Cadence
Published Sep 5, 2026Work management your PMO actually owns.
Replaces
- Monday.com · monday.com Ltd. — $19 per seat per month (Work Management — Pro), about $91,200/yr at 400 seats
- Asana · Asana, Inc. — $24.99 per seat per month (Advanced), about $119,952/yr at 400 seats
Rented, per year
$91,200
Monday.com list price at 400 seats.
Owned, per year
$9,360
AWS infrastructure only. Azure is $9,960.
Build
8 weeks
2 engineers. To parity on the ten core features above, including migration of existing Monday boards, items, updates and files.
Difficulty
3/5
Well-understood shape. Low delivery risk.
Reference organisation: 400 seats, ~2M items, 25 GB attachments, single region, prod + non-prod. 3-year Compute Savings Plan on Fargate / 3-year reserved instance on Container Apps. Aurora minimum 0.5 ACU. Non-prod stopped outside business hours. Excludes vendor support plans and data egress above 1 TB/month. Figures are infrastructure only and exclude the build.
What it is
Cadence is a work management system: boards, timelines, portfolios, dependencies, workload and automations, with every record living in a Postgres database you control. It is aimed at organisations past roughly 200 seats, where per-seat work management has quietly become a six-figure line item and the thing everyone actually needs — read access for the wider business — is the thing the pricing model punishes. Cadence separates contributors from viewers, because viewers cost you nothing.
Why this one stops making sense
- Per-seat pricing taxes exactly the behaviour you want. The more of the business can see the plan, the more you pay for the privilege.
- At 400 seats, Monday.com Work Management Pro is about $91,200 a year, every year, forever, with no asset at the end of it.
- Your delivery data — every estimate, every slip, every dependency — is the highest-signal dataset you own, and it sits in someone else's schema behind a rate-limited API.
- Automations and custom fields accumulate into a system of record nobody planned, and there is no migration path out that preserves them.
- Renewal bargaining power is asymmetric. The vendor knows how many boards you have.
What ships
- Board, table, timeline, calendar and workload views over one item model
- Portfolios rolling up across boards with automatic status derivation
- Dependencies with critical-path and slip detection
- Custom columns: text, number, status, people, date, formula, mirror, connect
- Rule-based automations with a visible, versioned audit trail
- Unlimited free viewer seats — read and comment cost nothing
- Forms that create items, with conditional logic
- Real-time multiplayer editing over WebSocket with presence
- Full-text search across items, updates and files
- Time tracking and capacity planning per person and per team
Data model
Stack
- frontend
- Next.js 15 App Router + Tailwind + TanStack Query + dnd-kit
- backend
- NestJS on Node 22 — REST plus a WebSocket gateway
- database
- PostgreSQL 16 with Row Level Security per workspace
- cache
- Redis 7 for presence, rate limiting and view caches
- queue
- BullMQ for automation execution and digest email
- auth
- OIDC against the customer IdP; SCIM 2.0 for provisioning
- search
- PostgreSQL tsvector with a trigram fallback
- ai
- Optional status roll-up and risk summarisation through a pluggable LLM gateway
Parity, honestly
What we match, and what we do not.
The rows marked No are the important ones. If one of them is the reason you bought Monday.com, keep buying it — and we will tell you that on the first call rather than the fifth month.
| Capability | Monday.com | Ours | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Board / table / timeline / calendar views | Yes | Yes | — |
| Workload and capacity planning | Yes | Yes | — |
| Dependencies and critical path | Yes | Yes | Cadence adds slip detection, which Monday does not have natively. |
| Rule-based automations | Yes | Yes | Ours are versioned and diffable in git. |
| Free unlimited viewer seats | No | Yes | The single biggest cost difference. |
| Real-time multiplayer | Yes | Yes | — |
| Guest / external collaborator access | Yes | Yes | Scoped through your IdP as B2B guests. |
| Native mobile apps | Yes | Partial | Cadence ships an installable PWA. A store-listed native app is a separate 4-week engagement. |
| Marketplace of 200+ third-party apps | Yes | No | We integrate the three or four you actually use, natively and properly. We do not rebuild a marketplace. |
| Vendor-run SOC 2 report you can hand to your auditor | Yes | No | Cadence inherits your own cloud compliance posture. If a third-party attestation is the requirement, keep buying it. |
| 24/7 vendor support desk | Yes | Partial | Covered under a Conseiltek Run agreement, or by your own team after handover. |
| AI status summaries and roll-ups | Partial | Yes | Runs against your LLM gateway, on your data, with no training on your content. |
Reference architecture
Built twice, on purpose.
Every application in Techtons ships with a production architecture for AWS and one for Azure, using the same diagram grammar so you can read them side by side. Your cloud, your account, your bill.
Amazon Web Services
- Compute
- ECS Fargate services (api, ws, worker) behind an ALB
- Data
- Aurora Serverless v2 PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis (cluster mode disabled)
- Storage and edge
- S3 for attachments, CloudFront for the Next.js static output and file delivery
- Identity
- Cognito user pool federated to the customer IdP via OIDC/SAML
- Observability
- OpenTelemetry to CloudWatch and X-Ray; RUM on the front end
- Infrastructure as code
- Terraform, one module per environment, remote state in S3 + DynamoDB lock
Services
The decision worth arguing about
The one non-obvious decision is running the WebSocket gateway as its own ECS service behind the same ALB rather than API Gateway WebSockets. API Gateway bills per message and per connection-minute, which is exactly the wrong shape for a presence-heavy board where a hundred people idle with a socket open all day. A Fargate task holding 5,000 sockets costs a fixed and much smaller amount. Aurora Serverless v2 scales to 0.5 ACU overnight, which is where most of the non-prod saving comes from.
Microsoft Azure
- Compute
- Azure Container Apps (api, ws, worker) with KEDA scaling on queue depth
- Data
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server (B-series burstable in non-prod, D-series in prod), Azure Cache for Redis
- Storage and edge
- Blob Storage for attachments, Front Door Standard for edge and WAF
- Identity
- Microsoft Entra ID directly — no broker layer needed
- Observability
- Azure Monitor plus Application Insights, OpenTelemetry-native
- Infrastructure as code
- Bicep, with an azd-compatible layout
Services
The decision worth arguing about
Azure is the simpler of the two here, mostly because Entra ID removes the Cognito broker entirely — if the customer is already on Microsoft 365, identity is a configuration step rather than a component. The trade is that PostgreSQL Flexible Server has no true scale-to-near-zero equivalent to Aurora Serverless v2, so non-prod costs more unless you stop the server on a schedule, which the Bicep includes as an automation account runbook.
Sources
Every price on this page, with the page we read it from and the date we read it.
| Product | Plan | List price | Checked | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday.com | Work Management — Pro | $19 / seat/month | 2026-09-05 | monday.com/pricing |
| Asana | Advanced | $24.99 / seat/month | 2026-09-05 | asana.com/pricing |
Should you still be paying for Monday.com?
Two weeks, fixed price. We audit what you actually use, map it against Cadence, cost the replacement on your own AWS or Azure account, and give you a delivery plan. If the honest answer is to keep the licence, that is what the report will say.