Jira vs monday.com: Project and Work Management Features Compared in 2025

Thanks to its beautiful user interface, workflow tools that suit agile and traditional project management methodologies, collaboration tools, templates and affordable plans, monday.com receives our editor’s choice. Whether you’re working on a complex project that requires Gantt charts or software development that uses kanban boards, monday.com has you covered.

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Surprisingly, Jira and monday.com share many of the same workflow tools and views. In both platforms, you’ll find scrum and kanban boards that can be used to track and assign tasks; add due dates, files and comments; monitor sprints; and more. In addition, Gantt charts (timelines) can be used to plot project dates and milestones, as well as calendars.

What’s more, both platforms provide robust sprint planning capabilities that allow teams to estimate effort, prioritize backlog items and allocate work for upcoming sprints. They also include time-tracking functionality so that teams can monitor how much time is spent on tasks, enabling better resource planning and client billing.

Jira natively supports backlog management and issue tracking, which is ideal for software development teams. Monday also supports backlogs and bug tracking thanks to the hundreds of project templates available. Both suites also feature dashboards that can be used to track tasks, due dates, finances, project metrics and more. 

monday.com now supports Work in Progress (WIP) limits on kanban boards, allowing teams to cap the number of tasks permitted in each workflow status. Teams can focus on completing work rather than starting new tasks, bringing monday.com’s kanban capabilities more in line with Jira’s well-established kanban implementation.

Each project management software also has project portfolio management and group task cataloging capabilities, which make them ideal for teams working on multiple complex projects. Any way you slice it, Jira and monday.com can handle simple and complex projects. 

Jira’s kanban board and timeline task management tool aren’t as fleshed out as monday’s, and the platform overall is suited more to software development than to general project management. However, both platforms still offer many of the same tools, which is a boon for teams that need them to track project tasks. 

Jira and monday.com excel when it comes to creating custom workflows. Both platforms use kanban boards, so it’s easy to set up workflows that match any project. Should you need to add an extra step to a process, it’s as easy as adding a new column to your board. If you need to remove a step, you can delete it and move on.

Jira and monday.com also have numerous project templates for different project types in many industries and even department-specific templates. These strategic planning features can also be modified so you can tailor them to your project. Thanks to the templates, you can get your projects up and running quickly. For custom workflows, Jira and monday are fantastic options.

You can’t be too careful with the data your company produces. Fortunately, monday and Jira offer excellent security features. In fact, they’re so good that, with the right plan, both are HIPAA compliant, which means you can use them in ultra-secure healthcare industries.

Dive into Jira and you’ll find that the software offers two-factor authentication, single sign-on (SSO) methods and audit logs. It also provides mobile device management (MDM), allowing administrators to enforce security policies on mobile devices accessing company data, including remote wipe functionality and access restrictions.

Admins can also set password policies, user roles and permissions, and domain verification to ensure that only users with verified email addresses from your organization can access your Jira instance, adding an extra layer of security.

In addition, Jira uses TLS 1.2+ with PFS encryption for data in transit and AES-256 to cipher data encryption at rest.

monday.com offers many of the same options, such as two-factor authentication, SSO and Google authentication methods. In addition, users can generate audit logs, set private workspaces and grant custom roles. The platform uses AES 256-bit to cipher data and TLS 1.3 to cipher data in transit across open networks.

The service also allows for IP restrictions and SCIM provisioning, which enables automatic user provisioning and deprovisioning. This streamlines IT management in large organizations and enhances security by immediately revoking access when employees leave.

For Enterprise accounts, monday.com now supports conditional status changes with mandatory fields that users must complete before progressing. This ensures data integrity and standardized processes across teams, making it suitable for organizations with strict compliance or documentation requirements.

Along with project management tools like workflow views, those needing new project management software must consider integrations and automations, which can link other platforms to your project management software for better workflows and take care of time-consuming admin tasks. Fortunately, both Jira and monday offer these features.

