Airtable and Monday.com are two competing project management tools, each of which focuses on helping team collaboration. The following report provides an objective comparison between them to present an unbiased view of their similarities and differences, as well as strengths and weaknesses.
Main Differences Between Airtable and Monday.com
Airtable is more focused on storing data and maintaining its integrity so teams can work from the same source; Monday.com is focused on tasks, completing jobs, and transparent accountability.
Airtable is good for small to mid-sized companies looking to centralize data so they can scale; Monday.com is ideal for company’s with relatively stable growth, but have a lot of moving parts working together.
Monday.com is specifically geared toward productivity; meaning it’s task-oriented, and has much less in the way of data storage and management than Airtable.
Airtable is a spreadsheet with the features of a database, which facilitates cloud collaboration–hence the name “air” (the cloud) and “table”(spreadsheets). It is considered hybrid software, taking the ingenuity and visual interface of a database and combining it with the familiarity and ease-of-use from spreadsheets.
Monday.com is a web-based project management software that uses the cloud to facilitate collaboration between teams. The views are made to be highly customizable to suit different industry types, with some workload automation.
Airtable presents itself as a versatile system that can work in any team-based environment.
They carefully avoid pigeonholing themselves into one specific area, presenting ‘templates’ that are geared toward different purposes. Its client base ranges from individuals to small teams who need a bit of organization for ideas to enormous enterprises like Netflix, so this lack of categorization under any specific industry is more true than not.
Like Airtable, Monday.com doesn’t limit its reach to any specific department; rather, it focuses on the administrative aspects of work, which can be any field.
However, their platform does have distinct versions for marketers, sales CRM, and agile developers. The other two modules–work management and ‘project’–are generalized for all types of work.
Spreadsheet-based Data Management – Their main selling point, which makes the platform simpler for companies that aren’t as tech-savvy as others, though it’s still feature rich enough to appeal to developers and the like.
Modular workflows – Project workflows can be customized in a matter of minutes by moving blocks around in Airtable’s UI. The resulting adjustments to data happen in real-time so the most tedious aspects of project management only take a few clicks.
Team Solutions – These are templates that can be used by any department within a company. Marketing, Products, HR, and Operations, Sales, and Finance are all covered on their website, and these are just the most popular examples.
Enterprise Ready – Airtable scales with enormous workloads (250k+ records), and has proven itself capable of handling such workloads with its client base.
One Source of Truth – The oft-repeated phrase captures the centralization aspect of Airtable, a feature that is present throughout its design rather than a single part that provides this service.
Dashboards – Comes with visual UIs that simplify team management, notifications, views, lists, and processes.
Gantt Charts and Kanban Boards – These are interactive charts that use bars to display schedules and workloads in a logical way, with project information accessible within a few clicks.
Automation – This includes notification on overdue or completed work, auto-updating workloads, status changes, and customized workflows.
Good Integration – Monday.com claims to integrate with over 50 applications. It’s not an industry-leading number, but they have most of the important ones covered (e.g. GMail, Dropbox).
Monday workdocs – These are a unique combination of a messaging app and a dashboard that lets users add figures, graphs, charts, and other visuals in real time.
Airtable Pros
Familiar spreadsheet database management with the features of a relational database, with the ability to create applications that simplify views even more.
Highly customizable fields, views, and tables fit into a user-friendly, practical UI that is both modern and familiar.
Facilitates collaboration in each module, supporting communication and information sharing throughout organizations.
Less feature-rich than some other productivity platforms–e.g. logs, dependencies, tracking–though this is intentionally done for simplification
Document and file management is a bit behind similar platforms, missing some basic sorting and classification features
Limited database capabilities, since it’s almost completely focused on productivity
Airtable vs. Monday.com: Which one should you go with?
We love both of these pieces of software, and which one you choose depends on your situation.
If you run a lean team and want powerful software that won’t break the bank, go with Airtable. If you’re looking for a slightly more robust option with more customization, go with Monday.com.
