Industry

The Collaborative Work-Management Software Industry — The Record

monday.com sells subscriptions to a cloud-based "Work OS" — a no-code/low-code platform on which organizations build and run their own work-management applications — and reported revenue of $1,232.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2025, up 27% year over year, having launched the platform in 2014 [1]. The company describes its core idea as the "democratization of software": its no-code and low-code platform "consists of modular building blocks that are simple enough for anyone to assemble," on top of which it has built products for the work-management, sales (CRM), service, and software-development verticals [2].

This page lays out what the filings, transcripts, decks, and peer documents state about the arena monday.com competes in — the unit economics, the size and structure of the market, the growth cycle, the demand base, the competitive set, and the rules that govern it — so the rest of the report can be read with a working model of the industry. Every figure links to the page that states it.

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How the industry makes money: SaaS subscription unit economics

This is a subscription-software (SaaS) business. Customers pay recurring fees for seats on tiered plans, software is delivered from the cloud at very low incremental cost, and the dominant cost lines are people — research and development and sales and marketing — rather than cost of goods. The shape of monday.com's FY2025 income statement is typical of the category: an ~89% gross margin, heavy operating spend that pulls GAAP operating income to roughly breakeven, yet strong cash generation.

Source: revenue, cost of revenue, gross profit, R&D, S&M, G&A and net income from FY2025 Consolidated Statements of Operations [3]; adjusted free cash flow of $322.7 million from Our Success by Numbers [4]; percentages derived.

The economic engine of the category is "land-and-expand": a customer adopts the product for a team, then adds seats, upgrades tiers, and attaches more products over time. monday.com's adjusted free cash flow was $322.7 million in 2025, $295.8 million in 2024 and $204.9 million in 2023, alongside net cash from operating activities of $333.6 million in 2025 [5]. The metric the industry watches to measure expansion is Net Dollar Retention Rate (NDR) — current ARR from a cohort of customers divided by what that same cohort produced a year earlier, capturing upsell, contraction and churn; monday.com's overall NDR was 110% for the three months ended December 31, 2025, 112% in 2024 and 110% in 2023 [6].

Sources: revenue and FCF margin, FY2025 20-F [7]; gross margin derived from the Statements of Operations [8]; NDR [9]; enterprise customer count [10].

Market size: how the industry sizes its addressable market

The industry is sized by stacking the software sub-markets that map to a Work OS platform's use cases. At its 2021 IPO, monday.com cited IDC estimates that "our total addressable market was $56.1 billion in 2020 and will grow to $87.6 billion in 2024, representing a 4-year compounded annual growth rate (“CAGR”) of 12%" [11]. That figure was the sum of five markets: project and portfolio management ($4.0 billion), collaborative applications ($21.7 billion), sales-force productivity and management ($11.5 billion), software change/configuration/process management ($4.6 billion) and marketing-campaign management ($14.3 billion) [12]. The IPO priced 3,700,000 ordinary shares at $155.00 in June 2021 [13].

By its 2023 Investor Day the company presented a larger TAM built on IDC forecasts — $101 billion in 2023, growing to $150 billion by 2026 — split across the four product verticals it now sells into.

Source: monday.com Investor Day 2023, "Large and growing Total Addressable Market" — $101B (2023) growing to $150B (2026F); segment values WM $45B, CRM $30B, Dev $17B, Service $9B (IDC forecasts) [14].

The market-sizing reflects how the platform spans several traditionally separate software categories rather than one. monday.com describes itself as "creating a new category of software" and states that it "compete[s] across multiple different markets" as a result [15].

The growth cycle: from hypergrowth to durable, slower growth

The reported record shows the classic deceleration curve of a maturing SaaS franchise: revenue growth has stepped down each year from roughly 91% (2021) to 27% (2025), while the company crossed from net losses into reported net income. Filings state annual revenue growth of 41% (2023), 33% (2024) and 27% (2025) [16].

Source: revenue FY2021–FY2025 from reported financials and Our Success by Numbers [17]; FY2021/FY2022 growth rates derived from reported revenue.

Sources: revenue growth derived from reported financials [18]; NDR for 2025/2024/2023 (110%/112%/110%) [19]; NDR for 2022 (121%) from the FY2024 20-F [20].

Net Dollar Retention has compressed from 121% (Q4 2022) to 110% (Q4 2025), with the company noting that 2024's rate "was positively impacted by pricing adjustments" implemented across the customer base [21]. In this category, an NDR above 100% means the existing base alone grows revenue before any new customers are added.

