How to Let Each Client See Only Their Own monday.com Items
In monday.com, boards can be shared with external users and clients. Whether you are keeping records belonging to many clients on the same board or if you have a dedicated board for each client, ensuring that each client only sees their own items is a must.
There are 3 ways to do this:
- monday-native solutions (without any third-party software)
- monday marketplace apps
- AI vibe coding
First we'll cover these 3 methods and at the end we'll provide a comparison to help you decide which approach suits you best.
monday-native
Natively in monday, by using guest seats, boards can be shared externally. An important factor here is the monday.com plan you are on since access to guest seats are different on each tier (your monday.com subscription plan):
- Basic plan: guest seats and external sharing is not available
- Standard plan: every 4 guest seats converts to 1 billed monday.com seat
- Pro & enterprise plans: unlimited guest seats for free
Knowing the above, there are 2 ways to ensure guests in your monday.com will only see their own items.
Separate board for each account
The least complicated way to ensure external people only see what they are allowed to see is to use a separate board for each account and invite guests to their own board only.
My preferred way to do it is by using templates; Here is how to do it step by step:
- Create a new board and name it "TEMPLATE: Client Board". In the privacy section choose "shareable" as the type - This will be our template board that we will duplicate for each client to keep the boards consistent. You might already have a board you'd like to reuse; in that case skip this step.
- Set up the columns and the structure of the board as you prefer. Add all the columns a client needs.
- Click the ... button and choose "Save as a template"
If you are on the enterprise plan you can choose to create a "managed template"; this means that later by just editing the template itself you can automatically edit all the boards that were built from that template. if you have access to this feature I suggest using it for our case. Name the template as you see fit and click save.
- For each client, create a new board based on this template by choosing the template center option after clicking the + button.
There click on "Created by me', and you should see your template
- After the board is created, rename it to your clients name then click the invite button in the top right corner and use the "Board guests" section to invite your external user/client as a guest to this board.
Limitations of the approach
Apart from the obvious work of having to manually invite each client to their respective board, the biggest issue in this approach is deciding where internal work happens (if your team wants to work on client 1, do they go the board shared with client and work directly there or do they have a private internal board?).
If work happens directly on the shared board, managing privacy is tricky; one mistake and a client might be reading your internal communications about them (uh oh!). Other than that your team's work would be scattered across many boards; this is because work is being divided by client not by type of task. Scaling this is next to impossible.