Jira vs Monday.com
A source-aware comparison of pricing, documented capabilities and workflow fit.
Short answer
- Price: Jira is cheaper — $8/mo vs $9/user/mo.
- How to start: Jira is from $8/mo, Monday.com is from $9/user/mo.
- Where they differ: on what we checked they match — both offer public api, mobile app and sso (saml).
These lines are generated from the pricing we track, not from a paid placement. How we score tools.
What Jira is
What Jira isJira is the industry standard for professional software teams worldwide using Agile methodologies. Built by Atlassian, it flawlessly tracks every step of the software lifecycle (planning, coding, testing, release). It offers deep tools for Scrum and Kanban and goes further than most trackers in bug tracking and workflow customization. For a professional engineering team, Jira is not just an option—it is a necessity for managing complex builds.
What Monday.com is
What Monday.com isMonday.com is a 'Work OS' that turns business processes into a visual feast. Its colorful and intuitive boards make it pleasant for teams of all sizes to track their projects. Monday's success lies in simplifying complex database logic so that 'anyone can use it.' With drag-and-drop automations and 'Workdocs,' it unites marketing, sales, dev, and HR departments under one common visual language.
Side by side
| Jira | Monday.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Developer Tools | Project Management |
| How to start | $8/moverified | $9/user/moverified |
| Public API | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile app | Yes | Yes |
| Open source / self-hostable | No | No |
| SSO (SAML) | Yes | Yes |
| Visit | Jira ↗ | Monday.com ↗ |
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What Jira is built to do
- Scrum & Kanban
- World-class tools for sprint planning and backlog management.
- Advanced Roadmaps
- Plan future projects and team capacity over the long term.
- JQL Querying
- Search through thousands of tasks by writing your own custom queries.
- Automation Engine
- Trigger task updates based on developer actions like pushing code.
What Monday.com is built to do
- Visual Boards
- Track tasks based on status, person, and date through colorful tables.
- Dashboards
- Visualize data from multiple projects in one single management panel.
- Monday Workdocs
- Collaborate on smart documents that talk live with your project boards.
- Sales CRM
- Manage your leads and sales processes within the same interface as your projects.
Choose Jira if
- Teams of up to 10 people who need real project tracking for nothing: the Free plan covers unlimited goals, projects, tasks and forms with board, timeline, calendar and backlog views
- Growing teams on Standard at $7.91 per user/month — user roles and permissions, external collaboration, multi-region data residency, 250 GB storage and up to 100,000 users per site
- Organisations coordinating several teams: Premium at $14.54 per user/month adds cross-project planning and dependency management, unlimited storage and a 99.9% uptime SLA
Skip Jira if
- Automation is central to your workflow — Free gives only 150 steps per subscription per month, and even Standard is capped at 400 steps per user per month
- You need SSO, SCIM or Active Directory Sync below Enterprise: on Free, Standard and Premium those require a separate Atlassian Guard Standard subscription
- You run more than one site — Free, Standard and Premium are single-site; multiple sites (up to 150) start at Enterprise, which is annual-only and quote-based
Choose Monday.com if
- Teams that want boards, automations and dashboards without building them from scratch
- Two-person setups: the free plan covers 2 seats and 3 boards
- Committing annually — the vendor lists an 18% saving over month-to-month
Skip Monday.com if
- You are three people on the free plan — it stops at 2 seats and 3 boards
- You want to buy exactly the seats you use: paid plans start at a 3-seat minimum
- You need a firm USD figure; the price is set by your billing country and shown in local currency
Evidence and freshness
Where a claim on this page comes from a vendor page, it is linked here.
Jira: pros & cons
- Dev Focused: Offers the exact workflows and terminology that engineers need.
- Infinite Customization: Define exactly what every button and status does in detail.
- Advanced Reporting: Burndown charts and velocity tracking come built in, not as add-ons.
- Ecosystem: Works as a unified system with Bitbucket, GitHub, and Confluence.
- Difficult Setup: Configuring initial settings can require a dedicated 'Jira Admin.'
- Complex UI: Can be intimidating and confusing for non-technical team members.
- Speed: Page loads can be slow for massive enterprise-level projects.
Monday.com: pros & cons
- Best Visual Experience: The most understandable UI due to its color-coding and design.
- Ease of Use: Even non-technical teams can adapt to it in under 10 minutes.
- Ready Templates: Hundreds of industry-specific solutions for HR, construction, and more.
- Strong Automations: Setting up 'notify X when date arrives' logic is incredibly simple.
- User Minimums: Certain plans require a minimum purchase of 3 users.
- Cost: Moving to higher tiers for advanced features and automation limits is expensive.
- Depth: Does not offer the same 'change everything' flexibility as ClickUp.
Our verdict on Jira
The world's most powerful tool for managing professional software development processes.
Our verdict on Monday.com
The most pleasant and fastest-to-adopt project management tool on the market.
Published plans, side by side
Every figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page and is shown with the sentence it came from. Where a vendor publishes no plan prices, we say so rather than guess.
Jira
- Free$0/mo
Free $0 forever for up to 10 users: unlimited goals, projects, tasks and forms; backlog, list, board, timeline, calendar and summary views; reports and dashboards; 150 automation steps per subscription per month; 2 GB storage; 100 emails per day; Atlassian Community support; 1 site
Monday.com
No published plan prices verified. Monday.com either quotes on request or renders its prices in a way we could not read from the pricing page.
Jira vs Monday.com: common questions
- Is Jira cheaper than Monday.com?
- Jira is the cheaper entry point at $8/mo, against $9/user/mo for Monday.com. Both figures come from the vendors' own pricing pages.
- Does Jira or Monday.com have a free plan?
- Jira publishes a free plan (Free), while Monday.com has no free plan listed.
- What is the difference between Jira and Monday.com?
- On the criteria we check, on what we checked they match — both offer public api, mobile app and sso (saml). The table above lists every criterion side by side.