monday.com Video Proofing: Setting Up Client Review for Agency Boards
I let a client review video inside our monday.com board once and it cost my agency two extra rounds. Here is how I run review links beside the board now, with statuses that match.
Skipping video proofing on our monday.com boards looked like the tidy choice when my agency moved its client work over, and it cost us two extra revision rounds on the very first launch film we ran through the new setup, right, because I decided the board could carry the review on its own. The editor dropped Launch_Film_MV2.mp4 into the item's Files column, and I asked the client's marketing lead to leave her notes in the Updates section under that item, since I wanted everything about the job in one place.
What came back over two days was eleven updates along the lines of the logo coming in a bit slow, with no timecode on a single one, and two of them were about MV1, which was still sitting in the same Files column right next to MV2. My editor lost a morning guessing which frames she meant and guessed three of them wrong, so a job we had quoted at two rounds went to four, right, and to be very honest those extra rounds came straight out of our margin rather than her budget.
So this post is my take on monday.com video proofing for agencies that run client work on boards. It basically comes down to one decision, whether the review lives inside the board through a proofing add-on or beside the board in a proper review room with the link sitting on the item, and I'll walk through the setup my team runs today.
How agencies handle monday.com video review today
Agencies that live on monday.com tend to handle video review in one of three ways, and I've run all three at some point. The first is the one from my story, the export in the Files column and the notes in the Updates thread. The second is a Drive link pasted into a Link column, with notes coming back over email, WhatsApp, a call and so on, so the board knows a review is happening but has no idea what anybody said. The third is a proofing add-on from the monday.com marketplace.
The reason the first two break isn't really monday.com's fault, right, the board is a very good project management tool that answers where a job is better than almost anything I've used. What it was never designed to answer is what exactly is wrong at 00:14 on MV3, and I'm pretty sure those two questions need very different kinds of screen, with the item holding the status and the link while the review happens where the frames are.
The board should tell you where the job is, the review room should tell you what is wrong with the frame, and mixing the two is how a two round job becomes four.
The proofing add ons that show up for monday.com
If you search for monday.com video proofing right now, almost the whole first page is proofing vendors explaining their own monday.com integration. The broad pattern is similar across them, you install the app, connect your proofing account and create a proof from a file attached to a board item, though the details differ by vendor.
Ziflow is the one agency owners ask me about most, and I've laid out how it stacks up for video work on our PlayPause and Ziflow comparison. As a category, most of these tools were built to proof every kind of creative, with video as one file type among many next to PDFs and banners, which is a great fit, right, if half your board is static design.
The catch here is that an add-on is a second product sitting on top of a board that already charges you by the number of people on it, so your team gets another login and you get another bill to renew. For an agency where nine out of ten board items are videos, that means paying for a general proofing platform to do one job, and when I went through the wider list in monday.com integrations for video teams, the proofing apps struck me as the heaviest way to solve what is really a small wiring problem.
a second subscription and login from the marketplace, billed apart from the board and often built for every kind of creative
the item holds a PlayPause share link, the client comments on the exact frame without an account, and one flat workspace covers the team
What a client needs to approve a cut
Before picking any tool I'd write down what the client actually has to do, because the client doesn't care about your board, right. Nobody on the client side wanted a monday.com invite or another tool to learn, what they wanted was to press play, say what felt off at the moment it felt off, and then say yes.
The list starts with one link that opens in a browser with no account and no install, because the approver is often a marketing director on a phone between meetings, which my post on client video review on mobile covers properly. Then a comment that sticks to the exact frame, and a range comment for a stretch, for instance music sitting on the voiceover from 00:36 to 00:42. Then drawing on the frame for picture notes, like a logo lockup a few pixels off, and a clear version label, so nobody writes about MV1 while the editor is on MV3.
Then there's the part no tool solves for you, which is asking the right question in each round. I send a short note with every link saying what this round decides, structure first and polish second, and the questions I use are in questions to ask clients for video feedback. Without that note, even frame-accurate comments drift away from the original creative brief.
- One browser link with no account and no install
- Comments that stick to the exact frame
- Range comments for a stretch of the cut
- Drawing on the frame for picture notes
- A visible version label like MV3
- A written ask for what this round decides
Frame-accurate note, everyone sees the exact same thing.
Running a review link beside a monday.com board
The setup my team runs is easiest to explain on a worked example, a Q4 board for a furniture retailer with eight items, one 60-second hero film, three 15-second cutdowns and four 6-second bumpers. The board has the usual columns plus two I add for every video client:
- Status, which I'll come back to in the next section
- Owner, meaning the editor on that deliverable
- Due date for the next version
- Round, a number column so round two of two is visible at a glance
- Review link, a Link column that holds the PlayPause share link
On the PlayPause side, the retailer gets one project and each deliverable gets its own card, named identically to the board item so anyone can jump between them. Running lots of client projects like this in one workspace is what managing every video project in one place is about. The editor uploads the rough cut as MV1, I copy the share link, add a password if the launch is under wraps, and paste it into the Review link column.
When MV2 comes in it goes onto the same card as a version stack (Creator plan and up), so MV1 sits underneath with its comments and the client keeps opening the same link from the same item, without ever creating an account.
