A monday.com alternative without the per-seat subscription
monday.com charges per seat, per month, with a minimum seat count. If you're one planner who needs Gantt charts, capacity planning and scenarios, shadow-planner does that on your desktop for €4,99 once.
monday.com is a flexible work-management platform, and its Gantt and workload views are good — on the plans that include them, billed per seat with a minimum number of seats. For a single project manager, a team lead or a freelancer, that means paying for several seats to get one planner's worth of features.
shadow-planner is the opposite shape: a desktop planning tool for one person, with Gantt, resource utilisation, portfolio roll-ups, what-if scenarios and an AI assistant — free to start, €4,99 once to go unlimited.
Side by side
| shadow-planner | monday.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free tier; €4,99 one-time | Per seat, per month, minimum seat count; Gantt and workload on higher tiers |
| Deployment | Desktop app, data stored locally | Cloud SaaS |
| Account | None | Required |
| Gantt | Dependencies, drag-to-reschedule, cascade preview | Gantt view on Standard and above |
| Capacity planning | Weekly utilisation, over-capacity highlighting, cost roll-ups | Workload view on Pro and above |
| What-if scenarios | Isolated scenarios, snapshots, templates | Duplicate boards |
| AI | Built-in assistant over your plan; bring your own model — local Ollama or a cloud key | monday AI, credits-based |
| Automation & integrations | None — it's a planner, not a workflow engine | Extensive |
| Collaboration | Single user; share via export | Real-time, multi-user |
When shadow-planner wins
You're the planner, not the whole team. Pay for one tool once, not for a seat bundle.
You want to model, not just track. Copy the baseline into a scenario, move people and dates, compare finish dates and person-days, decide. The baseline stays untouched.
You'd like the AI to actually know the plan. shadow-planner's assistant is connected to your scenario: it can answer "which projects are red this month?", create and reschedule tasks, and drafts whole plans from a Markdown brief. No credits — use a free local model or your own API key.
Data residency is a question you get asked. Everything stays on the machine. The only outbound traffic is chat messages to the AI provider you chose — or none at all with Ollama.
When monday.com wins
- You need a shared workspace where the whole team updates status, comments and files.
- You want automations ("when status changes, notify…") and integrations with your other tools.
- You need multiple users editing the same plan at once.
Using both
A common setup: plan and steer in shadow-planner, execute in monday.com. Export the scenario to Excel or CSV for the hand-off, snapshot it for the record, and keep what-if work out of the team's board entirely.
Install shadow-planner — free, no account, opens right away.