Limitations

Known limitations and potential issues when using Client Portal Builder for monday.com

We think it’s important to be transparent upfront about the limitations of the Client Portal Builder for monday.com app.

Maximum number of total clients

Technically, we don’t limit the number of clients you can create in the app. However, we do recommend keeping the number of clients below 500, because it might get hard to manage otherwise, and there are limits to how many clients are able to access the portal at the same time, which is more likely to occur with many clients. Learn more down below.

Maximum number of clients browsing the portal

When a client accesses your portal, we internally make calls to the monday.com API to fetch e.g. board data. The number of API requests that can be made per minute is technically restricted by monday.com. This means that if you have a lot of clients browsing your portal at exactly the same time, there is a possibility of hitting that limitation. With browsing, we mean actively browsing through pages in the portal, and not just having it open in a second browser tab.

So, how many clients can browse the portal at the same time? It heavily depends on how many monday.com boards you show on a portal page. Because the more boards are shown on a portal page, the more API requests are done. If you only show one board on the portal page, our rough guess is that you'll reach the limitation at around 50 clients browsing the portal at the same time. If you show two boards on a portal page, it will be reached by around 25 clients browsing the portal. You get the idea. Because of this limitation, we do not recommend using the app in cases where you have a lot of clients simultaneously accessing the portal.

Client Portal uptime and availability

Our rough annual uptime estimate for client portals is about 99%. We have a Status Page where you and your clients can check if there is currently a known service interruption going on. So, how often do service interruptions occur in practice? More often than we'd like, they are often linked to temporary problems related to the monday.com API.

In a typical week, there are sometimes smaller interruptions that last up to 30 minutes. About once every 6 weeks, there is a service interruption that lasts a few hours. The longest service interruption we observed so far (in the first year of the app's existence) took about 3 hours. Because our app is so dependent on third-party services like the monday.com API, we can't rule out the possibility that there will be interruptions that will last longer. An example scenario for a longer service interruption could be when we are facing problems with the monday.com API on a day when the Monday developers are not in the office (usually Fridays and Saturdays), and there is no one available to fix it. This is why you must structure your business in such a way that it can continue to operate normally during a phase where your portal is unavailable.

Bad performance caused by Mirror Columns

Heavy usage of mirror columns can significantly impact the performance of your client portal. Fetching board data through the monday.com API takes longer on such boards that contain a lot of mirror columns. A moderate usage of mirror columns is usually not a problem.

For example, loading the items of a board without any mirror columns usually takes about 2 seconds, on boards with moderate mirror columns usage, it takes about 5 seconds, and on boards that heavily depend on mirror columns, it sometimes takes up to 40 seconds in extreme cases. Obviously, no client wants to wait 40 seconds until the data gets displayed in the portal, which is why we don't recommend using the app if you heavily depend on mirror columns, and are you are not able to change that. We also have a help page on the performance topic that provides a couple of tips.

The app is not a Website Builder

With Client Portal Builder for monday.com, you can adjust certain design aspects of your client portal. This includes colors, font, and uploading a company logo. However, it's important to know that it's not an app that can be used to change every single design aspect. In our experience this is sufficient for most users, especially if you are building a B2B client portal. But there are some users for whom this might be too limiting.