Monitask Reviews & Product Details

When you work in product management for a data-intensive company, it’s all about prioritization. Striking this balance between "keeping the lights on" and new feature development was my greatest challenge. Monitask provided me with the numbers to be able to do that. I use it to see how my team’s time is spent across core responsibilities. For instance, I create projects for “Platform Reliability,” “Client-Specific Data Requests,” and “Q3 Product Roadmap.” When we saw the 40% of our time on sprint being eaten away by ad-hoc data investigations it was epiphany -- no longer a gut feel but a measure. This enabled me to lobby for a dedicated data support position. The clean, project-based reports are what I use in QBRs to show exactly how engineering investment is aligned with strategic goals. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Adding any form of tracking to a high-autonomy engineering team needs thoughtful change management. The first reaction was that it indicated a lack of faith in their expertise. We solved this problem by treating the data as completely transparent to the squad and only ever using it to improve systemic processes, never for individual performance assessment. On a technological level, the tool does have issues with context. If a developer is pair-programming, reading API documentation or drawing a system architecture in whiteboarded scribble inside a whiteboard app, that valuable time isn’t all necessarily recorded accurately as “productive.” We have to use the manual notes feature a lot, learn to flag such periods. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As one of the marketing department at a sports tech start-up that was growing rapidly, I was constantly asked what value freelancers were bringing to table and why my time and our tiny budget should go towards them. It's been an ugly ride. I implemented Monitask nine months ago because I was personally desperate to vindicate my team's output. But what’s actually been most useful isn’t the stealth mode or screenshots it's the dead-simple ability to track project time. For example, I create projects for things such as “Q1 Brand Awareness Campaign” or “Website Redesign.” My freelance writer logs into the “Blog Content” task, and I check into “Social Media Graphics.” At the end of the week, I get to hand our CEO a report: "Here's 40 hours of marketing effort and assets." It has transformed subjective feeling-based weekly updates into objective show-and-tell. I open up the dashboard every morning with my coffee to plan out my day and see how we’re doing with freelancers without having sent one, “how’s it going?” Slack message. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Honestly, this conversation was something I had never anticipated to do and it is really awkward to ask the only freelance video-editor I could afford to install time-tracker on my project. I was left with no alternative but to submit his work in order to render it as the sole guarantee for me to boost his rate for the next project. He was open to it, but it felt like a business deal. When speaking about tech-y things, I go a little nuts about app classification. If you are stuck deep in thought staring at the canvas Monitask will sometimes see idle time. Currently, we are creating our designs in Figma. I have taken to using the “manual activity” note with things like “Wireframing.” But I wish it were smarter about our design tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In shopper marketing, a big part of my budget is spent on third-party creatives and field agents who do our in-store displays and demos. I’ve got a job to do in proving that spend drives lift.” Prior to Monitask, I received invoices and prayed that the hours were accumulated. Now, I get data. I use it exclusively for following the freelancers who design our point-of-sale materials and the agencies that report on store conditions. The project-tracking capability brings me the ability to make a project titled “Whole Foods Summer 2024 Launch” and have every hour logged against it, whether I was doing graphic design, vendor management or reporting. The auto screenshots – (we use a “blurred” setting) are like my sanity check that work is actually taking place on our assets, not just being billed. It has taken a form of subjective vendor opinion and turned it into an objective performance review. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Onboarding external partners is clunky. You can’t convince a freelancer to install invasive, ubiquitous monitoring equipment without significant fine print and a lot of very uncomfortable explanation. We position it as a tool that benefits them — to automate their time tracking for our invoices, and to get paid quickly and fully for all the work they do. It works but it’s an extra step. Also, the reporting, while excellent, wasn’t designed for marketing. I frequently have to download CSVs, and then splice the data with my own sales lift numbers in Sheets to show real ROI. I wish there were a more streamlined way to relate tracked time to campaign results. