Main question is, what is a viable alternative? Does anyone really offer a complete package or will everyone be forced to build some configuration of base software + 3rd party + API calls?
I agree that there’s no perfect answer. (And as long as capitalism governs innovation, I’m not confident that there even can be.) However, I’ve noticed stark differences between SaaS platforms in terms of overall business practices.
In the work management space, I only have extensive experience with Asana and Monday—I’ve contracted, deployed, and trained employees on both—and I can’t speak to how the others compare. But even between these two, the customer experience feels very different.
- Monday’s sales style and business practices feel almost adversarial: the customer versus the company. Asana makes it feel more like you and your rep are on the same team, collaboratively figuring out the best fit.
- Asana releases highly-desired features and improvements at a much greater rate than Monday—clearly always trying to make the UX better.
- Asana doesn’t nickel-and-dime everything. When they roll out a new feature, they almost never caveat it with “heads up: we might decide to start charging you for this at some point” like Monday does all the time. (They don’t roll out features, wait while customers integrate them into their business processes, and subsequently start charging extra for them.)
- Monday has numerous demonstrable bugs gathering dust in the backlog; they don’t seem to have any real interest in fixing them. I have found very few, if any, clear bugs in Asana—showing that they devote more resources to QA and making the platform more stable.
I promise, I’m not affiliated with Asana in any way! And I do have one HUGE gripe with it that I won’t get into here—I’m definitely not saying it’s perfect. But comparing the two makes it clear that Monday could be doing a whole lot better.