Have you ever looked at different monday.com plans, trying to decode the differences between them? If so, you’re not alone. Figuring out which is best suited to your team’s needs can be a little overwhelming. 

In this article, we’ll explore the features, constraints, and potential sweet spots for each monday plan. Whether you’re a two-person startup that can’t commit just yet or a large-scale enterprise that needs every last shred of advanced security, you’ll find out fitting your business needs. 

If you want to watch a tutorial for a detailed comparison among the plans, check this video below: 

Understanding the Basics of monday.com

At its heart, monday.com is about making task management and collaboration a breeze. But it also has tools for project collaboration, CRM, and more. 

You can use it to manage projects, track sales leads, or even plan marketing campaigns. With views like Kanban, Gantt, and Calendar, it’s easy to customize your workspace to fit your flow, whether you’re a visual planner or prefer a more structured timeline.

One of the best things about this platform? It adapts to your needs. Whether you’re a small startup, a massive corporation, or a freelancer, it’s built to scale with you. Small teams can use it to keep daily tasks organized, larger companies can manage complex projects across departments, and freelancers will love the simple interface for tracking personal projects.

An Overview of monday.com’s Plans

There are five monday.com plans: Free, Basic, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. Each plan is designed to meet the needs of different types of users. Here’s a quick overview of who each plan is for:

1. Free Plan: This plan is perfect for individuals or small teams just getting started. It’s a great way to try monday without any cost.
2. Basic Plan: Ideal for startups or small businesses that need more features than the Free plan but aren’t ready for more advanced tools.
3. Standard Plan: This plan works well for growing teams or businesses that need more flexibility and advanced features like timeline views or calendar views.
4. Pro Plan: Designed for businesses that need advanced project management tools, such as dashboards, time tracking, and more automation.
5. Enterprise Plan: Best suited for large organizations with complex needs. It offers the highest level of customization, security, and scalability.

Let’s get into more details about each individual plan:

1. Free Plan

Consider this option if you’re brand-new to project management tools, you’re curious about how monday.com’s interface works, or you only have a couple of people who will be using it (and you really, truly mean just two people).

The Free plan also restricts you to three boards. A “board” on monday is like a workspace for a specific project or set of tasks. Three boards, in many cases, can feel pretty limiting if you handle multiple projects or want to create specialized boards for different teams. But if your needs are super basic (like, “Hey, let’s track a few daily tasks and keep an eye on one ongoing client project”), it might be enough.

Because it’s free, it comes with quite a few restrictions:

• Two seats: That’s you and your partner, or you and that friend who’s helping you out.
• Three boards: Good luck juggling more than three distinct projects or workflows.
• Limited column types: You may not realize how powerful monday’s columns can be until you experience constraints. Free plan users can’t access advanced columns like Time Tracking or Formulas.
• Limited automations: You don’t get automations in the Free plan. That means no auto-reminders, no tasks that automatically move when statuses change. So, you don’t get any of those time-saving features that make the platform so appealing.

Why You’d Choose It

The Free plan makes perfect sense if you’re super new to this. Maybe you’re a freelancer who only wants to experiment with a smaller scope. Or perhaps you and a colleague want to see if a cloud-based project management tool is even feasible in your industry. This plan is cost-free and risk-free. It’ll let you play around the basic settings and get used to monday’s interface.

2. Basic Plan

When you have three or four core team members who all need to actively use monday.com, you should look into the Basic plan. It offers a modest set of features that are enough to manage simple workflows with a slightly bigger team. 

The core features of this plan are: 

• Minimum of three seats: The plan starts at three seats and can expand to 200 or even more (the extra seats will cost more). 
• Unlimited boards: Unlike the Free plan’s measly three, now you can have as many boards as you need. It’s helpful if you want separate boards for every client or every department in your small startup.
• Unlimited free viewers: Let’s say you have stakeholders who just need to read the boards’ updates without making changes. Those folks can be added as viewers at no extra cost.
• 5 GB of storage: This plan also includes 5 GB of file storage, which is enough if you’re mostly sharing PDF documents or smaller images. If you regularly deal with giant video files or want to store everything on monday, though, you’d want to upgrade to a higher plan. 