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Listen, my team is on the ground 90% of the time. There was nothing I could do about this, other than observe and speculate about what happened between their a.m. check-in and after-hours email, prior to Monitask. Did they really spend three hours at the store, or was there two hours of driving and an hour-long “planning” coffee break? I have the mobile app on my phone to look at the dashboard. GPS location combined with the activity log is the killer feature for me. What I can see is the rep was at a Target store from 10AM to 12 PM and their device reflected active work in your sales app during that time. It validates their effort. Mostly, they use the basic “time tracking” feature — when they enter a store, they clock in to a task called “store visit,” then clock out on their way out. It makes people lie a little less, if Iʼm honest about it, exaggerated time reporting is down by around 30 per cent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This was by far and away the biggest issue – and still is. The battery drain on their phones. The app that runs GPS and tracking in the background sucks it dry by midafternoon if they’re not careful. I’ve had reps who are perfectly understandably frustrated by that. And, god knows, among the big box stores with terrible cell service, sometimes their data are lagging or don’t sync until they’re back in the car. I’ve had to make a rule that they need a note added manually if the visit looks too short because, otherwise, it makes them look like they ditched early when the store manager wasn’t available! It’s not a fire-and-forget tool; you need a little bit of common sense and follow-up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It lets me see the progress of multiple projects simultaneously without micromanaging.I jump back and forth between campaign strategy meetings with views on analytics and what the group is checking on all day (yes, literally). It lets me know where our time has been invested: SEO efforts, content development, or running campaigns without distracting the group. Summaries of activities are so helpful. They’re the first thing I read with my coffee every morning and give me our status. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I find task switching on mobile to be still clunky. I just think it’s easier to forget to switch my tracker when I am moving from a call with a client to optimizing a campaign, or whatever else. That just ends up being a waste of time down the line. I’d also like to see more flexible reporting options, to be specific to digital campaign phases: strategy versus execution time, by channel. That’d make client reporting even quicker! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I want to ensure that our clients feel supported and my internal team stays productive without me micromanaging them. Monitask actually helps with both. I especially appreciate the level of blurriness from which the screenshots emerge it's opaque enough to protect privacy, but still offers a sense of what everyone is working on. The daily reports are clean and simple, something I can look at in the morning before my own check-ins. And because it quietly runs in the background, the team doesn’t feel as if they’re being policed, just reminded a bit more about where their time is going. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I also hope that task-switching in the mobile app is quicker. Occasionally, when I’m bouncing between client calls, support tickets, and internal meetings, I forget to toggle tasks immediately and rehashing it is a pain. And, I’d be incredibly excited to see additional out-of-the-box report views designed specifically around the metrics that are relevant for customer success, such as time spent per client, ticket resolution phases, or onboarding hours. That would make QBR prep even smoother. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My biggest struggle as a founder and CTO was trying to figure out how my engineering team spent their time in reality compared to what we had planned for them in Jira. I pull up Monitask at my desk to take an aggregate view of engineering bandwidth. I’m not trying to read people’s code over their shoulders. But it’s the pattern recognition that I appreciate. I can glance at the dashboard, see when the whole (backend) team is fractured with “active” time (a suggestion there’s been too many interruptions, or meetings), compared to long blocks of deep focus time and know if I should intervene in some way. This data has been especially crucial in setting, and enforcing our “no-meeting Wednesday” rule. The project tracking is also key; we tag time to broad initiatives like “Platform Scalability”, which allows us to answer (in retrospect) how many engineering hours did it take to deliver a major tech investment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Let’s be honest: you cannot mandate this to an engineering culture. The initial pushback was significant. Developers considered it reductive, and said it did not reflect the value of research, design thinking or debugging. We had to adapt our use. We placed senior engineers specially on the spotless list and developed a firm rule that CA should never be used for single individual performance criticism. Wrong, we use that to debug process at the team level. Technically, it is often Online mis-categorising developer essentials. You would perhaps have to manually re-categorize time spend in terminal or Docker, or a custom IDE. It’s a blunt yardstick for nuanced creative work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My case is also a little different (it's an ancient style glass making company that modernizes it to digital factory, I'm Software QA engineer. I watch the work of Monitask with my team from our IT office in Thessaloniki, where we made our ERP and production tracking systems. Though perhaps its most valuable feature was its neutral, datadriven proof of work. And when I’m in the midst of a testing sprint – whether manually checking UIs or writing Selenium scripts – it’s nice that project-based time tracking (like “ERP v2. 