Moving off monday.com starts with an export, and the export decides what you can bring. monday.com exports a board to Excel; every importer then reads part of that file. Neither step is complete, and the teams that regret a move are the ones who found out what was missing after they cancelled. Here is what monday.com's own help centre says its exports contain, exactly what Kavanah's importer reads, and an order of operations that keeps the history you cannot carry.
1. What monday.com's Board Export Contains
On a board, open the three-dot menu, then More actions, then Export board to Excel. You can export up to 100,000 items at a time, choose to include updates and subitems, and the export respects active filters, so you can export one group or one person's items. Its limits are worth reading first. Only table views export, so board views do not come across. Updates land on a separate tab, but updates on subitems are not exported. The Auto Number column is not supported. And you cannot change the export's layout.
2. What Kavanah's Importer Reads
Kavanah imports a monday.com board export as CSV or JSON, not .xlsx, so open the Excel file and save the main sheet as CSV. It reads each item's name, group, status, people, the first date in a date or timeline column, and a description, notes or text column. Each group becomes a board column in a new project; the status value is used only for an item with no group. It skips the title rows above the header and recognises the repeated group headers in monday.com's layout. People are matched to members by email or name, and anyone unmatched is kept on the task as written. The limit is 5,000 items. Priority, completion, subitems, updates, files and every other column are not imported.
3. Step by Step
First, export the board and save it as CSV. Second, open any project's Integrations tab, choose Migrate a board from Trello or Monday.com, pick Monday.com and select the file. Third, read the preview before anything is written: it lists the columns each group will become and which people matched a member. Then commit, and the board lands as a new project. Importing the same export twice is skipped, not duplicated. You can also attach a small export in chat and ask the agent to import it, but chat attachments are cut at 30,000 characters, so use the panel for anything larger. A workspace admin runs the import.
4. Rebuild What Did Not Come Across
No importer carries everything: ClickUp's comparison page says its importer turns sub-items into separate tasks and does not support connected boards, dependencies, formulas, mirrors or tags. For Kavanah, mark finished items done and set priorities, because the import reads neither. Recreate subitems as Kavanah sub-tasks and add the dependencies that matter. Rebuild your automations as rules, starting with the ones that notify people or move work between groups. Invite clients to the client portal instead of sharing boards with guests. And invite teammates before the import, or reassign afterwards, so their names land on the right person.
5. Keep monday.com's Full Export as the Archive
Before you cancel, ask an admin for the whole-account export: a zip of every board, including private and shareable ones, and the files uploaded to them. It can take up to 24 hours, and the download link lasts 24 hours. It does not include archived boards, workdocs, dashboards or the Emails and Activities timeline, so export workdocs as PDF first. Keep that zip and each board's Excel file together. Updates, subitems, files and every column Kavanah ignores stay there, and you will want them the first time someone asks why a decision was made.
6. Or Pilot Beside monday.com First
You do not have to move everything at once. Kavanah's monday.com connector uses a personal API token and lets its agent list boards, groups and items, create an item and update an item's column values. Writes into monday.com wait for your approval by default, and are removed entirely in safe mode. It is not an automatic two-way sync, but it lets one team work in Kavanah for two sprints while everyone else stays put.
A move without regrets is mostly a list of what moves, what stays and where the rest is kept. For how Kavanah, ClickUp and Asana compare on imports, seats and AI, see our monday.com alternative page.
