentiment (word cloud), add benchmarks, and manage resources more efficiently (workload overview). 

Integrations with third-party software such as Google Analytics offer more opportunities for further reporting. With all this, monday.com can not only help identify potential roadblocks within a workflow, but also enable users to take the correct action to overcome such hurdles. 

Jira 

Jira offers a range of reporting tools to track project progress. Standard Reports, automatically available within projects, cover features like time tracking and pie charts for various metrics. Other basic reporting tools include an Issue Navigator, which functions as a search tool, and the dashboard, which can be used to create and share report pages concerning specific projects. 

In addition, Jira’s affinity for Agile methodologies means that it has many Agile reporting tools at its disposal. Examples include sprint reports, burndown charts, and Scrum boards. Jira also offers an extensive number of add-ons, which users can install from the Atlassian Marketplace.

These add-on gadgets bolster Jira’s reporting capabilities, offering numerous reporting features such as timesheets, custom charts, report builders, etc. Third-party add-ons are also offered as integrations, meaning that Jira has all its bases covered when it comes to reporting. 

Winner: Jira’s sheer number of add-ons makes it the winner when it comes to reporting features. 

8. Integrations 

Monday 

monday.com boasts a robust integration library, allowing it to connect seamlessly with many popular tools you already use, eliminating the need to constantly switch between platforms. It offers native integrations with popular services, including Google Calendar, Slack, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams. 

Jira 

Jira also offers a wide range of integrations, allowing it to connect with various tools and streamline your workflow. You can sync Jira with Git repositories for version control, integrate it with project management tools like Trello or Asana, and connect it with communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Jira's integration capabilities are particularly strong in the realm of software development, where it can seamlessly integrate with tools like Bitbucket and GitHub. 

Winner: Both platforms offer an astounding range of integrations and are, thus, tied once again. 

Both monday.com and Jira are excellent project management tools with similar features. Both offer an unprecedented degree of customization, templates, and integration. However, the way they are designed makes them more suited to different types of projects. 

monday.com’s user-friendly board-based approach, combined with its extensive automation, makes it appliable to a wide variety of projects. While it lacks the add-ons offered by Jira, it still offers a variety of features that can handle most projects. 

Meanwhile, Jira’s focus on task tracking, combined with various collaborative features, means that it’s more suited towards projects that focus on iterations and sprints. This means that it lends itself more naturally towards projects that utilize an Agile framework. Unfortunately, its extensive options may be overwhelming for some users. 

Therefore, the final choice rests on the buyer’s needs. If they are seeking a safe platform for any type of project, monday.com is a good option. However, if they want a platform designed to handle Agile workflows, Jira is their best bet. 

If neither monday.com nor Jira fully meet your project management needs, then there are several other popular alternatives to consider. Asana software and ClickUp software are two notable options that offer robust provide a variety of customization capabilities, task management tools, and integration options.