With so many tasks to juggle, teams today need a dependable collaboration platform more than ever. The right platform can not only help them stay organized but also streamline their workflow and foster seamless communication throughout the team.
Lark and Monday.com (hereafter “Monday”) both offer robust solutions to meet these challenges. In this blog, we delve into the differences of Lark vs Monday—examining their unique features, pricing models, mobile experiences, and suitable teams—to help you determine which platform best meets your needs.
What is Monday?
Monday is a project management platform designed primarily for desk-based teams, such as marketing, engineering, and sales. It offers features such as task management, project planning, timeline management, team collaboration, and more. One unique advantage of monday is that it provides a visual interface that makes it easy to manage various projects and see their progress.
What is Lark?
Lark is an all-in-one collaboration platform designed for companies seeking to improve team efficiency and operational excellence both in the office and on the field.
Lark offers a full tech stack in one app that knowledge workers can use to handle their work without toggling apps. At the same time, Lark’s tailored solutions for industries such as retail, food and beverage, and manufacturing, allow frontline teams to complete their daily tasks more efficiently.
Lark’s wide range of functions makes such solutions possible. These functions, include but not limited to:
Project management with automated workflows to streamline daily tasks, such as inventory tracking, food defect reporting, and revenue reporting
1:1 and group chats for work communication across teams and companies, instead of waiting on email replies
Video conferencing & minutes with auto-translation, friendly for async collaboration across time zones and locations
Document collaboration to provide unified and up-to-date information on company policies, product development, creative design, or best practices to teams across all levels of the organization.
Lark’s no-code database platform, Lark Base, can be used for managing a wide variety of projects. Designed to be highly customizable, Lark Base can be used for progress tracking, workflow management, task assignment, automation, data visualization and analysis, and much more.
All of these features are accessible from the Lark’s desktop and mobile apps, allowing frontline teams to perform daily tasks, such as facility inspections, inventory tracking, and defect reporting using their phones. Colleagues in the office can view real-time updates on their desktop.
Lark vs Monday pricing: get more while paying less with Lark
Both Lark and Monday offer a range of collaboration features to help teams streamline their work processes for different types of projects. However, there are some key differences between the two platforms and Lark offers much greater value for money.
To begin with, Lark takes a lead with the free tier, which comes with a wide array of features. On top of the project management functions and versatile views that Monday doesn’t provide in its free plan, Lark provides functions such as team chats, document management, file sharing, and more. This means your team doesn’t have to toggle between multiple apps to collaborate on a project.
If your organization has more than 20 employees, both platforms offer scalable pricing. Lark provides better value at a price 70% lower than a typical tech stack with multiple tools. Whether your team is constantly on the move or primarily based in an office, Lark’s mobile-friendly design ensures they can get the job done. This is in contrast to a multi-tool, desk-bound tech stack that you would need to assemble to get your team up and running.
Compared to Monday’s Pro plan that costs $19 per user per month, Lark’s Pro plan, at $12 per user per month also offers much more advanced features at a lower price point. In Lark’s Pro plan, you get 1TB of storage, 20,000 rows per table, 100+ formula functions, cross-table calculations, the Workflow feature, offline editing, restoring previous versions, and more. For monday, you only get 100GB of storage, 10,000 rows per table, 50+ formula functions, and none of the advanced features mentioned above.
Suitable teams: Lark takes your frontline’s needs into consideration
Lark is designed for both knowledge workers and frontline teams. For example, if you’re in the manufacturing industry and your frontline team inspects the assembly line on a weekly basis, they can easily update the status of the assembly line, take pictures, and communicate with the back-end team in real-time using Lark's mobile app.
This applies to all the in-field work your team might need to conduct, such as OSHA compliance inspections, inventory tracking, revenue reporting, and defect ticket submission, among others. The best part: this system doesn't require an IT manager to configure; a facility manager without any technical background can easily build it on Lark Base. The manager can also choose to get started with a template instead, such as this one that can be used for ensuring quality in the manufacturing process.
For industries such as manufacturing, retail, and food and beverage where a lot of the workers can only use a phone for daily tasks, Lark is a much better option. Its mobile-first design means employees can easily conduct daily routines such as inventory checks, inspections, sales reporting, and more. They can also use Lark Messenger to chat with colleagues directly without switching to another app, making it a much more convenient and intuitive option than Monday when it comes to frontline team usage.
Project management software: Lark saves time and cost on onboarding and integration
Even if most of your employees work in an office setting, Lark remains a better alternative to Monday. Not only is Lark more affordable, but it also saves your team time and money because key management functions and messaging are integrated onto one platform. This way, your teams keep track of key project metrics and updates, and communicate with stakeholders in one place.
1. Suitable for all departments
In addition to the field operations mentioned above, departments such as HR, marketing, admin, supply chain, PMO, legal, and enterprise service can all use Lark for their work, with free templates for different teams to get started easily. This means that onboarding different tools for different teams is no longer necessary.
2. Built-in messenger for timely project notifications
A built-in messenger is vital for collaboration across teams. For example, your property team can use Lark Base to create and monitor milestones and tasks for preparing a new office location. Meanwhile, your marketing team can easily organize their social media calendar using Base's Calendar view. Assigned colleagues can receive reminders and notifications for upcoming tasks and due dates directly in Lark, via automated messages. In short, team communication is much more efficient.
3. No need to pay for additional work views and integrations
Some of Monday's features, such as various work views (Gantt, Calendar, etc.) require not only a more expensive paid plan, but also additional integration with tools like Slack to enable features such as assignment tagging and reminders.
By the time a reminder email is sent to a project member's inbox, it may take several hours or even days to be processed and responded to, further delaying the project timeline. The built-in integration is another reason why Lark is the better tool for project tracking.
Conclusion
While Monday is primarily designed for desk-based teams and project management, Lark is a versatile collaboration platform that can be customized for all types of projects. Lark helps companies improve operational excellence in the field with a more versatile, mobile-friendly solution that can be used by both frontline teams and office workers.
Furthermore, Lark provides more solutions at a lower price point to help companies reduce costs in their tech stack and avoid unnecessary subscriptions. This makes it a better alternative for companies seeking better collaboration and business growth by connecting their teams across that work remotely or at the office. Reach out to our team today to get a tailored solution for your business 👇
