The activity log on monday.com is retained for a week on Basic, six months on Standard, a year on Pro and five years on Enterprise. The same page notes that it does not track updates added to an item, only changes to the item itself, and that an export shows column value changes while item creation, deletion and movement do not appear.
Read that as a procurement fact rather than as a criticism. It is entirely reasonable for a work management product: activity logs are expensive to store, most teams never open one, and the plan ladder is how the cost gets allocated to the people who want it. It is also the single sentence that decides whether monday.com can be the system of record for a governed portfolio, because a record that expires on a billing schedule is not a record. It is a cache.
There is an audit log too, and it is worth separating clearly. It is Enterprise and admin only, its records are currently not deleted after a set time, and what it holds is logins, devices, failed sign-ins, attachment downloads and board exports. Security events, kept forever; work events, kept by plan. Those are two different questions and only one of them is “what happened to this project, and when did we know”.
The fair framing first
monday.com does not market itself as project portfolio management software. It markets work management, and comparing it to a portfolio register on portfolio-register terms would be unfair if we stopped there. But its own documentation addresses portfolio managers and PMOs directly, and it ships a portfolio solution — so the comparison is fair on the ground monday.com chose, which is the only ground we will use.
On that ground the portfolio is Enterprise-only, and it has documented edges. Standalone projects created on the Pro plan cannot be added to a portfolio at all. A portfolio connects up to 200 projects, and up to 750 items and subitems per project or 20,000 items across the portfolio, whichever ceiling arrives first. Owner, project health and project progress are mandatory columns.
And then the constraint that surprised us most, in monday.com’s own words: data generated by portfolio-level features such as portfolio automations and rollups is scoped to a single portfolio and is not available as board columns, and because dashboards pull from board columns, that data cannot be surfaced in a widget. The portfolio rolls up, and the roll-up cannot be charted on the dashboard beside everything else.
The successor is on its way and is honest about its status. Portfolio at scale is in beta, rolling out gradually, with a published list of what it does not yet support — automations on rollups, the portfolio snapshot, portfolio workload, risk insights, API access and mobile access among them. A vendor that publishes that list is being straight with its customers, and a buyer signing a multi-year agreement should read it as a roadmap rather than as a shipped capability.
What the status column is
A hand-set label. Up to forty of them per column, in colors the board picks, and a label that has been used can be deactivated but not deleted. “Done” is not a system state either — it is whichever color or colors that board decided count as done.
For a team running its own work, this is right. Vocabulary should belong to the people using it. For a portfolio spanning forty teams it means the word “done” has forty definitions, and a roll-up that counts them is counting forty different things into one number. BoardWalk goes the other way and pays for it in flexibility: the states are the product’s, not the board’s, and a team that wants its own vocabulary cannot have it.
Capacity, and what it is connected to
The workload widget is Pro and Enterprise only, and its capacity model works from a work schedule assigned to a team, applying to every user in it, rather than from a per-person availability. Enterprise adds a real resource layer — a resource directory, a planner, a capacity manager and a portfolio utilization report.
Two documented details matter for how it is used. Tasks from the project board do not appear in the resource planner, and people are not notified when they are assigned there; and the utilization report refreshes every 24 hours. Planning and execution are deliberately separate surfaces. Our model is the narrower one — capacity a person stated, load as the sum of allocations that person accepted — and it has no leveling, no scenario staffing and no directory.
The AI difference, stated plainly
monday.com meters AI. Credits are, in its own phrasing, the single unit of measure across all monday AI capabilities, active AI workflows are capped at three, twenty and 250 by plan, and a good deal of the AI surface is documented as consuming no credits at all. Agents are in gradual release, with agent credit consumption beginning in June 2026 for Pro plans and below.
BoardWalk does not sell AI credits. An organization brings its own provider key and sets a monthly ceiling, and what the model returns is an immutable proposal that a named person accepts or rejects. The honest comparison is not “theirs costs money and ours does not” — ours costs whatever the provider charges. It is that a credit balance and an approval queue are answers to different questions, and only one of them tells you who decided.
Where monday.com wins, and it is not close
Adoption. People open it voluntarily, which is not true of most products in this review and is worth more than several features. The automation and integration surface is deep and generous at the higher plans, with action allowances published per plan, and connect-board and dashboard limits documented rather than discovered. The mobile experience is real. The agent platform is further along than most. If the actual problem is that nobody updates anything, monday.com solves that problem and BoardWalk does not.
Choose monday.com if…
Choose monday.com if the binding constraint is participation. If the portfolio is out of date because updating it is miserable, no amount of evidence architecture fixes that — a tool people enjoy using does, and this is the best of them at that job.
Choose it also if the work management platform and the portfolio view should be the same product for the same teams, and if a five-year Enterprise activity retention meets your obligations. For a great many organizations it does, and this comparison is not an argument that it should not.
Come here instead if somebody will eventually ask what the portfolio said eighteen months ago and who signed it off. That is a question about a record that does not expire, kept in a trail that refuses deletion, with acceptance stamped from the session rather than typed into a field — and it is the question this register was built around.