Project managers use many essential skills to help them manage projects successfully. One critical project management skill is communication. Today, visual project management (PM) software like Monday.com and Milestones Professional integrate modern visualization tools and more traditional communication and reporting. As a result, project teams have more awareness and better understanding of important milestones and project progress.

This article compares the features of two project management software and their different approaches. We can help you find the right project management software and provide more details and recommendations. Use our Product Selection Tool to get a short list of recommendations.

Monday.com

Monday.com Ltd is a privately held software company based in Tel Aviv and has an office in New York. It was founded in 2012 by Roy Mann, CEO; and Eran Zinman, CTO. Formerly called daPulse, it spun off from web publishing platform Wix to provide customers a communication tool for their projects, developments, and teams. In 2017, it was renamed to Monday.com to better reflect the focus of their services — which is to help customers solve all work challenges.

Monday.com is an online work management platform that lets you connect people to workplace processes, projects, and day-to-day work. It is an intuitive software that allows your team to be more engaged and able to collaborate better. The software is flexible for use in different situations and has automation tools to keep repetitive work to a minimum. Centralize your communications and collaboration; then get a clearer picture of all your work’s progress.

Milestones Professional

KIDASA Software is the company that created Milestones Professional project management software. It was founded in 1989 by Susan Butler in Austin, TX. Butler imagined a better way for engineers and project managers to build milestone charts that are ready for presentation. Over the years, the company improved its products based on customer feedback and requests to create a better version of Milestones Professional that is flexible and easy to use.

Milestones Professional is a downloadable Windows-based project scheduling software. It lets you create Gantt charts, schedules, and other types of project timeline reports that are presentation ready. The software can be used as stand-alone or together with Microsoft Project, Excel, and Oracle Primavera. It simplifies and streamlines project scheduling with powerful tools that can create a wide variety of project timelines and charts. It works with other project planning tools, provides great visuals, and combines schedules with cost performance.

Features comparison of Monday.com vs. Milestones Professional

Visual project scheduling

Monday.com lets you manage and schedule projects starting with a board. Start building your board by adding blocks that hold and display a specific information. As you enter information on your board, you can choose to display your data in several ways. Aside from the standard table view, you can choose timeline view to display your project’s planned tasks in a given timeframe. Other views include the dashboard view that produces high-level data across projects and the workload view that shows the load of individual team members in the next days, weeks, months, and years.

Milestones Professional is designed to create, manage, and display project schedules. From your task list, quickly build a project schedule and choose from a mixture of symbols and bars to represent dates and milestones. It has flexible time scales that you can easily expand or collapse to focus on the future or present. Fill in bars and symbols with different colors to represent progress. The software also has percent complete smart columns that can show the actual percentage and an optional pie symbol. For quick presentations, create a single page report that lets you integrate several schedules, swim lane reports, and others.

Workflow automation

Monday.com has several automation tools to address a variety of workflows and processes. Aside from project management, it can be used to automate tasks in remote work, marketing, media and production, software development, and others. Add these automations using a code-free editor to manage notifications, status change, recurring tasks, due dates, dependencies, and creation or movement of work items. You can also use integrations with other software to further automate the flow of data to and from the PM tool.

Milestones Professional automates project cost tracking. Using an earned value management (EVM) system, it adds costs, calculates values, and automatically presents data by updating project schedules. By incorporating cost performance in schedules using data graphs and value sets, the software displays graphs together with the schedule. Perform mathematical operations on task values on the schedule and indicators will automatically display results. They are displayed through a percent complete pie or a stoplight. Information on a spreadsheet can also be copy-pasted into the PM software, and it will instantly display the schedule. A refresh will reflect changes from the spreadsheet to the schedule.

Information sharing

Monday.com is a customizable application where you can choose from different items and building blocks to track your work. Data is consolidated in reports such as charts to share with the rest of the team. Use dashboards, calendar view, kanban view, map view, and file sharing and customize them to immediately show important information.

Milestones Professional has several tools to help you share your project schedules. Colleagues using the PM tool or the free Milestones Viewer can view the actual schedule sent to them. You can export your schedule to a PDF format and send it or save the schedule as an HTML page and share it. Schedules can also be copied and pasted to PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and other Windows-compatible document software.

Ready to make a decision on Monday.com vs. Milestones Professional?

Both Monday.com and Milestones Professional offer free trials of their software.

Monday.com is a cloud-based work management application ideal for businesses of all sizes. It helps users manage and track processes and projects using customizable widgets or pulses through a web browser, desktop apps, and mobile devices. The PM software is ideal for agile development and daily work tracking.

Milestones Professional is a Windows software installed in a local server or desktop. It is ideal for mid-sized and larger businesses that manage multiple and long-duration projects. The PM tool provides users a quick way to create and share presentation-ready project schedules for reporting purposes.

Ready to find the right project management for your needs? Use our Product Selection Tool to get a free list of the best project management software for your needs.