Please Clarify & Post Platform Limitations

Feature requests
,
1

Hello Monday,
I need better understanding of your platform limitations. I know of the 10k item/subitem limit, but please let us know and have a place where we can see more limitation details.

My situation:
I have 42 low-level boards (all working fine) that are connected to 4 summary boards… Each summary board is under 5k item/subitems, so according to the limit I’m aware of, there should be no problem… However, the summary boards are made almost entirely of connect/mirror columns (yes, lots of them) and as a result they load painfully slow, if they load at all… These 4 summary boards are connected to a dashboard (since I can’t connect all 42 low-level boards to a dashboard, I have to use summary boards)… my dashboard, connected to the 4 summary boards, each with under 5k items/subitems, will only load once in a blue moon, and only after I’ve been able to get all 4 summary boards to load on their own without the browser crashing (if I’m that lucky) and waiting for an additional half hour or more for the dashboard to load. …that doesn’t make any sense to me because i don’t know why a dashboard needs the connected boards to load on their own in the browser, as if the dashboard is pulling data from the user interface rather than a database in the background. …the reason for so many boards is because of monday’s limitations. In my ideal world, the 42 low-level boards would all be just 1 board and the 4 summary boards would also be 1 board. …My low-level boards are acting as subitems to the summary boards, so it’s like having subitems of subitems. Think of the summary boards as having the main ‘items’ with ‘subitem’ categories and then within each subitem (connected to items on the low-level boards) are subitems (on the low-level boards) to hold individual assets and asset details. I’d rather be able to have subitems of subitems in the same board, that would be cool, we need this level of detail which is why I do it this way.

So what are all the limitations? I need to know so that I can figure out how best to structure everything as scalability is a definite issue…

How many item connections per board?
Are there limits on number of columns?
Number of mirror columns?
Mirror or Connect columns X Items/Subitems?
How many boards can connect to a dashboard?
How many items/subitems/boards can a dashboard handle?
How many can it handle if those items/subitems have connect columns?
etc…?

…and yes, we have an enterprise account. …and I’m using the latest version of Chrome.
…and also, it might help dashboards if we could say “only look at these columns” to avoiding loading tons of data that doesn’t matter for the dashboard - don’t know if that’s doable, but just a thought.

…monday seems to be great for very small projects and team tracking, but if it’s got data viz dashboards it really should be able to and needs to be able to handle more, especially if higher ups in a company have been sold on the idea of monday because they will generally have no clue before spending the money on it as to how crippling the limitations are and they won’t want to hear about it after they’ve spent the money.

…instead of just using monday as the platform it’s advertised to be, I have to run my entire project on another system and API info into monday as a backup data storage platform so that the higher ups think it’s being used. Right now, I’ve got dashboards built elsewhere for them, but they want everything on monday (because they’ve spent the money on it). …but monday has honestly turned out to be a monumental waste of my time. I restructure everything to get around one limitation just for another to present itself and I’m back at square one again, and again, and again.

So PLEASE post ALL of your limitations somewhere and please WORK ON SCALABILITY because this is really impeding on my work and I’ll be the one to take the fall for it because they’re spending more money on monday than on me and they’re completely sold on the idea that monday can do whatever we need it to do (because monday looks like it can with all the data viz and widgets and automations). Monday is really pretty, but due to scalability issues, and only scalability issues, it feels like it’s a really pretty candy wrapper holding just a nugget of wasabi inside. …I know this isn’t nice to say, but as a comparison, I’m running my entire (global) project, from data entry to executive dashboards, on a free version of google workspace without any issue. …I’m really rooting for you guys, I think your platform has tons of potential, and I don’t want to try to convince the higher ups that they made a bad purchase (let’s face it, that’s a battle lost before it starts), but we really can’t use monday for what we’ve spent the money to use it for, not until you figure out the scalability issues. Do you have a roadmap somewhere where we can keep an eye on your plans for increasing scalability? And in the meantime, please let us know all limitations, post them somewhere, so we can plan our own ways of working around them without restructuring again and again just to find other limitations we didn’t know about.

I didn’t mean to sound this sour, my apologies, but the stress of wasted work hours and concern of job security from having to use the platform the higher ups want me to use (because they were lead to believe it’s more capable than it is) is just like rubbing salt in the wounds over and over again. I NEED to know all of your limitations so I can find my way around them… and monday really needs to work on scalability. While higher ups (who are the ones who decide to buy your product) are generally never tech savvy in any way and will never understand this issue, it really hurts those of us who have to use it to appease them when it’s not capable of handling what needs to be handled… it looks great and you can sell it to higher ups, but you don’t want all this grunting from the ground floor about it - that can eventually backfire on you, and i know the scalability issue has been raised by many others before me.

Thanks! And my apologies again. I don’t mean to be a ‘debby downer’ and lay out all my grievances… but I think monday really needs to understand how much of a hinderance these limitations are and what their competition looks like - I can do more for free on google, and that’s just really not good for you if higher ups ever give the slightest amount of attention to notice it. Please at least equip us with knowledge of all the platform’s limitations so we can try to find ways around them before we start trying to convince higher ups to pull out.

2

Thank you for writing this because, it’s basically what I have been echoing to monday.com for a long time. To truly build a Work OS, the system but be robust enough to not only handle lots of data but make it easier to query and update those data. monday.com seems to focus on the UI and that helps it to sell but in the long run, it comes back to bite them because, one can only do so much on the UI. Building systems with monday.com has little to do with the UI but rather how data communication can flow easily and faster. Querying 5K data, or even 10K shouldn’t be much of a hustle. At the end of the data, it is just text data. If monday.com is to focus on developers and creators who work on connecting and using lots of data, they will fill two needs with one deed, because the platform will be faster for general users using the UI too. Competition is growing, and huge companies like Google and Microsoft are also watching the low-code, no-code space. It will be great if monday.com makes their platform robust to allow companies to connect all their systems to monday.com before let’s Google adds automations to Google sheets. monday.com is a great platform, just that they are a few very important bolts that need to be tightened properly.

2 Likes
3

I think I’ve realized where the limitations are…

backStory… I was trying to set up an Automation Recipe using a Formula column… Come to find out that Monday.com doesn’t support automations from formula columns because the formula column is run on the client side… So whatever is in any Formula column doesn’t exist anywhere but in your browser… and that makes me wonder if Dashboards are working the same way… that would explain why it’s so slow to load and can’t handle that much data… The Dashboards and whatever Charts are in them are trying to load up, calculate and display everything on the client-side… Don’t know why I didn’t see that earlier - it’s obvious to me now… And think about what it’s trying to do on the client-side if you have data from Formula columns in a Chart! Yikes! …and this explains why monday.com doesn’t post or talk about limitations - because they don’t really know them, it’s up to the client-side of things and your browser.

…and that’s something they can’t change. It’s probably in their business model to have as much done on the client-side as possible. To change it would mean to change their everything and when money and jobs are involved it’s just not a great thing to do.

in conclusion… Monday.com is possibly the best thing out there for small project teamwork. It’s a really great self-contained environment allowing for tons of different ways to speed up collaboration and workflows with great visibility and communication …and it even has little bits scattered around to brighten your day; not a full-on ray of sunshine, but every little bit counts! However, monday.com cannot ever be a platform for large-scale projects because of its inherent design… who knows, maybe they could have that shift planned out in the future after some significant growth, and i really hope they do… but that would be a long way off. It’s not a platform for data-people, it’s a platform for teams without a data-person. …they should market it this way.

2 Likes