Asana
Asana's AI Teammates stopped answering questions and started writing the automation themselves.
Comparison · PM
monday.com vs Zoho Projects
A side-by-side editorial comparison of monday.com and Zoho Projects — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
monday.com vs Zoho Projects: at a glance
What is monday.com?
monday is turning its board engine into an AI platform with named products on top.
The dated entries are housekeeping — label cleanup in managed columns, unmapped columns in List View, workspace exclusions for data retention, one-time password login — plus the release that lets external AI agents and apps connect and treat monday as the source of truth. The undated rows carry the larger moves: monday service out of beta, AI Blocks opened to every account, per-user AI credit limits, Active Directory sync for tickets, and sequences in monday CRM.
What is Zoho Projects?
Zoho Projects makes time tracking the product's center of gravity, and lets Zia build the schema.
Three of the last six releases touch time logs: a unified grid view, workflow automation with rules and webhooks, and Zia auto-filling weekly hours from assigned tasks. Alongside that, Zia has moved past suggestion into construction — users can now build custom modules by talking to it. The rest of the recent work extends reach rather than depth: a rebuilt Chrome extension, SalesIQ and WhatsApp integrations, and four more Android languages.
monday.com vs Zoho Projects: editorial side-by-side
monday is turning its board engine into an AI platform with named products on top.
◆ Current state
The dated entries are housekeeping — label cleanup in managed columns, unmapped columns in List View, workspace exclusions for data retention, one-time password login — plus the release that lets external AI agents and apps connect and treat monday as the source of truth. The undated rows carry the larger moves: monday service out of beta, AI Blocks opened to every account, per-user AI credit limits, Active Directory sync for tickets, and sequences in monday CRM.
◆ Where it's heading
Two things are happening at once. The board engine is being packaged into distinct products — work management, CRM, service — each aimed at a buyer who already has an incumbent to displace. And AI is being pushed down into the platform as a metered primitive: blocks anyone can use, agents that connect from outside, admin limits on what each user can spend. The governance releases arriving in the same window as the capability ones is the tell that this is being sold to enterprise buyers, not just teams.
◆ Prediction
With blocks open and spend metered, the next step is usage-based pricing made explicit — expect AI credits to surface in packaging, and the agents currently in early access to reach general availability inside the named products rather than as a separate surface.
Zoho Projects
6.3COLLABPM
Zoho Projects makes time tracking the product's center of gravity, and lets Zia build the schema.
◆ Current state
Three of the last six releases touch time logs: a unified grid view, workflow automation with rules and webhooks, and Zia auto-filling weekly hours from assigned tasks. Alongside that, Zia has moved past suggestion into construction — users can now build custom modules by talking to it. The rest of the recent work extends reach rather than depth: a rebuilt Chrome extension, SalesIQ and WhatsApp integrations, and four more Android languages.
◆ Where it's heading
Time tracking is being rebuilt from a data-entry chore into an automated subsystem, with Zia supplying the entries and workflow rules acting on them. The more consequential shift is Zia's role: suggesting timesheet values is assistive, but generating custom modules means the AI is editing the structure of a customer's portal. Integration work points outward to the Zoho suite and to customer-facing channels, turning inbound chats and WhatsApp messages into tracked project records.
◆ Prediction
Expect Zia's module-building to widen into the surrounding configuration — workflow rules, layouts, and reports built the same conversational way. On the time side, the pieces are in place for Zia-suggested logs to be submitted and approved automatically under rules rather than reviewed entry by entry.
monday.com alternatives
Other PM products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Tap any card for the full editorial trajectory or compare directly with monday.com.
Backlog
Backlog ships steady planning and mobile work under a pile of scraped site chrome.
Atlassian
Rovo reaches into Drive and SharePoint while the app ecosystem runs down the Connect clock.
Everhour
The time-tracking product is invisible behind a steady run of comparison roundups.
Wakapi
Wakapi is quietly rebuilding itself around the login and container requirements teams ask for.
Phorge
Phorge tags a release per fix, and years pass between the ones that reach this feed.
Zoho Projects alternatives
Other PM products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Tap any card for the full editorial trajectory or compare directly with Zoho Projects.
AFFiNE
AFFiNE just cut its AI loose from a fixed provider — bring your own keys, your own models, per workspace.
Asana
Asana's AI Teammates stopped answering questions and started writing the automation themselves.
Kagi Search
Kagi is unbundling itself: search as an API, Assistant as an app, AI as a switch.
Read the Docs
Read the Docs deploys weekly, and almost all of it is rebuilding how builds run.
SiYuan
SiYuan's 3.8 alpha turns the note vault into an agent surface: embeddings, reranking, MCP.
Discord
Discord is turning the chat client into a storefront and Nitro into a rewards program.
Recent activity from monday.com and Zoho Projects
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 7d agoZoho ProjectsTime Log Grid View
- 13d agoZoho ProjectsZia Suggestions for Weekly Time Logs
- 13d agoZoho ProjectsRevamped Chrome Extension
- 21d agoZoho ProjectsCreate Custom Modules with AI ⚡
- 1mo agoZoho ProjectsNew Languages Supported in the Android App
- 1mo agoZoho ProjectsAutomation for Time Logs
- 3mo agomonday.comClean up your data by deleting unused labels in managed columns
- 3mo agomonday.comSee the full picture with List View unmapped columns
- 3mo agomonday.comMarketing page captured by crawler (not a release)
- 3mo agomonday.comLog in securely with Email one-time password login
- 4mo agomonday.comAI agents and apps can now plug into monday.com as the source of truth ⚡
- 4mo agomonday.comProtect data with Workspace exclusions for data retention
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between monday.com and Zoho Projects?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Zoho Projects is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is monday.com better than Zoho Projects?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Zoho Projects is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other PM products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to monday.com?
Top monday.com alternatives in PM are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "monday.com alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/monday for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Zoho Projects?
Top Zoho Projects alternatives in PM are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Zoho Projects alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/zoho-projects for the full list with editorial commentary on each.