3 Regression Testing"), used to record who did what. This has been critical as we figure out a way to argue with schedule leads about deadlines when they are used to thinking in terms of physical production months rather than hours. Well its also saved my ass quite a few times when I had to show the external dev team some super complex bug repro path and didn't want them spending the next 4 hrs typing in that address in, clearing their cache, etc. which did used to be a real burden before we test on local: "Oh your machines cached our old js? let me clear oh wait, what is happening?" It has been a life saver! (the screenshot one - seems like privacy blurred or something if you intentionally try with sensitive content) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The initial adoption faced skepticism. The concept of "monitoring" knowledge work was anathema within a production culture, and met initially with some skepticism. I was required to become a champion for the tool, and act as the intermediary between IT and factory leadership, in order that QA's otherwise nebulous work could be turned into solid "project hours" they were comfortable billing. The tool is in fact formally rigid. It completely fails to realize, e.g., watching logs or testplans for hours (with no frequent mouseclick events) as not being "idle". Had to blow out the use of the Manual activity note feature, extra admin overhead but small and uniform.. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When I moved from Hearst to Reddit, managing a globally distributed team became my new normal. Monitask was our infrastructure for visibility, not spying. I use it on a daily basis from my home office in New York, where I'm ever connected with teams in EMEA and APAC. What it’s best at: It turns fuzzy, subjective work into hard data. And during a big brand campaign, I know agency hours break down between strategy, creative and placement. The project-based time tracking works really well for this. I also depend a lot on the weekly automated summary reports; they give me an elevated-view of pulse on what my team is up to without having them all drop work and do status, which pulls away from progress with real work. For a platform that was founded on authenticity like Reddit was, providing an internally-consistent proof of work is right up there. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only thing standing in the way was culture, not technology. Any instrument that accomplishes that at a tech company with inculcated autonomy will demand some nimble footwork. We positioned it as a tool to defend time by focusing and headcount of teams in budget review cycles. But I’d have to get used to that. Integrations On the technical side, it does integrate with more run-of -the mill PM tools but I want to be able to connect with our martech stack better natively (ie in a Workfront/Asana kind of way) so that time is automatically assigned to campaigns. The admin side of things does the job and is not bad, but it's certainly not very high-intuitive for a casual user who only wants to see their own time logs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In adtech we all talk about data, transparency and trust but we couldn’t look at ourselves in the mirror. Monitask changed that. I personally use it to oversee a global team of marketers and evangelists. What I love about it is that it gives me ammo, not anxiety. When I’m spinning up a deck for a skeptical enterprise CMO, I can show now man hours applied to their campaign strategy instead of fluffy deliverables. The hidden layer and strong-activity detection are for us non-negotiable in fraud detection as we want to be sure about our data. The automated weekly productivity digest it emails me is a work of art I can identify bottlenecks (hello revision tools ad infinitum) and cheer for high-quality deep work without micromanaging. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Now can we face it, no one wants to see us? And insinuating this took the dexterity of a Bowie lyric. We called it a "work validation tool" & an excuse to protect scope creep from our teams, and show how they spent their time. Still, there was grumbling. The interface is crude, though it’s not winning any design awards there’s a bit of a utilitarian vibe next to the shiny analytics platforms we’re used to pitching. Also, it sometimes misinterprets activity. It may flag my content guy for doing competitive research on Twitter/X, building a deck in Canva at any given time as unproductive when they start something. You're always fine-tuning the “productive vs counterproductive” list of sites Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.