Switch Guide: Moving from Monday.com to Teamwork
Monday.com is an Israeli company listed on NASDAQ, storing your project data on US-based AWS servers. It's a capable tool — but it's priced aggressively, requires minimum 3-seat purchases, and is designed as a general-purpose work OS rather than specifically for client-service work. Teamwork was purpose-built for agencies and professional services teams who manage work for external clients. If your team has grown from "we need a way to track tasks" (Monday.com's sweet spot) to "we need to track time, manage budgets, and give clients visibility" (Teamwork's sweet spot), this switch is a natural progression that also happens to move your data to Canadian infrastructure.
What You'll Gain
- Client portals: Give clients project visibility without internal access to your workspace.
- Native time tracking: Log hours against tasks and projects with timers and manual entry.
- Project profitability: See budget burn, time logged vs. estimated, and project margin in real time.
- Billable hours workflow: Mark time as billable, generate invoices, and track payment — all in one place.
- Better for client work: Teamwork's information architecture is built around clients and projects, not boards and items.
- Canadian data residency available: Teamwork offers data residency selection for compliance-sensitive organizations.
What You Might Miss
- Monday's flexibility: Monday.com's "work OS" approach lets you build almost any workflow. Teamwork is more opinionated about project structure.
- Automations: Monday.com's automation builder is very powerful and visual. Teamwork's automations are more limited.
- Column types: Monday's varied column types (formula columns, mirror columns, connect boards) are more flexible than Teamwork's field types.
- Docs and Workdocs: Monday WorkDocs has no direct Teamwork equivalent — you'll need a separate docs tool.
Migration Checklist
- Export Monday.com boards — Go to each board and select More options → Export → Excel or CSV to download your data.
- Map your Monday structure to Teamwork — Monday uses workspaces, boards, groups, and items. Teamwork uses companies, projects, task lists, and tasks. Plan your mapping before importing.
- Set up Teamwork account — Create your account and configure user roles and permissions.
- Create client companies — Add your clients as companies in Teamwork — this is the foundation of Teamwork's client-service structure.
- Import projects — Use Teamwork's import feature or manually create projects for each active Monday board. CSV import is available.
- Set up time tracking — This is the biggest workflow change. Train your team on logging time in Teamwork before the full switch.
- Configure client portals — Invite clients to their Teamwork portals once projects are set up.
- Migrate active tasks — Focus on migrating in-progress work; archive completed Monday boards rather than migrating everything.
Data Export Tips from Monday.com
Monday.com supports Excel and CSV export for each board individually. There's no global account export — you export board by board. The export includes items (tasks), their status, assigned users, dates, and column values. Subitems export separately. Attachments are not included in the export — download important files manually from Monday before migrating. Monday's automations and integrations don't export — document these separately so you can rebuild or find alternatives in Teamwork.
Timeline Estimate
Most agencies complete this migration in 2–3 weeks. The technical import of active projects can be done in a day. The larger investment is training your team on Teamwork's time tracking workflow and setting up client portals. Plan a 2-week parallel period where both platforms are active before fully committing to Teamwork.