Each platform provides robust API access, allowing developers to create custom solutions that extend functionality beyond native integrations.

monday.com has strengthened its developer tools with the GitHub Actions integration, so users can create tasks from CI/CD events. This enables seamless tracking of development processes alongside project management activities, increasing its appeal for software development teams.

Jira integrates with many platforms, though most are geared towards reporting and software development. Its extensive Marketplace offers over 3,000 apps and integrations, including Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Drive, giving users access to specialized tools and extensions that can enhance functionality for specific industries and use cases.

There’s also a native integration with Confluence, which can help you create documents for scrum ceremonies like sprint retrospective and sprint review meetings.

Jira also allows you to enable automations. Creating automations in Jira is straightforward. You can use template automations to automate the removal of completed tasks, auto-assign tasks to team members like scrum developers or trigger an action when a comment is left on a card. You can also create automations to suit your workflow.

Integrations on monday.com are very similar, though they cover a much broader spectrum. There are integrations for top platforms, such as some of the best cloud storage services, Google Calendar, Slack, Zoom, Canva and many more, including software development integrations.

With its Zoom integration, teams can include meeting recordings and transcripts directly in activity timelines. The platform’s AI-powered meeting summaries automatically highlight key takeaways and action items from Zoom meetings. This extra layer further widens the gap compared to Jira’s more limited native collaboration capabilities.

Automations are another area where monday.com shines. The automation center is filled with premade automations you can install with just a few clicks, and the automation builder is slick and easy to use. Within minutes, you can create all sorts of automations on both platforms that will save you precious time.

monday.com has expanded its automation capabilities with Sequences, allowing teams to create automated follow-up workflows with detailed analytics on performance. The feature includes triggers based on email interactions (like opens or auto-replies), providing sophisticated options for automating project communications and follow-ups.

It has also added delay blocks so teams can incorporate timed pauses between workflow steps. This provides more control over automated processes, which is especially useful for projects with time-sensitive approvals or sequential tasks that need specific timing.

Beyond basic automations, monday.com has incorporated AI-driven custom automation features that can analyze your workflow patterns and suggest optimizations. These intelligent automations help project managers streamline repetitive tasks and create more efficient processes without manually configuring every automation rule.

As a project manager, part of your job is to track team performance, team velocity and many other performance metrics. Jira and monday.com offer a wide variety of reports and graphical analysis tools that can help you keep track of work and meet your business initiatives. 

The dashboards monday.com offers are excellent. They’re bright, colorful, easy to read and customizable. You can put virtually any project information on the dashboard, including financials, due dates, workloads, timelines and more. Project data on the dashboard is displayed via graphs, pie charts and text. You’ll find support for pivot boards, too.

monday.com has also added an “activity tracker” widget that provides real-time visibility into team activities. Project managers can track emails sent, tasks completed and other activities, as well as filter options by team member, project or client. This reporting enhancement helps managers better understand team performance and prioritization needs.

Jira’s customizable dashboard isn’t as pretty as monday’s, but it’s no less functional. More than 40 configurable widgets can be added to Jira’s dashboard.

You’ll find heat maps, pie charts, workload and team velocity charts, sprint health charts, flow diagrams, control charts, issue statistics and more. It also offers detailed burndown charts that visualize work completed versus time remaining in a sprint, helping Agile teams track progress and forecast completion dates.

Compared to monday.com’s more generalized reporting options, Jira’s comprehensive reporting suite better enables teams to track performance metrics, sprint health and project progress.

Ultimately, if you like digging into data, it’s hard to go wrong with Jira or monday.com.

Customer service is worth its weight in gold, and every company should strive to be the best. However, there’s a noticeable difference in the levels of service and support you’ll receive from monday.com and Jira. 

monday.com offers 24/7 support on all plans. You can reach out to a live chat agent and receive help immediately. We opened several chats and got our issues resolved quickly. We sent a few emails to the support desk and received help within 24 hours. The only downside is that phone support is only for billing issues. Monday.com also has a forum where you can get help. 

If you want to solve a problem on your own, you can visit the well-designed monday.com help pages in the knowledgebase. You’ll find articles with screenshots and easy-to-follow instructions. There’s also a stellar monday.com academy where you can learn the ins and outs of the platform. If you need help, there’s no shortage of ways to receive it.

