Monday.com vs. Rodeo: Which One to Choose?

On your quest to find the right software solution for your business, monday.com must have popped up among your top search results.

This popular tool is very flexible, allowing you to create custom workflows with over 200+ ready-made templates. Its template center includes options that have been designed specifically for a range of different industries, organizations, and types of teams. 

When compared to Rodeo, both tools are all-in-one project management solutions that help manage workflows through a single source of proof. While both deliver on this promise, the degree of effectiveness comes down to choosing a platform that best fits your company’s needs and processes.

While both, monday.com and Rodeo, are presented as one-size-fits-all solutions, this article will help you understand what each one has to offer in order to determine whether or not it fits with your organization’s workflows.

The differences between monday.com & Rodeo

How does a super customizable platform such as monday.com measure up to Rodeo? Let's take a deeper dive into their differences:

Monday.com is highly customizable, and Rodeo not so much

Monday.com is a platform that gives you the flexibility to custom-create all your workflows on your own. Start by creating a board, table, or chart—with one of the 200+ templates—and drag and drop the different column and row types to reflect all necessary values.

Next, you can add groups, items, sub-items, and buttons while linking all your different boards and other visualizations together. The possibilities are endless, but it also depends on your ability to create the right structures, in the most efficient way. How would you know the best way to visualize a certain process in your organization? Or how to collect and measure the related data?

Compare this to using Excel sheets, which are super handy and supposed to make calculations a piece of cake, as long as you know what you are doing to create the right formulas while arranging and entering data accordingly.

Fun fact: It turns out that almost 90% of all spreadsheets contain errors. Which is counterproductive in the end. 

Although monday.com offers a very good planner, that’s about the only built-in feature they offer. For everything else, the platform is designed to integrate seamlessly with countless other tools and applications.

So ask yourself: “Is there someone in my organization who is tech-savvy enough to create effective workflows in monday.com, and who also knows what other apps we need to integrate and how?” If the answer is no then you would be far better off using a platform that provides a steady structure for you.

Rodeo, might not be super customizable when it comes to project management structures, but it offers a clear framework with built-in features for workflows that are commonly followed by project-based organizations. 

Monday.com is very broad while Rodeo is project-focused

Being able to customize your workflows with a platform like monday.com means you can potentially tailor them to any type of industry. However, because of this broad character, it’s safe to say the platform was not designed with a specific workflow or process in mind.

Rodeo, on the other hand, was developed by a financial services company, Kop of Munt, based on the needs and challenges of their clients (mostly creative businesses). This makes the platform especially suitable for creative agencies such as marketing, video production, content creation, advertising, architecture, and (digital) design agencies.

These organizations usually work on projects, which is why Rodeo focuses on the project cycle, offering features that support it from start to finish—especially the financial side of them.

Each project in Rodeo starts with a budget to help you create accurate estimates for clients. Then, tasks can be planned and assigned to team members, who then can track their time spent on these tasks. Finally, you can generate and send invoices to clients straight from Rodeo, keeping all project data stored in one place and turned into powerful reports.

Although Rodeo was initially designed for creative companies, any project-based organization could benefit from this solid structure of project-focused features.

Monday.com has no connection between budgets and planning

If you work at a company that needs to track billable time to a budget, then the features you use for this need to be connected and synced. In this case, you want to use a platform where once you start planning tasks and activities, you can then see how your planned tasks are impacting the budget. 

With monday.com, you can create a widget to reflect your budget and a widget to count the time worked on tasks (or integrate it with a time tracking tool). But there is no way to actually connect them.

Because Rodeo offers built-in features that are designed to communicate together, the budget and all of its features are linked to one another. The built-in time tracker automatically deducts all recorded billable time from the budget, giving you a clear view of the health of your project's budget. 

This is crucial to calculating accurate estimates and avoiding going over budget while making sure every second is accounted for.

Rodeo generates comprehensive reports, monday.com’s reporting function is very limited

As mentioned above, monday.com is quite limited when it comes to syncing all the different workflows and widgets. 

You are only able to review data linked to the separate widgets or integrated tools/apps, which makes it harder to generate reports that truly show the big picture and allow you to make better executive decisions.

