Monday.com vs. Focal
Monday.com tracks tasks about your creative work. Focal is where the creative work and files live, tagged, organized, and connected to performance.
Petteri Jalonen
Monday.com is a general-purpose work platform teams stretch to cover creative production. Focal is built specifically for how ad creative gets made. In Focal, the assets themselves live inside the platform, tagged automatically, approved, and connected directly to performance, instead of living as scattered attachments on Monday task cards.
General work management and high-volume creative operations are not the same problem
Monday.com describes itself as an "AI Work Platform" used across marketing, sales, product, IT, HR and operations, with over 250,000 customers and more than 60% of the Fortune 500. It's great at what it's built for: flexible boards, task tracking, and automations that adapt to almost any department's workflow.
Creative teams use it too, and reviewers who lead creative work (creative directors, 3D artists, creative editor leads) describe real value in it: clear ownership, visible deadlines, a shared view across stakeholders. But the same reviewers all hit a similar wall. Monday.com tracks facts about creative work – status, owner, due date – it doesn't hold the creative work itself.
Reviewers report real performance strain attaching large volumes of images or large creative files, no way to search or tag by what an asset actually shows, and cross-board search and connectivity repeatedly described as inconsistent. Nearly every creative team in our research pairs Monday.com with a separate tool to manage the files themselves such as Google Drive, Dropbox or a DAM platform.
Focal is built around the asset, not the task about the asset. Every creative is tagged automatically on upload, lives in one searchable library, gets briefed and approved in the same platform, and connects directly to performance data and channel uploads. The whole brief-to-launch cycle is in a single platform where the work actually lives.
Choosing the right tool for your team
Choose Monday.com if… | Choose Focal if… |
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Or use both: Monday.com can work well for your broader organization. However, thanks to Focal Workflows, you could use Focal with your creative operations and sync new and compeleted tasks to and from Monday.
What creative teams say after using Monday.com
Monday.com has a score of 4.7/5 across 17,198 reviews on G2.com — reflecting its huge, cross-department user base. To get a better idea of its suitability for ad creative teams, we read through recent reviews specifically from creative directors, designers, 3D artists, creative producers, and marketing roles, rather than relying on the aggregate.
What's genuinely great is task and status tracking, not asset management: "I use monday Work Management for mapping out all of our creative assets like emails, ads, landing pages, and hero images... It solves issues with knowing who is assigned to what, tracking deadlines, and pinpointing areas of creative for reviews." — G2 reviewer
Creative-specific reviews almost solely refer to platform working well with status labels, not so much with the actual files.
On the file-handling ceiling – confirmed independently by two different creative disciplines: "The only issue I've experienced over the years was when we tried to store around 5,000 images on a single board. The platform didn't crash, but we did notice some performance issues due to the large volume of images." — G2 reviewer, Account Manager
"I wish there were better file attachment capabilities for large 3D files and render assets. The platform can feel slow when handling heavy project loads with numerous tasks... integrating with specialized 3D software pipelines could be more seamless." — G2 reviewer, 3D Artist
On the reporting gap, from the most directly relevant reviewer in our research — her job title is Performance Marketing: "for performance marketing campaigns, some advanced reporting and Analytics customisations can feel limited compared to dedicated marketing platforms. Also, managing large-scale campaign data across multiple boards can sometimes become overwhelming and require extra manual organisation." — G2 reviewer, Performance Marketing
On cross-board search and connectivity: "I think the connection between boards can be problematic, with information overload and issues with connecting from one board to another." — G2 reviewer
"Searching between boards can be a little wonky at times." — G2 reviewer
On hitting a configurability ceiling at scale, even with paid help: "We have worked with several monday specialists to try build what we are looking for, but haven't been successful. What we have now is functional, but not high level like we need." — G2 reviewer, Client Success Manager, managing 30–40 concurrent projects across web, design, copy, social, and video teams
On briefing being approximated: "clients can send in requests with attachments and other pertinent information. It's the closest thing to a creative brief, presented in a simple, streamlined form." — G2 reviewer, Graphic Designer
Monday.com is clearly excellent at what most of its customers use it for. It's just not built with ad creative use cases in mind specifically, or where creative assets actually live, and its own reviewers, across multiple creative disciplines, describe the same workaround: pair it with something else for the files.
Monday.com now markets itself differently. Do the reviews back that up?
Monday.com's current marketing makes a specific claim: "monday.com isn't task management with AI on top. It's a connected system where campaigns, assets, approvals, performance data, and AI agents live together." It has also rolled out a suite of marketing AI agents, including one built to generate ad creative variations and adapt them per channel.
We didn't find a single review, across roughly 65 most recent ones read for this page, describing that connected experience actually happening. What we found instead, independently and repeatedly, is the opposite: assets living in Drive or a separate DAM, performance reporting called out by name as limited "compared to dedicated marketing platforms," and — from the most detailed AI-specific review in our research — a customer describing the AI push directly:
"AI is promoted everywhere, but much of it adds little real value in daily work. Instead of solving meaningful workflow problems, many AI features feel like superficial additions designed to follow the market trend." — G2 reviewer
"Many AI capabilities also feel unreliable. They frequently require manual verification, which limits the productivity gains they promise." — G2 reviewer
"Monday remains one of the most capable work management platforms available, but its priorities seem increasingly driven by marketing rather than by customer value." — G2 reviewer
To be fair, none of the reviews we read mention Monday's newest, most marketing-specific AI agents by name, so we can't say those particular features are hype. We simply don't have evidence either way yet. What we can say is that the general pattern of monday's AI claims outpacing the reviewed experience isn't a one-off complaint, and the specific claim that assets and performance data now "live together" runs directly counter to what every creative and performance-marketing reviewer in our research actually describes.