However, the Basic plan does not offer any automations and integrations. So, you have to upgrade if you need to automate repetitive tasks or integrate third-party apps (like Slack or Gmail). 

In this plan, you’ll have access to a main table view, but you won’t get the advanced timeline or calendar views that come with the Standard plan and above. If you just want a clean, spreadsheet-like layout, you’re fine. But if you need Gantt charts, keep reading.

Why You’d Choose It

The Basic plan is an excellent solution for small teams (maybe 3–5 people) who just want more boards than the Free plan can handle, but don’t necessarily need advanced columns or automations. If your biggest priority is having multiple boards and letting viewers see what’s going on, this plan can absolutely work. 

3. Standard Plan

For a lot of users, the Standard plan is ideal for getting access to most of monday.com features. You’ll get extra seats, enhanced features, and a couple of the “extras” that make project management much easier. 

Some of the features that you’ll love are: 

• Automations and Integrations: Finally, you can automate tasks like “When status changes to ‘Done,’ notify the team” or “Every Monday, send a summary email to the project manager.” You’ll get 250/actions every month for both automations and integrations.
• Guest Access: It allows you to bring in external collaborators (think freelancers, consultants, or clients) without paying for a full seat, and you can have four guests per paid seat. 
• Timeline and Gantt Views: If your team deals with deadlines and dependencies, being able to visualize tasks on a timeline or Gantt chart can be a lifesaver.
• Calendar View: For those of us who live and die by calendars, having tasks show up in a calendar layout is a game-changer. It’s particularly helpful if you’re dealing with lots of deadlines that need a high-level overview.
• Dashboards (with One Board): In the Standard plan, you can create dashboards to visualize data, but they’re limited to pulling information from just one board. It’ll work if you centralize your tasks in a single board. 
• Storage: You get 20 GB of storage on this plan, which is significantly more than Basic’s 5 GB.

Why You’d Choose It

Standard is arguably the best fit for medium-sized teams or small teams that demand features beyond the basics, specifically automations, guest access, and timeline/Gantt views. If you can handle limiting each dashboard to one board at a time and limiting your automations, the plan would be the right choice. 

4. Pro Plan

The Pro plan is where many monday.com power users end up. It’s also the plan that’s most commonly recommended if you’re running a mid-to-large business that’s heavily reliant on the platform’s robust capabilities. 

Why? Because Pro unlocks even more automations, advanced columns like Time Tracking and Formulas, and a wide range of dashboard possibilities.

The standout features of this plan are:

• 25,000 Automations and Integrations/Month: If you’re planning to utilize the features like notifications, Slack updates, email automations, or integrations with your favorite apps, 25,000 actions per month goes a long way. It’s a big jump from Standard’s 250 and makes the Pro plan appealing to teams that rely on heavy automation.
• Advanced Dashboard Capabilities: The plan allows you to combine data from up to 10 boards into a single dashboard. That’s a good option if you’re managing multiple projects.
• Time Tracking Column: With this, you can count the total time spent on that particular task. It’s perfect for service-based businesses that bill by the hour, or internal teams looking to monitor resource allocation.
• Formula Column: It helps you do calculations on your boards, like summing up costs, determining the difference between start date and end date, or computing an overall score based on multiple variables.
• Private Boards: The Pro plan also offers private boards that only selected team members can see. 
• Storage: The Pro plan offers 100 GB of storage, which means more space for your files, images, videos, and so on. 
• Activity Log: Pro also has a longer activity log retention (a year versus six months on Standard). That’s handy if you want to track changes for a year (e.g., you might want to revisit how your boards evolved at the end of the fiscal year).