Two things make this feel connected even without any marketplace app, right, and both sit on Creator and up. Who-watched analytics show who opened the cut, when and from which city, so before my producer writes a polite chaser, she can see the marketing lead watched the hero film at 10:40 and just hasn't commented yet. And Slack posts every comment into the client's channel as it lands, which I've written about in video review Slack integration.
If your editors cut in Premiere Pro, the Premiere Pro panel shows those comments inside Premiere and clicking one jumps the playhead to that frame. Editors on DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro don't get a native panel, so they export, upload and then work through the notes beside their timeline, which is still miles better than decoding an Updates thread.
Matching board status columns to review statuses
This is where most setups quietly fall apart, right, the board says Client review while the review tool says Needs changes, and by Thursday nobody trusts either one. So I make the two vocabularies match exactly. PlayPause has custom statuses on every plan, and I name them the way the review labels read in the monday.com status column, In review, Needs changes and Approved, while the board keeps Brief and Editing before review and Delivered after it.
The rule in my agency is that PlayPause is the source of truth for the review and the board mirrors it, and one person, the producer on that client, flips both in the same minute. The client never sets a status, they write their decision as a comment on the frame, and the producer moves the card and changes the item's status, while the board's automations do what they're good at, like notifying the account manager when an item hits Approved.
For instance, one round on the furniture retailer's hero film runs like this. The producer stacks MV2 on the card, sets the card and the board item to In review together and bumps Round to 2, and the marketing lead leaves her notes on the frames and closes with a comment saying the price card needs changing and everything else is approved. The producer flips both sides to Needs changes, the editor fixes that one shot and uploads MV3 onto the same card, and once the client comments approved on MV3 both sides go to Approved. Only then does the master go into the item's Files column, which is the one rule that would have saved me those two rounds on the launch film.
Does that make sense, right, all it takes is one human with a two-click habit and two screens that speak the same words. Our page on creative project management and review shows how the stages chain together from brief to delivery.
The review labels in PlayPause and the monday.com status column read identically, and the producer flips both in the same minute after the client's decision lands as a frame comment.
Cost of proofing add ons versus a flat review workspace
I won't quote you add-on prices, because they change and depend on your tier, but the shape of the bill is what really matters, right. monday.com prices its plans by the number of people on the board, and plenty of proofing platforms price by user or by tier too, so every editor and freelancer you add can end up being paid for on both bills.
So let me do some illustrative math with the one per-user review price I can state accurately. If your review layer billed per user the way Frame.io does, from $15 per user per month, a 14-person agency would pay at least $210 a month for review before a single freelancer joins. The flat alternative is our Agency plan at $19 a month for the whole workspace, which holds up to 50 members, and clients commenting through the link don't count as members at all.
Link life matters more for board-driven agencies than people expect, because on Creator the links and files expire after 30 days, which is really really annoying when a retainer's hero film item is still open in week eleven. Agency links run 90 days, while Enterprise links never expire, and Enterprise is also where white-label and a custom share domain live.
And if you're really questioning the board itself, I've written up monday.com alternatives for video teams for that decision. At the end of the day most agencies I know are happy with their board, they just need the review to stop happening in the wrong place, and trust me on any level, that's a much cheaper fix than the vendor pages make it look, you see what I mean here.
Frequently asked questions
Does PlayPause have a monday.com integration?
Not as a marketplace app, and I'd rather say that plainly than dress it up. The setup I run is the share link in a Link column on each board item, custom statuses named to match the board's status labels, and Slack posting every comment to the client's channel. In practice that covers what my team wanted from a monday.com proofing integration, right, the item knows where the review lives and the producer knows the moment a client comments.
Do clients need a monday.com account to review the cut?
They don't with this setup. The client only ever opens the PlayPause link in a browser, with no account and no install, so they can watch, click the exact frame, comment and draw on it without joining anything. Whether you also share the board with the client is a separate choice, and in my agency we usually keep the board internal and just send the link.
Is monday.com video annotation enough for client approval?
In my experience it wasn't, and that was about the workflow more than any one feature, since monday.com's file tools change and you should check what they do today. Our board notes came back as text in the Updates thread, rarely tied to a frame and sometimes about the wrong version. For monday.com creative approval on video, I want comments that stick to the frame, drawing on the picture, range comments and MV1 to MV4 stacked on one card, which a review link gives you.
Which PlayPause plan fits an agency that runs on monday.com?
For most agencies it's Agency, because a board-driven retainer needs links that outlive a 30-day window and room for every editor and freelancer, and Agency adds side-by-side version compare and Playbooks on top. A solo editor or a very small team running short jobs can start on Creator at $9 a month, just keep in mind it caps you at 30 projects and its links expire after 30 days, which bites on board items that stay open for months.
If you want to try this beside your own board, set up one client's items as cards, paste the links into a Link column and run one real round through it. Plans and limits are all on PlayPause pricing, and every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, which is enough time to get one cut from MV1 to Approved.
So yeah. That's my way of saying it.
Saumyajit co-founded PlayPause after years watching review and approval quietly eat creative teams' deadlines. He writes about the workflow side of video, feedback, versioning, and getting to a clean sign-off.
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