Where the growth is now: the move upmarket to the enterprise

As seat-expansion within small teams matures, the reported growth engine has shifted toward larger accounts. The number of customers contributing more than $50,000 of ARR grew 34% in 2025 to 4,281, from 3,201 a year earlier; ARR from these customers grew 42%, outpacing overall ARR growth, and they represented 41% of total ARR (up from 36%) [22].

Sources: 2025 (4,281) and 2024 (3,201) from the FY2025 20-F [23]; 2023 (2,295) from the FY2023 20-F [24]; 2022 (1,474) from the FY2022 20-F [25].

Larger accounts also buy more of the suite: as of December 31, 2025, 29% of enterprise customers had adopted multiple products, versus 6% of sub-$50,000 customers, and customers above $100,000 ARR grew 45% to 1,756 [26]. Despite the upmarket push, the base remains diversified: monday.com reports over 250,000 paying customers, with no single customer accounting for more than 1% of revenue and the top 100 customers representing less than 10% [27]. It serves customers in over 200 industries, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies [28].

Demand by geography: a US-led, globally distributed base

Revenue is reported by geography (the company operates as a single reportable segment). The United States supplied roughly half of FY2025 revenue, with EMEA, the United Kingdom and the rest of the world making up the balance.

Source: revenue by geographic area (US, EMEA, United Kingdom, Rest of the world), FY2025 20-F Segment Reporting note [29].

The company derives a majority of its revenue from its flagship monday work management product, with the newer CRM, service and dev products and AI capabilities layered on top [30].

The competitive landscape: four overlapping markets

Because the platform spans categories, monday.com names competitors across four fronts in its filing: project and work management (Asana, Smartsheet, Notion, Atlassian's Trello, ClickUp, Freshworks), CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, SugarCRM), enterprise service management (Freshworks' Freshservice, Atlassian's Jira Service Management) and software development (Atlassian's Jira) [31]. The structure ranges from venture-funded pure-plays to large multi-product platforms (Salesforce, ServiceNow) and bundled suites (Microsoft).

The table below benchmarks reported economics for a set of the publicly traded peers monday.com names. Fiscal-year ends differ (noted), and the set deliberately mixes true work-management pure-plays (Asana, Atlassian, Freshworks) with the larger adjacent platforms (ServiceNow, Salesforce) that compete on individual fronts — they are not all the same business model.

Sources: monday.com FY2025 [32]; Asana FY2026 10-K [33]; Atlassian FY2025 10-K [34]; Freshworks FY2025 10-K [35]; ServiceNow FY2025 10-K [36]; Salesforce FY2026 10-K [37]; margins and growth derived from reported financials.

Two facts stand out in the reported numbers. First, gross margins cluster near 80–90% across the group — the defining economic signature of subscription software. Second, profitability diverges sharply: the scaled platforms (Salesforce, ServiceNow) post double-digit GAAP operating margins, while several pure-plays (Asana, Atlassian) still run GAAP operating losses; monday.com sits at roughly breakeven on GAAP operating income despite positive free cash flow and net income.

The trends management cites — in its own words

monday.com frames the industry around three shifts it states in its FY2025 filing: that "AI is everywhere," that "unified platforms are the future of enterprise tech," and that organizations are increasing software budgets to fund AI transformation. On the last point it quotes Gartner that AI spending will "grow spending to $4.7 trillion by 2029" [38]. It also states a strategic reframing of its own offering — "from managing work to doing work for customers with AI" — built on a no-code/low-code platform whose schemaless database (mondayDB) it positions as the foundation for that unification [39].

Rules of the arena: regulation and structural factors

The industry's regulatory weight sits less in product approval and more in data, tax, and platform dependence. As an Israel-incorporated company, monday.com files as a foreign private issuer on Form 20-F, and its Israeli tax position is shaped by incentive regimes — the Law for the Encouragement of Capital Investments (Preferred/Technology Enterprise reduced rates) and R&D grant programs described in its taxation disclosure [40].

Two structural exposures recur in the company's risk factors and apply broadly across the category:

Concentration on one product. monday.com states that it "derive[s] a majority of [its] revenue from monday work management," so the franchise depends on continued adoption of, and pricing for, that flagship even as newer products scale [41].

Data, privacy and platform dependence. The business is subject to a broad set of privacy and cybersecurity regulations and relies on third-party application stores to distribute its mobile app — both itemized at length in the risk-factor section [42].

These are descriptive disclosures from the record; what they imply for the investment case is addressed separately.

→ Our read on what this means is in AI Opinions.