Monday.com Limitations That Hit Growing Teams Hard

Monday.com is one of the most popular project management platforms in Australia, and for good reason. The interface is colourful, intuitive, and satisfying to use. You can spin up a board in minutes, add columns for any data type, and get a team collaborating almost immediately. For a small team managing projects, tracking tasks, or running a basic pipeline, it’s genuinely excellent.

But Monday.com was designed for project management, and when growing businesses try to use it as their operational backbone — handling complex workflows, managing permissions across departments, generating meaningful reports, or automating business logic — it starts to strain. Here’s where the limitations show up, with specific numbers and examples.

Pricing Escalates Fast

Monday.com’s pricing is per-seat, and the plans aren’t cheap at scale:

• Basic — $12 AUD/seat/month (minimum 3 seats)
• Standard — $17 AUD/seat/month
• Pro — $30 AUD/seat/month
• Enterprise — custom pricing

A team of 10 on the Standard plan pays $170/month — $2,040/year. Reasonable. But a team of 40 on the Pro plan (which you’ll need for time tracking, formula columns, and better automations) pays $1,200/month — $14,400/year. And Monday.com enforces a minimum seat count that rounds up, so a team of 33 might be paying for 35 or 40 seats.

The real cost issue is the gap between Standard and Pro. Many features that growing teams consider essential — formula columns, time tracking, chart views, workload views, and higher automation limits — are locked behind the Pro plan. You often end up upgrading the entire team to Pro because three people need one Pro feature.

Automations Have Low Ceilings

Monday.com includes built-in automations, and they’re useful for simple tasks — “when status changes to Done, notify the project manager” or “when a date arrives, move item to another group.” But the limits are tight:

• Standard plan: 250 automation actions per month
• Pro plan: 25,000 automation actions per month
• Enterprise: 250,000 per month

250 actions on the Standard plan is almost nothing. A single automation that triggers on every item status change across a board with 50 active items, updated twice daily, burns through 3,000 actions per month — twelve times the Standard limit. Most teams hit the ceiling within the first week and are forced to upgrade.

Even on Pro, the automations themselves are limited in what they can do:

• No complex conditionals — you can’t build “if this AND that, then do X, but if only this, then do Y” logic in a single automation
• No loops — you can’t iterate over subitems or connected items
• No external API calls on Standard — integrations with external tools require Pro or higher
• No error handling — if an automation fails, it fails silently. There’s no retry, no fallback, no notification that something went wrong

Teams that need real automation end up connecting Monday.com to Zapier or Make, which adds cost and complexity. Now you’re paying for Monday.com, an automation platform, and spending time maintaining the connections between them.

Permissions Don’t Match Real Organisations

This is where Monday.com causes the most pain for growing teams. The permission model works at three levels: workspace, board, and column. But the options at each level are limited:

• Board-level: You can make a board private, shareable, or public. There’s no “this team can view but not edit” option at the board level on lower plans.
• Column-level: On Enterprise, you can restrict column visibility. On Pro and below, everyone with board access sees every column. You can’t hide cost data from sales reps, salary information from non-HR staff, or client financials from junior team members.
• Item-level: There is no item-level permission. You can’t say “sales reps only see their own deals.” Everyone with board access sees every item. The workaround is creating separate boards per person or team, which fragments your data and kills cross-team visibility.

For a team of 8 where everyone trusts everyone, this is fine. For a team of 30+ with contractors, department heads, junior staff, and external clients, the lack of granular permissions forces uncomfortable choices: either give people access to data they shouldn’t see, or fragment your workspace so heavily that the centralised visibility — the whole point of Monday.com — is lost.

Reporting Is Surface-Level

Monday.com offers dashboards with widgets — charts, numbers, battery indicators, workload views. For quick visual overviews, they’re decent. For actual business reporting, they fall short:

• No cross-board formulas — you can display data from multiple boards on one dashboard, but you can’t calculate across them. “Total revenue across all project boards” requires adding numbers manually or exporting to a spreadsheet.
• Limited aggregation — you can sum, average, and count. You can’t do weighted averages, percentile calculations, running totals, or year-over-year comparisons natively.
• No drill-down — clicking a bar in a chart doesn’t show you the underlying items. Dashboards are view-only summaries with no interactivity.
• No scheduled reports — you can’t set up a report to generate and email to stakeholders every Monday morning. Someone has to open the dashboard and screenshot it — or export to PDF, which loses the interactivity.
• Time-based analysis is weak — tracking trends over time (how has our average project duration changed quarter-over-quarter?) requires manual data collection or external BI tools.

The result is predictable: teams export Monday.com data to Google Sheets or Excel for any real analysis. The data lives in Monday.com but the insights come from spreadsheets, which means maintaining two systems and manually keeping them in sync.

Workflow Complexity Hits a Wall

Monday.com handles simple, linear workflows well. Task moves from “To Do” to “In Progress” to “Done.” But real business operations are rarely that simple:

• Multi-stage approvals — “The quote needs to be approved by the project manager, then the finance team, then the client. If finance rejects it, it goes back to the PM with comments. If the client requests changes, it goes back to the quoting team.” Monday.com has no native approval workflow engine. You can use status columns and automations to approximate this, but it’s brittle and doesn’t enforce the sequence.

• Dependent tasks across boards — “Don’t start the fit-out until the building inspection on the other board is marked as passed.” Cross-board dependencies exist but are limited and don’t block work automatically.

• Recurring but variable processes — “Every new client goes through onboarding, but enterprise clients have extra steps, government clients need different documentation, and international clients need compliance checks.” Monday.com templates give you a starting point, but conditional logic within the template isn’t supported.

• Subitems are second-class — Monday.com has subitems, but they don’t support the same column types, automations, or views as main items. Teams that need hierarchical data (projects > tasks > subtasks) find that subitems are too limited to represent their actual work breakdown structure.

When Monday.com Is Still the Right Call

Despite these limitations, Monday.com remains a strong choice for:

• Small teams (under 15 people) managing projects with straightforward workflows — it’s intuitive, fast to set up, and the collaboration features are genuinely good
• Marketing and creative teams tracking campaigns, content calendars, and deliverables — the visual interface and timeline views are excellent for this
• Teams that need fast onboarding — new users can be productive in Monday.com within an hour, which is a real advantage over more complex tools
• Simple CRM use cases — tracking a pipeline of 50-200 deals with basic status columns and follow-up reminders works well on Monday.com

Planning Your Next Move

If you’re hitting these walls, here’s a practical path forward:

Audit what’s working. Not everything needs to move. If your marketing team loves Monday.com for campaign tracking and it works at their scale, leave it. Focus on the operational processes that are causing pain.

Quantify the cost. Add up your Monday.com subscription, any bolt-on automation tools (Zapier, Make), the time spent on workarounds (CSV exports, manual reporting, maintaining duplicate boards for permissions), and the cost of errors caused by the limitations. This gives you a real number to compare against alternatives.

Consider what’s next, carefully. Switching to another project management tool (Asana, ClickUp, Wrike) might solve one or two of these problems while introducing new ones. If your needs are genuinely more complex than what project management tools are designed for, the answer might not be a different tool in the same category — it might be something purpose-built for your specific operations.

Migrate incrementally. Move the most painful process first. Get it working, get the team comfortable, then tackle the next one. Running Monday.com alongside a new system during transition is normal and expected.

The best thing Monday.com does for growing teams is show them exactly what their operations look like. Every board you’ve built, every automation you’ve configured, every workaround you’ve created — that’s a specification for what your next system needs to do. You haven’t wasted time on Monday.com. You’ve prototyped your operations, and now you have the clarity to build something that actually fits.