Why You’d Choose It

If you’re serious about making monday.com the hub of your workflow, choose the Pro plan. It’s built for teams that really want advanced reporting, heavy automation, time tracking, and the flexibility to combine multiple boards into eye-catching dashboards. It’s also more budget-friendly than Enterprise while still delivering lots of depth. 

5. Enterprise Plan

The Enterprise plan is for large organizations that have strict requirements around data security, advanced permissions, and hyper-detailed analytics. It’s also the plan that usually comes with custom pricing, because each Enterprise deal can be unique to the organization’s needs. 

Here are some of the features that come with this plan:

i. Deluxe Security and Control

One of the biggest selling points of the Enterprise plan is its advanced security. You get features like single sign-on (SSO), HIPAA compliance, IP address restriction, and advanced session management. If you work in healthcare, finance, or any industry with sensitive client data, those security protocols are essential for meeting compliance standards.

Beyond that, you get multi-level permissions. This means you can control who sees certain columns, which team members can create or modify automations, or which departments can only view boards without making changes. Such an in-depth function is invaluable if you handle large user groups with different roles.

ii. Massive Scalability

Enterprise includes 250,000 automations per month. The number is enough for big businesses that rely on streamlined workflows across multiple departments. You can also combine up to 50 (sometimes 60) boards into one dashboard (monday.com occasionally updates these numbers, so they may vary). For a company that wants top-down visibility across many divisions, that’s an absolute game-changer.

iii. Tailored Onboarding and Priority Support

When you sign up for the Enterprise tier, you’ll get specialized onboarding assistance from monday support staff. It might include a dedicated account manager and advanced training sessions so your team members can quickly adapt. 

And let’s be honest: if you’re paying Enterprise rates, you probably need that extra help setting up multiple teams and ensuring everything is running smoothly.

Why You’d Choose It

Enterprise might be overkill if you’re a small-to-medium business. But if you need large-scale usage, bulletproof security, or you have hundreds (even thousands) of users across multiple locations, the plan can offer the peace of mind and customization you need. Companies in highly regulated industries often choose this plan to comply with strict data privacy rules.

Which monday.com Plan Is Right for You?

Choosing the right monday.com plan depends on the size and needs of your team. Here’s a breakdown of which plan is right for each type of organization:

Small Businesses and Startups

• Recommended Plan: Free or Basic

For small businesses and startups, keeping costs low is usually a top priority. The Free plan is a great option if you have a small team (up to 2 seats) and only need basic task management. You can manage simple projects, collaborate with your team, and get a feel for how monday.com works.

If you need a few more features, such as unlimited viewers and a minimum of 3 seats, the Basic plan is a good upgrade. While this plan still has limited functionality, it’s perfect for teams that just need simple organization and collaboration tools.

Growing Teams

• Recommended Plan: Standard or Pro

For growing teams, the Standard plan is a great place to start. It offers more features than the Free or Basic plans, like automations and integrations, and supports a growing number of users. If your team is expanding and needs more advanced functionality, like tracking tasks across multiple boards or collaborating more efficiently, this plan will work well.

As your team continues to grow, you might want to consider upgrading to the Pro plan. This plan is ideal for teams that need scalability, advanced reporting, and greater automation limits. The plan also unlocks features like dashboards, time tracking, and more integrations.

Large Enterprises

• Recommended Plan: Enterprise

This plan is built for scalability, complex workflows, and security. It offers advanced security features, such as multi-level permissions and HIPAA compliance, which are essential for large organizations handling sensitive data. 

Ready to Find Out for Sure? Take Our Quiz

We know this can still feel like a lot to process. After all, you’ve got deadlines to meet, teams to coordinate, and maybe your dog barking in the background while you read this. If you’re still a bit uncertain about which plan checks all your boxes, we’ve got you covered.

Take our quick monday Questionnaire to find the perfect plan for your use case. It’s super simple (and dare we say, fun). Answer a few targeted questions about your team size, project complexity, and business type. We’ll hand you a personalized recommendation so you can head over to monday.com confident that you’ve got the right plan for your business.

Click here to take the quiz!