This is another area in which the interdependence of all Rodeo’s built-in features proves to be super beneficial. Each update in any of the features is automatically processed through to the rest of the features, meaning you have real-time data at your fingertips at all times.

Rodeo’s reporting feature is very intuitive, allowing you to check “quick reports” at any time, which is super convenient for when clients suddenly call asking for updates. Moreover, very extensive reports can also be generated, full of useful information about past and current projects. 

This data can be leveraged in many ways, to make better decisions, better results, and more profit for example.

Monday.com has a mobile app, Rodeo only offers mobile time tracking

Some people just prefer to access their work management platform on their mobile phones, using their computers to focus on the actual work. Often people also tend to use certain features on their computer, while preferring to use others (often time-tracking) on their mobile.

In any case, it’s great to have this flexibility and Monday.com facilitates the option by offering mobile versions on Google Play and the App Store.

Unfortunately, Rodeo doesn’t offer a full-fledged version of its platform for mobile use. But we do offer mobile time-tracking, as we have found out this is what mobile versions are used for most often.

Monday.com relies on integrations, Rodeo doesn’t need them

We have already explained how Monday.com basically only has one built-in feature; a very competent and easy-to-use planner. For any process beyond planning tasks and activities, you can either custom-create workflows with templates (which comes with limitations we have explained) or integrate them with other apps and tools.

Want an invoicing system? Find financial software to integrate with. Want to gain insight into the number of hours employees need for certain tasks? You need to integrate with a time-tracking application. What about keeping your team aligned, especially now working from home is common? Integrating with a communication tool such as Slack is absolutely imperative.

There are countless tools and applications available for anything you may need. Integrating this network of other systems with Monday.com will work just as fine as a platform with built-in features like Rodeo. 

The downside though, is that all these extra applications come with a price tag. Seeing as Monday.com only has a planner, this means you will be piling on extra applications, increasing your monthly payment total. 

Besides, in the event of technical problems, whose support service will you contact? Probably both, as it might be unclear who is responsible depending on the issue. Maintaining all these integrations takes time and effort, as there will be regular updates. 

This is the very reason why Rodeo is designed as a true all-in-one platform with built-in features meant to replace all the other apps and tools you use. Allowing you to integrate your workflows without integrations, keeping costs down. 

All the features you need to manage projects are present, including a built-in messenger feature.

Both offer package prices based on needs, but Rodeo is more flexible

Both platforms offer different packages at various price points based on the number of features needed.

Monday.com offers a very limited free version for max. 2 users, while Basic, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise packages range from $8 to +$16 per user. You can’t select a mixture of different user profiles though, and your grand total will be billed annually, which is quite a commitment.

Rodeo doesn’t offer a free version, as we wouldn’t dream of leaving any of the interdependent features out just for the sake of offering it for free.

On top of the starting price of $29.99 per month, you pay $4.99, $8.99, or $14.99 per user, depending on the user profile (project manager or creative for example). You can select a mixture of user profiles, switching things up or adding users on and off each month. 

You can put together a package that suits your team’s needs perfectly, every month. This flexibility is ideal for companies that employ temporary freelancers for example. Without the obligation to pay annually, your monthly total might differ each time. Why pay for things you don’t need?

Features overview and comparison

Almost coming to the end of this blog, here’s a clear overview of the features offered by Monday.com vs. Rodeo.

Takeaway

You probably catch the gist by now. While initially seeming similar, Monday.com and Rodeo are very different platforms. Both were created with the mission to help organizations streamline and optimize their processes through one single platform, but do this in very different ways.

Monday.com is a highly customizable work management system that has all but one built-in feature; the planner. All other processes require custom-created templates or integrations with other applications. 

So, if you already work with a selection of multiple apps and are hard-bent on continuing to work with them, monday.com is an excellent platform to bring them all together. As long as you have team members savvy enough to accomplish and maintain this.

If your company works on projects, it would make much more sense to replace the plethora of apps you use with an intuitive project management tool such as Rodeo. It has all the features you need to manage and track the progress of your projects while optimizing your workflows. 

Ready to test it for yourself? Start a free trial or plan a free demo with one of our experts.