Why teams look for a monday.com alternative
monday.com is a capable product, and for most teams the reason to look elsewhere has nothing to do with right-to-left languages — it's price at scale, or the minimum seat count, or wanting something simpler. This page isn't about those. It's about the one gap that doesn't get fixed by choosing a different plan.
Requests for proper right-to-left support have been posted in monday.com's own community forum for years, and they are still being raised. A request from September 2025 describes the symptoms precisely: alignment that becomes inconsistent, direction that flips unexpectedly, dropdowns and labels that assume left-to-right, and mixed Urdu-English content that comes out awkward in the same cell.
We're not going to characterise what monday.com does or doesn't support today — check it yourself, it's their product and it changes. What we'd point out is the shape of the problem. Retrofitting right-to-left into a product built left-to-right isn't a translation job or a setting. It reaches every physical CSS property, every icon that implies direction, every drag-and-drop calculation, and every string that mixes scripts. That's why these requests stay open across products for years, and it's the reason we built Artala the other way round.
What "built right-to-left" actually means
- The interface mirrors, not just the text — boards, tables, task cards, dialogs, menus, and kanban drag-and-drop all read right-to-left. Not a flipped skin over a left-to-right layout.
- Bidirectional text isolation — direction is resolved from the whole string rather than its first character, and Latin runs inside it are isolated. An Arabic task title containing a product name, an SKU or a system name stays coherent instead of throwing its punctuation to the wrong end of the line.
- Per-user language — Arabic-, Hebrew- and English-speaking teammates share one workspace, each in their own interface. Nobody works in a second language so the tool can cope.
- Native Hijri calendar — Umm al-Qura or local sighting, alongside Gregorian, toggleable per user, and available in all 32 languages.
- Regional working weeks — Friday/Saturday weekends, or whatever your workspace uses; calendars and timesheets shade non-working days to match.
- Professionally native-reviewed — Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu have been reviewed by native speakers, not machine-translated and shipped.
The bidirectional claim is the one worth checking rather than believing, so here it is — paste a real task title from your own work, in Arabic, Hebrew or Urdu with an English product name in it, and watch where the Latin run lands.
Type mixed text. Watch where the English word lands.
Nothing is sent anywhere — this runs entirely in your browser, using the same direction rule Artala uses.
The second line isn't exaggerated. It's the same text with the base direction hardcoded left-to-right and no isolation around the Latin run — which is what a tool built English-first does. Your browser renders both with the same standard algorithm; the only difference is what each tool tells it about the text.
See a right-to-left workspace
This is a real Artala board — a Riyadh trading business — running in Arabic, right-to-left, with the Hijri calendar, next to the same board in English:
Where Artala is the weaker choice
Artala is a small, independent product. monday.com has a marketplace of hundreds of integrations, a large partner network, enterprise procurement processes, and years more feature depth. If you need a mature apps ecosystem, or your organisation buys software through a vendor-assessment process that favours scale, that's a real argument and we'd rather you knew it now.
What Artala offers is a tool that reads correctly in your team's language, at $7 per user a month, from a team that treats right-to-left as the product rather than a backlog item. If that's the thing you've been unable to find, it's worth an hour of your time.
See it in your own language
Open the Arabic demo workspace — one click, no signup, no account needed. Or set up your own workspace in under a minute.