Monday.com is one of the most recognisable names in work management software. It has a clean interface, a generous app marketplace, and a marketing budget large enough that most agency owners have at least trialled it at some point. Many still use it. The question worth asking honestly is: does using Monday.com actually make running your agency simpler — or does it just make your project boards look tidier while everything else (CRM, billing, support, site monitoring) still lives somewhere else?
That’s the real test. Not “is Monday.com good software?” (it is, within its scope) but “does Monday.com solve the specific operational problems that make running a digital agency hard?” For most UK agencies with 5–15 staff managing ongoing retainer clients, the answer is: only partially, and the gaps are expensive.
This article lays out exactly where the two products differ, where Monday.com falls short for agency use, and which type of agency would be better served by each.
What Monday.com Actually Is
Monday.com describes itself as a “Work OS” — a flexible platform that can be configured to manage almost any type of workflow. That positioning is accurate and also revealing. It’s a general-purpose tool that can be shaped into an agency project management system, a CRM, a hiring tracker, or a marketing calendar. The flexibility is the product. It is not, by design, an opinionated system built around the way digital agencies actually operate.
In practice, most agencies use Monday.com for one of two things: as a project and task management board, or (with significant configuration work) as a light CRM. The board-based model is genuinely good for tracking tasks within a project. You can build out Kanban views, Gantt charts, timeline views, and automations that notify team members when status changes. For pure project delivery visibility, it’s capable.
What it doesn’t do — and what requires bolting on additional tools — is invoicing, time tracking connected to billing, client portals, support ticketing, retainer management, site monitoring, or anything resembling a client health score. Those gaps mean the typical agency using Monday.com is also running Xero or FreeAgent for billing, HubSpot or Pipedrive for CRM, Zendesk or Freshdesk for support tickets, and possibly a separate uptime monitoring tool for client sites. Monday.com becomes one layer in a five-tool stack, not the platform holding everything together.
Pricing: What You’re Actually Paying
Monday.com’s pricing is where the comparison becomes uncomfortable. The platform charges per seat, and the pricing tiers are structured in a way that makes it easy to underestimate the real cost before you’ve committed.
At the Basic tier (around £9–12 per seat per month), you get boards and limited automations. The Pro tier — which unlocks time tracking, guest access, and more advanced automations — runs to roughly £16–19 per seat per month. For a 10-person agency on Pro, that’s approximately £190/month before you’ve paid for a single invoice, CRM contact, or support ticket. Add Xero (£30–47/mo), a CRM tool (£50–100/mo), and a support platform (£50–80/mo), and the combined stack lands somewhere between £320 and £450 per month to cover the functionality that a typical agency actually needs.
Marque CRM’s Agency plan at £149/month includes all of that: project management with Kanban boards and Gantt charts, full CRM, invoicing and recurring billing, retainer management, support tickets with SLA tracking, site monitoring, white-label client portal, time tracking, Shopify sync, and accounting integrations with Xero and QuickBooks. For 15 users. The cost comparison is not marginal — it’s typically 2–3x cheaper once you account for what Monday.com’s ecosystem actually requires.
Quick pricing reality check: A 10-person agency on Monday.com Pro + Xero + a basic CRM + Freshdesk Support Starter is looking at approximately £350–450/month. Marque CRM’s Agency plan covering the same scope (and more) costs £149/month for up to 15 users. That’s a saving of £2,400–3,600 per year, before accounting for integration maintenance time.
Feature-by-Feature: Where Each Platform Stands
The table below compares Monday.com and Marque CRM across the features that genuinely matter for a UK digital agency with ongoing retainer clients.
The Client Portal Gap
One of the biggest practical differences between the two platforms is the client-facing experience. Monday.com does allow you to invite guests (clients) to view specific boards. What it doesn’t do is present that experience under your brand. Clients log into Monday.com, see Monday.com’s interface, and whatever board you’ve granted them access to. There’s no invoice history, no support ticket view, no project documentation hub — just the board.
For agencies positioning themselves as professional, technology-forward partners, asking clients to log into a generic work management tool is a small but persistent credibility drain. The implicit message is: “we use Monday.com, just like everyone else.” A white-label portal — your logo, your domain, your agency’s name on every page — sends a different message entirely. Clients can view open projects, download deliverables, raise support requests, approve quotes, and see their invoice history, all in an environment that looks like it was built by you.
