monday.com or Jira? A comparison for companies choosing a team work platform

The most important difference is not in the feature list but in the starting point. With monday.com you start from a board: a table of tasks with columns and colour-coded statuses. The team itself decides what to track on it and how to display it.

Jira starts from a process. Every task has a type, and every type has a fixed path of statuses, for example “to do”, “in progress”, “in testing”, “done”. The tool makes sure a task goes through all the stages in the right order.

Take a hypothetical company where the marketing manager wants to run a campaign calendar. In monday.com she will build a board from a ready-made template in one afternoon. In Jira she will usually ask an administrator to set up the task types and fields. On the other hand, a development team in Jira gets a process straight away, which it would first have to design in monday.com.

The two products have been converging for years. There is a version of monday.com for developers (monday dev), and since 2024 Jira has been a single product for technical and business teams. Even so, their ways of thinking about work remain different, and that is usually what decides whether people start using the tool.

The tool works well where work has so far lived in Excel, in email and in people’s heads. To many users a board looks like a better spreadsheet, so it is easy to get started. That matters in teams that have no time for week-long training.

Ease of use comes at a price, though. When every manager arranges boards their own way, after six months it is hard to pull data from several departments into a single report. That is why it is worth agreeing common status and column names and a single workspace structure right from the start.

The typical uses in the list below have one thing in common: many parallel cases, several people on each, and a need to check quickly who is doing what and by when.

Jira was built for developers, and it still shows. It works best for teams that have a repeatable process and want the tool to enforce it. What counts there is the full history: who changed the status, when and why.

Jira supports Scrum well – working in short cycles, usually two weeks long, with an agreed list of tasks. It also shows how much work the team actually completes in such a cycle. For an IT manager, that is the basis of planning.

For non-technical teams Jira now has business templates, because since 2024 the former Jira Work Management product has been part of a single Jira. Its interface and vocabulary, however, are still closer to the work of engineers than to that of a salesperson.

Both tools are billed per user, although monday.com sells seats in fixed bundles (3, 5, 10, 15 and so on). The monday.com prices in the table below come from the European price list as of October 2026. Atlassian gives Jira prices in a calculator based on the number of users, and the rate per person falls at higher tiers.

An example calculation: a company gives 25 people monday.com on the Pro plan. That is 25 × EUR 19 × 12 months = EUR 5,700 a year with annual billing. On the Standard plan the same group costs 25 × 12 × 12 = EUR 3,600.

When comparing, check not only the price per person but also the limits. In monday.com the Standard plan includes 250 automation actions and 250 integration actions a month, and Pro includes 25,000 of each. In Jira, planning work across multiple teams (the Plans feature, formerly Advanced Roadmaps) is only available from the Premium plan upwards.

Jira is often accompanied by Confluence, Atlassian’s separate product for documentation and notes. That is a separate licence. In monday.com, documents are part of the platform.

In both tools, AI summarises longer threads, helps write task descriptions and answers questions about the state of work. These are useful extras, but rarely a reason to choose one tool over the other.

The way it is billed differs. In Jira, the Rovo assistant is included in the paid plans, and the company gets a shared monthly credit allowance based on the plan and number of users. In monday.com, every paid plan has a monthly allowance of AI credits, and you can buy more.

Rovo can also search for information across Jira, Confluence and other connected tools at the same time. If a company keeps its documentation in Confluence, that is a real advantage. We write about AI in projects in more detail in a separate article.

Most mid-sized companies already work in Outlook and Microsoft Teams. Both tools connect to them: notifications in Teams, creating tasks from email, a board preview in a team channel. Neither, however, is part of Microsoft 365.

If your teams are small and your projects simple, first check what your existing licence already includes. Microsoft Planner handles task lists and simple plans, and its premium version has taken over the features of the retired Project for the web. As a company gains more projects and departments, it usually starts to miss shared reports and automation – that is where monday.com or Jira have the edge.

Whichever you choose, the management board usually gets a consolidated report from Power BI or another reporting tool. Both systems let you export data or connect it to such a report.

The most common mistake is buying one tool for the whole company just because one department likes it. If the developers chose Jira, that does not mean it will suit the salespeople. If marketing has fallen in love with monday.com, developers may miss process control there.

In mixed companies a split works well: Jira for IT, monday.com for business teams, and a connection between them. For example, a customer request lands on a service board in monday.com, and when it requires a software change, a task is automatically created in Jira.

Two tools mean two licences and two places to administer. This set-up only makes sense when both groups of teams are large enough that a single tool would clearly put one of them off.

A vendor demo shows the tool in its best light and on made-up data. It is better to base the decision on a short pilot in which real teams do real work. Both tools have free trial periods.

The people who will use the tool should take part in the choice, not just the management board and the IT department. A small group is enough: the process owner, representatives of two teams and the systems administrator.

The steps below let you complete the choice in a few weeks, with a result you can defend in front of the management board.