You’ve chosen monday.com as your tool, you’re getting ready to make the purchase, but how many seats do you really need to buy? Understanding the different user classifications in monday, and therefore who does and who does not require a purchased seat, is one of the first steps of launching monday within your organization. Below is a quick breakdown to help you along the decision-making process.
Members
Full-fledged users who are part of your organization. These users require a seat to be purchased.
Guests
Guests have similar capabilities to members, but are not part of your organization. A guest might be an outside consultant, vendor, or a temporary collaborator. To be classified as a guest, a user must be logging in with an email address that is not from your company’s domain. Guests are not required to be in a purchased seat, and can only access shareable board types, not main or private. Pro and Enterprise subscriptions can have an unlimited number of guests, but in Standard and below every 4th guest must be in a paid seat.
Example guest billing for Standard plans:
- 3 guests–free
- 4 guests–purchase one additional seat
- 11 guests–2 additional seats
- 12 guests–3 additional seats
Viewers
Viewers are users who are able to see information in Monday but not edit. Viewers are free and do not require a seat, and can be from inside or outside your organization/domain. Every subscription level can have an unlimited number of free viewers.
Additional Notes
What you’re purchasing from monday is a set number of seats. An admin can assign users to these seats and essentially activate/deactivate the individual. This means that you only need to purchase seats for the number of active members you will have at one time. If there is employee turnover, you can remove one person from the seat, and add another without increasing your seat count.
Beware guest abuse. Guest abuse is the scary term for assigning individuals from within our organization (using the organization domain for their login email) a guest, and therefore unpaid, seat. The goal of having free guest seats is to allow outside collaboration, but if that is misused just to avoid paying
for additional members, it’s generally frowned upon and your account will get flagged. Monday will message your partner, and we’ll have a conversation to figure out the best way forward.
As always, if you have questions or would like more information, you can email the Ability Ops team at contact@abilityops.com and we’ll happily set up a zoom call with you to discuss.