Marque’s client portal is available from the Grow plan (£79/month) and is fully white-labelled from the Agency plan (£149/month), including custom domain support. This isn’t a feature you’d typically find below £200–300/month in any comparable stack.
Support Ticketing and Site Monitoring
These two features are where agencies maintaining client websites live or die, and they’re completely absent from Monday.com.
Support ticketing matters because most agencies offering retainer or maintenance packages receive inbound client requests that need logging, prioritising, and tracking to resolution. Without a proper ticketing system, those requests come in via email, WhatsApp, phone, and Slack, get lost, get forgotten, and eventually become relationship problems. A ticket system with SLA tracking — “we acknowledge within 2 hours, resolve within 24 hours” — gives your team accountability and gives clients confidence. Monday.com boards are not a substitute for this: you can create a row per issue, but there’s no email-to-ticket conversion, no SLA clock, no automatic escalation, no client-facing ticket status page.
Site monitoring is equally critical for web agencies and is almost always handled with a separate subscription to something like Uptime Robot, Better Uptime, or StatusCake. Marque builds this directly into the platform: uptime checks, SSL certificate expiry alerts, and WordPress plugin vulnerability notifications for every site under management. If a client site goes down at 2am, the alert fires, a ticket is created, and the on-call person knows about it — without a separate monitoring service, a separate ticket, and a separate notification chain. For an agency managing 30–50 client sites, that consolidation alone saves meaningful admin time every month.
Where Monday.com Is Genuinely Better
This comparison would be incomplete without acknowledging what Monday.com does exceptionally well.
Flexibility and customisation. If your agency has genuinely unusual workflows that don’t fit the standard project-delivery model — say, you run large media buying operations, manage complex event timelines, or coordinate between dozens of external contractors with highly variable processes — Monday.com’s blank-canvas flexibility is a legitimate advantage. You can build almost any workflow from first principles. Marque CRM is more opinionated: it’s built around how most digital agencies work, which means it’s faster to set up and more powerful out of the box for standard agency operations, but slightly less malleable for edge cases.
Integrations marketplace. Monday.com has a large native integrations library and a well-documented API. If your team relies on specific tools (certain marketing platforms, data connectors, enterprise systems) and needs native integrations with them, Monday.com may connect more easily. Marque CRM covers the integrations that agencies most commonly need (Xero, QuickBooks, Shopify, WordPress) but has a smaller total integration surface.
Scale beyond agency use. If you’re running a hybrid business — part agency, part SaaS product, part media company — and want a single work management platform across all functions, Monday.com’s horizontal design means it can span those contexts. Marque CRM is built specifically for the agency model and doesn’t try to be all things to all businesses.
Which Should You Choose?
The decision comes down to what you’re actually trying to solve.
If your agency’s primary pain is project visibility — you need a better way to track tasks, set deadlines, and show clients what’s in progress — and you’re already happy with your billing, CRM, and support setup, Monday.com is a reasonable choice. It does project and task management well, the interface is approachable for new hires, and the onboarding friction is low.
If your pain is deeper — you’re running 4–6 separate tools, reconciling data manually between them, losing billable hours to admin, struggling to spot at-risk clients before they churn, and paying £400+/month across your stack — then a purpose-built agency platform is the right call. The value isn’t that Marque CRM has shinier task boards than Monday.com (it doesn’t need to compete on that dimension). The value is that one login covers your CRM, project delivery, invoicing, support desk, site monitoring, and client portal, with all of that data connected in a single record per client.
A 10-person UK digital agency managing 30 retainer clients has an operational profile that no general-purpose work management tool was designed for. Monday.com is excellent at what it was built for. Running a digital agency in its entirety is not that thing.
“The question isn’t whether Monday.com is good software. It’s whether buying Monday.com and three other tools to fill its gaps is a better decision than buying a platform designed for exactly what you do.”
If you’re currently on Monday.com plus a billing tool, a CRM, and a support system, it’s worth doing the maths before your next renewal. The stack cost is almost certainly higher than the all-in alternative — and the admin overhead of keeping multiple systems loosely in sync is a real but invisible cost that doesn’t appear on any invoice.
See the full feature list for Marque CRM, review the pricing page, or compare how Marque CRM stacks up against other platforms in the compare section. If you want to dig deeper into the cost of running multiple tools, this article on tool sprawl is worth 10 minutes of your time — and if you’re thinking about what a purpose-built agency platform looks like in practice, agency operations systems that scale lays out the architecture.