CRM migration

Migrate from Act! to monday CRM

Field-level mapping, validation, and rollback between Act! and monday CRM. We move data and schema; workflows are rebuilt natively in monday CRM.

Get a quote See object mapping
Act! logo

Act!

Source

monday CRM

Destination

monday CRM logo

Compatibility

82%

9 of 11

objects map 1:1 between Act! and monday CRM.

Complexity

BStandard

Timeline

3-5 weeks

Rollback included Accuracy guarantee Field-level validation

Overview

What this migration involves

monday CRM is a visual, board-based CRM built on the monday.com Work OS platform. Its primary differentiator is the configurable board model: every object lives on a board with user-defined columns, and migrations involve real board-architecture design work before any record can land. We design the board structure during scoping — typically a Contacts board, an Accounts board, and a Deals board with subitems for activities, plus a connect-boards relationship between them. Act! Custom Tables migrate as additional boards with the same connect-board relationships. The interesting work is in column type selection: monday columns are typed (text, status, dropdown, people, date, link, number, etc.) and an Act! tenant's mix of custom fields needs each one classified to the right monday column type. Activities migrate as subitems on the parent Deal/Contact board, with status preserved as a monday Status column value.

Field-level fidelity

Every standard and custom field arrives verified.

Schema-aware mapping

AI proposes the map; you confirm before any record moves.

Relationships preserved

Parent–child, lookups, and ownership stay linked.

Full activity history

Calls, emails, meetings — with original timestamps.

Attachments & notes

Documents, uploads, and inline notes move with the record.

Act! logo

Source platform

Act! platform overview

Scorecard, SWOT, gotchas, and pricing for Act!.
monday CRM logo

Destination platform

monday CRM platform overview

Scorecard, SWOT, gotchas, and pricing for monday CRM.

Data migration guide

The complete monday.com CRM migration guide

Data model, import mechanisms, field mapping strategy, pitfalls, and cutover — by the engineers running it.

Destination checklist

monday.com CRM migration checklist

Pre- and post-cutover tasks for moving onto monday CRM.

Why teams make this switch

Two sides of the same decision

Leaving

Act! logo

Act!

What's pushing teams away

  • Dated UI and on-premise legacy feel — long-time Act! Desktop users describe the experience as 'Office 2007-era' compared to modern cloud CRMs, and the upgrade path between major versions historically requires reinstalling and re-syncing data.
  • Limited modern integration ecosystem — Act!'s Zapier and native integration count is in the low double digits, where HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive all measure integrations in the thousands.
  • Act! Premium Desktop's reliance on SQL Server, IIS, and Windows Server makes IT maintenance an ongoing cost — patching, backups, and disaster recovery fall on the customer's IT team rather than the vendor.
  • Team collaboration features lag modern CRMs — Act!'s historical strength is the individual contact owner, and shared pipelines, real-time activity feeds, and built-in chat are weaker than HubSpot, Pipedrive, or monday.
  • Reporting is functional but inflexible — most users export to Excel rather than build inside Act!, where modern CRMs ship dashboards, pivot charts, and embedded BI as core features.

Choosing

monday CRM logo

monday CRM

What's pulling them in

  • Users praise the board-based visual interface for making pipeline stages immediately legible to non-technical team members without CRM training.
  • The no-code automation builder lets sales ops teams create lead routing, stage updates, and email triggers without developer involvement.
  • Integration ecosystem connects to Slack, