Why Teams Leave Monday.com
Pricing scales fast. Monday.com charges per seat: $12/seat/month on Standard, $20/seat/month on Pro. A 10-person team pays $120-$200/month. A 25-person team pays $300-$500/month. And that is before add-ons, integrations, or premium features.
The per-seat model creates a specific kind of friction. Every new hire means a higher bill. Every freelancer you bring onto a project adds cost. Teams start gatekeeping access to keep costs down, which defeats the purpose of a collaboration tool.
But pricing is only half the story. Teams also leave because of complexity creep. What started as a simple board becomes a tangled mess of automations, dependencies, custom columns, and views that nobody maintains. Someone set up 15 automations six months ago and left the company. Now they fire randomly, and nobody knows how to fix them.
Too many features. Too many views. Too many options in every dropdown. Monday.com is built for enterprise teams with dedicated project managers. If that is not your team, the complexity becomes a tax you pay every day.
Feature Mapping: Monday.com to Thicket
Before you migrate, you need to know where things land. Here is how Monday.com concepts translate to Thicket:
The top seven rows cover what most small teams use daily. Boards become projects. Items become tasks. Updates become comments. The core workflow translates directly.
The bottom three rows are where it gets honest. Automations, Gantt charts, and the integrations marketplace do not have equivalents in Thicket. If those are central to how your team works, read the "What you lose" section carefully before deciding.
What You Gain
Flat pricing: $49/month for unlimited users. Not per-seat. Not per-board. Not "starting at." A 10-person team on Monday.com Standard pays $120/month. That same team on Thicket pays $49/month. That is $71/month saved, or $852/year. On Monday.com Pro, the savings jump to $171/month - $2,052/year.
Simplicity. Fewer features means less to configure, less to break, less to train on. New team members get productive in minutes, not days. There is no dedicated admin role needed. No one has to maintain a system of automations and custom views.
Speed. Thicket loads fast because it does not try to do everything. No heavy dashboards, no complex formula columns running in the background, no marketplace apps slowing things down.
Focus. Project management without the bloat. Tasks, comments, files, docs, messaging. The things your team actually touches every day, without 50 features competing for attention in the sidebar.
Check our pricing page for the full breakdown, including the free plan for teams of 5 or fewer.
What You Lose - Be Honest
This section matters more than the one above. Switching tools always involves tradeoffs, and pretending otherwise wastes your time.
Automations. Monday.com has powerful "when X happens, do Y" rules. Move an item to "Done" and it automatically notifies the client, updates the status column, and assigns the next task. Thicket does not have automations yet. If your team relies on 10+ active automations, you will feel this gap daily.
Integrations. Monday.com connects to 200+ tools natively. Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, GitHub, Jira, Google Workspace, and dozens more. Thicket has a smaller integration set. If your Monday.com boards pull data from external tools or push updates to other systems, check whether Thicket supports your specific stack.
Timeline and Gantt views. If your team relies on Gantt charts for resource planning, dependency tracking, or client reporting, Thicket does not have them. We focus on list and board views. For teams that need visual timelines, this is a dealbreaker.
Marketplace apps. Monday.com has an app marketplace with hundreds of extensions. CRM integrations, time tracking add-ons, custom reporting tools. Thicket does not have an app marketplace.
Formulas and advanced columns. Monday.com has formula columns, mirror columns, dependency columns, and dozens of column types. Thicket keeps columns simple. If you have built complex spreadsheet-like boards with calculated fields, that logic does not transfer.
If these features are critical to your workflow, Thicket might not be the right move yet. And that is OK. We would rather you stay on Monday.com and be productive than switch to Thicket and miss essential tools. For an in-depth feature comparison, see our Monday.com vs Thicket comparison page.
Cost Comparison
Here is what both tools cost at different team sizes. Monday.com pricing uses their Standard ($12/seat) and Pro ($20/seat) plans:
At 25 people, you save $271-$471/month. That is $3,252-$5,652 per year. At 50 people, the gap is $571-$971/month - up to $11,652 per year. The math gets more dramatic with every person you add, because Thicket's price never changes.
Step-by-Step Migration Plan
Do not try to migrate everything in a weekend. Rushed migrations fail. Here is a 7-step plan that works:
1. Export Your Data from Monday.com
Go to each board, click the three-dot menu, and select Export Board to Excel. This gives you a CSV with all items, statuses, assignees, and dates. Do this for every active board. Store the exports somewhere safe - you will reference them during setup.
2. Audit What You Actually Use
Most teams use about 30% of Monday.com's features. Before rebuilding everything, ask: which boards did someone touch this week? Which automations actually fire? Which columns do people look at?
Kill the dead weight. Do not migrate boards nobody has opened in three months. Do not recreate automations that trigger on edge cases. Migration is a chance to clean house.
3. Set Up Your Thicket Workspace
Create your Thicket workspace and set up projects that match your active Monday.com boards. One board typically becomes one project. Groups become sections within those projects.
4. Import Tasks - Keep It Clean
Use your CSV exports to recreate tasks in Thicket. Do not migrate every single item. Focus on open and in-progress tasks. Completed tasks from six months ago do not need to come over. Dead tasks stay dead.
5. Invite Your Team in Batches
Start with one project and the people who work on it. Do not invite your entire company on day one. Let the first group get comfortable, work out any workflow kinks, and become internal advocates. Then expand to the next team.
6. Run Both Tools in Parallel for 2 Weeks
This is the most important step. Do not cut over cold. Run Monday.com and Thicket side by side for two weeks. New work goes in Thicket. Existing work stays in Monday.com until it is done or moved. This gives your team a safety net and time to adjust.
7. Cancel Monday.com Once the Team Is Comfortable
When nobody has opened Monday.com in a week, it is time. Download any final exports for your records, then cancel. Do not keep paying for a tool nobody uses "just in case."
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I import my Monday.com data into Thicket?
You can export Monday.com boards to CSV and use that to rebuild in Thicket. There is no one-click import yet, but CSV export captures your task data including names, assignees, statuses, and due dates.
Will I lose my file attachments?
Download files from Monday.com before canceling. You can re-attach them to Thicket tasks. Monday.com does not delete data immediately after cancellation, but do not wait.
How long does migration take?
For a team of 10 with 5-10 active boards, expect 2-3 hours of setup plus a 2-week parallel run period. Most teams are fully switched within 3 weeks.
What if I need automations?
Thicket does not have built-in automations yet. If automations are critical, consider whether you can replicate them with Zapier or if Monday.com is still the better fit for your workflow.
Is Thicket really free for small teams?
Yes. Up to 5 users is free. No credit card required. Paid plans start at $49/month for unlimited users.
Can I go back to Monday.com if Thicket does not work?
Yes. Keep your Monday.com data exports. You can always re-import. We recommend the parallel run period specifically for this reason.
Is This the Right Move for Your Team?
If your team uses Monday.com for basic project management - tasks, assignments, due dates, comments, files - and you are tired of paying per seat for features you do not use, Thicket is worth trying. The free plan supports up to 5 users with no credit card required.
If your team depends on automations, Gantt charts, or deep integrations with tools like Salesforce or HubSpot, Monday.com is probably still the better fit. Switching tools only makes sense when the new tool actually covers what you need.
The best way to decide is to run both in parallel. Move one project to Thicket, keep everything else in Monday.com, and see what your team prefers after two weeks. The tool people actually open every morning is the right one.