We’re often asked how GW Apps compares to Monday.com. Both products are notable no-code solutions for building business applications, though they focus on different use cases.
GW Apps is designed for creating complex forms and workflows to better manage business processes, while Monday is a project and task management tool with extensive automation and collaboration features. This article compares the two platforms, highlighting their differences, likely use cases, and how they can best support different organizational needs.
Use Cases
GW Apps is optimized for building form-based, workflow centric business applications. It shines in scenarios requiring intricate form layouts, complex business process logic, and diverse data security at various workflow stages. Applications like Purchase Approval, Request for Capital Expenditure, Requests to add or modify master catalog records in ERP or Financial systems, and the like will fit better on GW Apps than Monday. Additionally, the inclusion of SLAs and platform level reporting and application organization means that GW Apps is also a stronger candidate for building customer and employee self-service portals.
Monday is tailored more towards project and task tracking, team collaboration, and table-based data management. It’s great for managing tasks, projects, and team productivity, benefiting use cases that revolve around planning, tracking, and quick collaboration. Its lack of form features and customization makes it better for spreadsheet-style applications with limited numbers of data fields/columns and few or no large blocks of text.
Getting Started & Ease of Use
GW Apps uses simple drag, drop and configure style builders that allow users to visually design applications. With a multitude of advanced features like highly customizable and shareable forms, automation and workflow, conditional logic, custom PDF and Email templates, granular security options, and multiple view types, the platform is tailored to empower technical and non-technical users alike to build enterprise-grade applications with ease. One of GW Apps’ most prominent strengths is its form builder, which offers a level of customization that includes multi-column forms, 3 form layouts to choose from (single-page, tabbed, and stepper), dynamic layout changes, conditional visibility of form fields and sections, and more.
Monday offers a highly visual interface that is simple and attractive, providing an inviting and user-friendly experience. Many of its builders use a combination of conversational, easy to understand language and dropdown lists, streamlining and simplifying the building process. It includes tables and boards that can be adapted to manage everything from simple tasks to complex projects, featuring a variety of useful views for project management like timelines, Gantt charts, and Kanban boards. Due to its spreadsheet style approach to data management, Monday’s forms are significantly more rigid than GW Apps’, offering only a single-column layout and not allowing for data to be viewed on a form, which may not suffice for more complex application requirements.
Workflow Automation
GW Apps allows you to easily model complex business processes with a wide range of capabilities, such as the ability to create multi-step approval processes with conditional logic, automatic and scheduled triggers, notifications and more. As an example, you can create a Purchase Order Approval workflow that dynamically routes requests to different approvers based on the purchase amount or any other data within your application. It is also possible to define SLAs (Service Level Agreements) to ensure that workflow stages are completed in a required time period, and key managers can be notified if any steps take too long.
Monday’s automation builder uses conversational, easy to understand language with dropdown lists to build. It’s great for streamlining team tasks and project activities, offering a majority of the necessary features for successful project management. That said, Monday cannot match the level of customization in GW Apps when it comes to modeling complex business process workflows, as it lacks features like SLAs and many of the necessary permission/security capabilities.
Security
GW Apps allows intricate, granular control over who can view, edit, or take action on any record or piece of data at each stage of the workflow, with custom roles and access permissions all the way down to the field-level. Each application can have its own set of custom roles, and you can also create prepopulated Shared Global Roles, such as IT Managers or VPs, that can be shared across multiple apps to simplify access management. It also offers form-defined dynamic roles that allow access to be defined by names entered on a record. Robust but flexible security is one of GW Apps’ most prominent strengths.
Monday’s security options are generally oriented towards team access and project-related controls rather than the granular security needs of business applications. Their approach to security is broad, linking board design and data editing permissions closely together. With no ability to limit permissions on specific columns or rows, no ability to limit permissions by status/workflow stage/etc., and no way to hide or show columns based on values in other fields, the security options are similar to those of shared spreadsheets – users can either edit everything, or nothing. These are severely limited access and security permission settings when compared to GW Apps.
Additional Use Case
In addition to being an effective app development platform for business process automation, GW Apps is used by many customers as the foundation for their paperless office. Its versatile and powerful form building enables companies to automate any kind of form or data capture coupled with its workflow engine throughout forms and requests for approval and resolution. Other clients are using GW Apps as an employee self service portal, enabling their staff to easily initiate a request for service or purchase, and provide them with the ability to track its approval and resolution.
Pricing and Support
GW Apps offers 4 plans for businesses: A starter plan for 25 users ($99/mo), the SMB value plan for teams of up to 100 users ($250/mo), and two additional plans targeted at Mid Market and Large enterprises, with an average price of $2/user/mo. The free trial gives you access to most features, enabling new users to try the platform and build test applications to fully validate the platform’s capabilities.
Monday utilizes a per-seat (user) pricing model, and the number of seats come in predetermined group sizes, beginning with 3 seats. This approach might be more flexible for scaling but can become costly as team size increases. In addition to the per-seat pricing model, Monday offers 4 plans for businesses: A Basic plan ($8/seat/mo), a Standard plan ($10/seat/mo), a Pro plan ($16/seat/mo), and an Enterprise plan. Access to some features like SSO and a Formula column require Pro or Enterprise plans, and access to some more common features like Automation, Form Customization, a Map view, and Integrations require at least the Standard plan. You would need an Enterprise plan for Monday to be able to access all the features offered by GW Apps on every one of its own plans.
Both platforms provide substantial support documentation online. Monday offers a community forum where users can ask questions and discuss the product with other users. But like other large organizations, it can be difficult to reach a live person for support or help building applications. GW Apps makes it easier to access live, one-on-one support, which can be a critical differentiator for businesses requiring hands-on assistance during development.
Conclusion
GW Apps is a great choice for organizations looking to develop business applications with custom workflow requirements and strict security requirements. It excels at creating secure applications for sensitive business transactions where it is vital only specific people can see, edit or take action on specific data, at any stage in the process life-cycle. Additionally, given its form-based approach, it is a great solution for any applications involving complex, highly customizable and shareable forms.
Monday is best suited for project management tasks, offering a visually intuitive platform that helps teams plan, execute, and track work across various functions. Its spreadsheet-style approach to app building, along with its visually attractive interface, makes it an inviting solution for new users. It is a great solution for task and project management, with extensive customization and powerful automation, but it isn’t designed for the same depth of application development as GW Apps.
Choosing between GW Apps and Monday boils down to the specific needs of your organization. For deep internal process integration, sensitive data handling, and form-based applications GW Apps has the edge. For general project management and team collaboration, Monday is a powerful option.