Monday.com is the Work OS — a horizontal platform used by marketing teams, HR departments, sales organisations, IT groups, and everything in between.
Kavaro is the agency project management tool built specifically for client delivery, pitches, and proposals — designed by people who ran agencies, not by people building a platform that tries to serve everyone. Monday.com gives you building blocks. Kavaro gives you the finished system.
Kavaro vs Monday.com at a glance
| Feature | Kavaro | Monday.com |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Agency project management for client delivery, pitches, and proposals | Horizontal Work OS for any team, any industry, any workflow |
| Built for | Agency founders, operators, and delivery teams | Marketing, sales, HR, IT, dev, ops — everyone |
| Project views | Phases, timeline, kanban — structured around how agency work actually moves; next to a weekly project plan | Board, timeline, Gantt, calendar, chart, workload — general-purpose |
| Pitches and proposals alongside delivery | Yes — projects, pitches, and proposals in one unified view | No — Monday.com is workflow management; pipeline lives in their separate CRM product that comes with an additional cost |
| Client-facing project view | Yes — clean, shareable overview for clients | No native client portal — clients added as guests see the same boards your team does |
| Client approvals tracking | Yes — tracks viewed, approved, waiting, and who needs to respond | No native approval tracking for client work — requires automations or integrations |
| AI first drafts | Yes — generates project plans and task content from a short brief | Yes — Monday AI for content generation, formula building, and task summaries |
| Project templates | Yes — reusable project and pitch templates | Yes — extensive template centre across industries |
| Checkpoints | Yes — mark key decisions, reviews, and handovers | No direct equivalent — status columns and milestones serve a different purpose |
| Estimates vs actuals | Yes — compare planned vs actual effort per client, phase, and work type | No native equivalent — time tracking add-on available but doesn't tie to estimates at project/phase level |
| Daily cross-project planning | Yes — see the day's priorities across every client, pitch, and proposal | My Work view shows individual tasks; no agency-wide daily planning |
| Multi-project dashboard | Yes — all projects, pitches, and proposals | Yes — dashboards available across boards |
| Setup complexity | Minimal — describe the work, start managing it | Moderate — flexible but requires building your own structure from a blank board |
Why agencies choose Kavaro over Monday.com
Monday.com is a well-designed platform that millions of teams use daily. But being designed for everyone means it's optimised for no one in particular — and agencies have specific operational needs that a horizontal Work OS wasn't built to address.
1. A tool built for agencies, not a tool you build into an agency tool
Monday.com's greatest strength — that it can model any workflow for any team — is also its biggest cost for agencies. You start with a blank board and build your project management system from scratch: columns for phases, automations for status updates, dashboards that pull from multiple boards, guest permissions for clients.
Kavaro starts with the assumption that you're running an agency. Phases, client views, approvals, checkpoints, and estimates-vs-actuals are there from day one because that's how agency work moves. The difference isn't features — it's whether you're assembling the system or using one.
2. Client visibility without guest-seat complexity
Monday.com handles external collaboration through guest access — you invite clients to your boards, set permissions, and hope they don't see the column where someone wrote "this client is exhausting." It works, but it's fragile, and managing guest permissions across multiple client boards creates ongoing admin.
Kavaro has a purpose-built client-facing project view: clients see progress, deliverables, and status in a clean overview while your team keeps internal detail private - at no cost! No permission juggling. No risk of accidental exposure.
3. Pipeline and delivery stop living in separate systems
Monday.com offers a separate CRM product for sales pipeline. For agencies, that means the pitch you're working on lives in one system and the project it might become lives in another — or, more commonly, the pitch lives in someone's inbox and the project lives in Monday.
Kavaro puts projects, pitches, and proposals in one view. You see live work, new opportunities, and proposal deadlines together, so nothing sits hidden and the transition from won pitch to active project happens without rebuilding anything.
4. Approvals that actually track client responses
When an agency sends work for client approval, the question isn't "is the task done" — it's "has the client seen it, and have they signed off." Monday.com can model approval workflows with automations and status columns, but it doesn't natively track whether a client has viewed a deliverable, who's approved, who's still sitting on it, and what's at risk of stalling.
Kavaro tracks approvals with that level of specificity because that's the loop that determines whether agency projects stay on track or quietly stall.
5. No wasted seats, no forced minimums
Monday.com requires a 3-seat minimum on every paid plan, and seats are sold in blocks — a 4-person team pays for 5 seats. For a small agency where every pound matters, paying for unused seats adds up quickly.
Kavaro doesn't impose seat minimums that force you to subsidise empty licences, so you pay for the team you have rather than the team Monday thinks you should.
Other comparisons agencies have asked us about
Frequently asked questions
Is Monday.com good for agencies?
Monday.com can work for agencies — many use it — but it's a horizontal platform designed to serve every type of team. The workflows agencies need most (client approvals tracking, client-facing project views, pitches and proposals alongside delivery, estimates vs actuals) aren't built in. You can build them using Monday's flexible column and automation system, but you're effectively constructing your agency management tool from parts rather than using one that's already assembled. Kavaro gives you those agency workflows from day one.
Does Monday.com have a client portal?
Not natively. Monday.com uses guest access to give external users visibility into boards. Guests see the same board your team uses, filtered by permissions. There's no separate, clean client-facing view — you're managing what clients can and can't see through permission settings on every board, which creates ongoing admin and the risk that internal detail becomes visible. Kavaro's client-facing project overview is designed specifically for this — giving clients the visibility they need while keeping your internal work private.
Can I track client approvals in Monday.com?
You can model approval workflows using status columns and automations, but Monday.com doesn't natively track whether a client has viewed a deliverable, who has approved, and who is still waiting. Kavaro's approval tracking is built for the agency-client loop specifically — viewed, approved, waiting, and who needs to respond — so projects don't quietly stall in someone's inbox.
Why do agencies leave Monday.com?
The most common reason we hear is complexity that doesn't pay off. Agencies spend time building and maintaining their project management system in Monday — creating boards, setting up automations, managing guest permissions, connecting dashboards — rather than doing the work. The platform is powerful enough to model agency workflows, but modelling them isn't the same as having them built in and ready to use.
Does Monday.com require a minimum number of seats?
Yes. All paid Monday.com plans require a minimum of 3 seats, and seats are sold in blocks of 5 after the initial minimum. A 4-person agency pays for 5 seats. A solo founder on a paid plan pays for 3. Kavaro doesn't impose seat minimums.
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