What Focal's users say
At the time of writing, Focal sits at 4.7/5 across 12 G2 reviews, a small sample next to Monday.com's reviews, since Focal is newer and built for one job instead of every department. But where Monday.com's creative-team reviewers describe tracking tasks about assets that live somewhere else, Focal's reviewers describe the asset itself living in the platform, tagged and organised automatically.
On tagging and naming actually happening inside the platform, not as a separate step: "My favorite part is the automation features, especially auto-renaming, which saves everyone hours and keeps things consistent and tidy. The AI-automated tagging is amazing too—it really helps with creative insights and reduces manual work." — G2 reviewer, Senior Marketing Animator
"It's also great for naming assets very thoroughly." — G2 reviewer, Small-Business
On production and performance living in the same place: "I'm particularly excited about the production and performance reports - these are very useful for showcasing the work and impact of creative teams to execs, as well as having an overview of the results in the same place." — G2 reviewer, Senior Creative Marketing Manager
Focal's reviewers flag real gaps too — a couple noted that the initial setup can take some effort.
Comparing Focal and Monday.com features
| Monday.com | |
|---|---|---|
Primary purpose | Built specifically for performance ad creative teams | General-purpose work platform spanning marketing, sales, product, IT, HR, operations |
Digital asset storage (files live in the platform) | Yes | No — reviewers pair it with Google Drive or a separate DAM |
AI-powered tagging, searchable by visual content | Yes | Not available — status/color labels only |
Meta, TikTok, YouTube channel uploads | Native, direct push | Not available |
Performance data connected to the asset | Yes | Not available |
Cross-project search and connectivity | One unified, searchable library with AI visual search (frame-by-frame for videos) | Reviewers repeatedly describe board-to-board connections and search as inconsistent |
Handling large creative files (renders, high-resolution video, image-heavy libraries) | Built for high creative-file volumes | Reviewers report performance strain at volume (thousands of images or videos) |
The Longevity Store is a rapidly growing longevity brand that sells to over 25 countries. They needed a flexible tool that manages large creative production operations and asset volumes, in multiple languages so they migrated from a fragmented stack of multiple tools to Focal.
FAQ
Q: What is the difference between Focal and Monday.com?
Monday.com is a general-purpose work platform used across marketing, sales, product, IT, HR, and operations. Creative teams use it to track tasks, statuses, and approvals for creative work, but the assets themselves — files, tags, versions — typically live in a separate tool like Google Drive or a DAM. Focal is built specifically for ad creative: the assets live inside the platform, get tagged automatically, and connect directly to performance data and channel publishing.
Q: Can creative teams use Monday.com for asset management?
Teams do use Monday.com to track creative work, but reviewers consistently describe it as a task and status tracker layered on top of creative work, not a home for the assets themselves. Reviewers report performance strain when attaching large volumes of images or large creative files (renders, video), no AI tagging of creative content, and search across boards described as inconsistent. Most teams pair Monday.com with a separate file storage tool or DAM to actually manage the assets.
Q: Does Monday.com integrate with Meta, TikTok, or YouTube?
Monday.com does not have native upload integrations with ad channels like Meta, TikTok, or YouTube. Teams manage ad performance data separately — one G2 reviewer working in performance marketing specifically noted that advanced reporting and analytics customisation "can feel limited compared to dedicated marketing platforms." Focal has native, direct-push integrations with Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, with performance data connected directly to each asset.
Q: Why do teams pair Monday.com with a separate DAM or file storage tool?
Monday.com is built around boards, items, and status tracking, not file storage or content-based search. Multiple G2 reviewers describe integrating Monday.com with Google Drive or a separate DAM to actually manage files, and this pattern shows up independently in customer conversations too — one prospect's actual stack was Monday.com for tasks, Dropbox for files, and a separate DAM for asset management, three tools for one workflow. Focal replaces that stack with one platform where the asset, its tags, its brief, and its performance all live together.
Q: Is Monday.com good for a small creative team, or does it break down at scale?
Smaller, single-discipline creative teams report a genuinely good experience with Monday.com for task and status tracking. The complaints concentrate at scale: one reviewer managing 30 to 40 concurrent projects across web, design, copy, social, and video teams said that even after working with paid Monday specialists, they couldn't build a rolled-up view that met their needs. Reviewers also describe cross-board search and connectivity as inconsistent once a team is running many boards at once.
Q: Can Monday.com and Focal be used together?
Yes. Many organisations run Monday.com company-wide for general project and task management across departments, while using Focal specifically for the ad creative operation — asset library, tagging, briefing, approvals, and channel publishing. The two solve different problems, and adopting Focal for creative work doesn't require replacing Monday.com everywhere else in the business.
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