Jira’s, or rather Atlassian’s, approach to customer service is different. Customer support on the free plan is nonexistent; you can only receive help from the functional community forum. However, as we found out, response times can vary from minutes to 24 hours or longer. 

The standard plan offers support during business hours. Premium adds 24/7 support for high-impact issues and provides faster response times, while Enterprise offers 24/7 support for all problems and adds phone support. It’s clear to see where Atlassian’s view on support lies.

Jira also offers a knowledgebase that’s jam-packed with articles and guides that will help you solve problems independently, which you’ll need if you’re a free user. Still, the guides, though well written, aren’t of the same quality as monday.com’s.

One big area where monday.com and Jira differ is in terms of user-friendliness. Hands down, monday.com is the most intuitive and gorgeously designed project management platform out there. Jira isn’t bad; in fact, it’s well designed and easy to navigate, but Jira comes nowhere near monday.com’s levels of refinement.

Everything about monday.com is beautifully crafted. The menus are easy to find and navigate, the tools are smooth and they feature a lovely color palette. The project templates are top notch and can be used quickly. There’s nothing complicated about monday.com, and the learning curve is shallow, which means new and experienced teams will feel at home.

Moreover, monday.com’s user interface features a color-coded system, intuitive drag-and-drop functionality and visually appealing dashboards that make even complex project data easy to interpret at a glance.

It also features a detailed activity log that helps project managers track all updates and changes to tasks throughout a project’s lifecycle. This historical record of project modifications ensures accountability and provides valuable context when reviewing project progress or conducting retrospectives.

Jira’s design is more reserved than monday’s, but it isn’t any less functional. There are splashes of color here and there, and the drag-and-drop kanban and scrum boards are a delight to use. The tools, including backlogs and issue trackers, are nicely designed, and the menus and settings are intuitive. You can get where you need to be with a few clicks.

The biggest drawback to anyone unfamiliar with the scrum framework will be Jira’s language and terminology. Littered throughout the software are words that will make little sense to anyone but scrum teams and developers, such as “issue tracking,” “backlogs” and “story points.” This may create a steeper learning curve for teams from other industries trying to adopt the platform.

However, if this is what you’re looking for, you’ll love Jira. Still, if you’re a team that works with multiple agile methods, monday.com will be the better choice.

Though neither Jira nor monday.com offers many collaboration tools, one platform does pull ahead in this category, and that’s monday. You can use integrations to get around the fact that there are few real-time collaboration tools with either platform, but we would prefer to see them both spending a little time fleshing out native options. 

If you want to boost collaboration, pick monday.com. Though there’s no real-time chat tool on monday.com, the platform’s commenting and messaging system is better than the one found in Jira by a hair. Users will also find a whiteboard that allows distributed teams to work together in real time. Users can embed documents, leave comments, proof work and more.

In 2024, monday.com introduced integration with WorkCanvas, a visual collaboration tool that enables teams to create project maps, flow charts, organization maps and mind maps in real-time. This feature significantly enhances its collaborative abilities, especially for distributed teams who need to brainstorm and visualize projects together.

The platform’s WorkCanvas includes industry-standard shape libraries for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and other platforms, so teams can design professional cloud and system diagrams. This feature is particularly valuable for technical project teams that need to document infrastructure alongside their project plans, providing an integrated environment for both planning and technical documentation.

monday.com has also added a new “activities timeline” column that provides a comprehensive overview of all emails and activities in one place. This lets project managers quickly identify which deals or tasks need attention without digging into each one individually, improving team coordination and follow-up efficiency.

It even offers a dedicated “workload management” view that allows managers to visualize team capacity at a glance, helping them distribute tasks evenly and prevent burnout.

Jira collaboration tools are few and far between. There’s no native real-time chat app or whiteboard. The only way to communicate is via @ messages, which can be left in task cards. However, it’s worth mentioning that Jira can integrate with Confluence, another Atlassian product that includes real-time collaboration tools, but they aren’t native to Jira.