Monday.com's Suitability for Small Businesses: An Insight Before Your Decision

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, one tool that has made a significant impact is monday.com, a cloud workspace designed for managing work. This platform, which offers four main products – monday work management, monday CRM, monday dev, and monday service – caters to a wide array of teams, from customer-facing to product and engineering.

At its core, monday.com is a project and task tracking powerhouse. Boards and dashboards within the platform make progress clear, eliminating the need for numerous status meetings. To get started with monday for a small business, begin by mapping a few repeatable workflows, creating one board per workflow, adding views, automating routine steps, integrating tools, and keeping track of projects with a simple dashboard.

However, like any digital platform, monday.com isn't without its risks. Weak account hygiene is a potential issue, with passwords being reused or shared, two-factor authentication (2FA) being turned off, and long-lived browser sessions remaining active on lost or shared devices. To mitigate these risks, it's recommended to enforce 2FA for everyone and adopt least-privilege defaults, limiting who can create boards, automations, and integrations, and requiring a named owner for every board.

Another common risk is over-sharing by accident. For instance, a client might be invited as a full teammate or a board left open, allowing them to see other clients' files. To prevent this, clients can be invited as Guests to their own board, enabling them to see only their project and share assets in context.

Moreover, sensitive work should be kept private. A security setting that can be enabled on day one in monday.com is 'Keep sensitive work private', which, for example, sets HR/finance/legal boards on private by default and gives clients Guest access to their board only.

To bolster security further, Bitdefender Ultimate Small Business Security can be employed. This tool blocks malware and ransomware, warns about phishing pages and fake attachments before anyone clicks, and quarantines risky files so mistakes don't turn into outages. It also offers a built-in password manager and breach monitoring, a VPN, and Scam Copilot to help sanity-check suspicious emails, invoices, or "support" messages.

Pricing for monday.com is per seat, with a three-user minimum on paid plans. Typical tiers include Free, Basic, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise.

In the realm of similar services, firms like Asana, Trello, ClickUp, Airtable, and Smartsheet also offer project management solutions. These differ mainly in complexity and focus, with Trello providing a simple Kanban board ideal for smaller projects, Asana offering intuitive task lists and workflows, ClickUp being an all-in-one scalable platform with Docs and time tracking, Airtable blending database and project management features, and Smartsheet focusing on spreadsheet-like management for complex workflows.

Lastly, it's important to address the risk of 'Ghost access', where former freelancers or interns keep their logins, API tokens, or shareable links and can still open boards months later. To combat this, it's crucial to regularly review and revoke access to ensure the security of your data.

In conclusion, while monday.com offers a robust suite of tools for managing work, it's essential to be mindful of potential risks and implement appropriate security measures to maintain the integrity of your data.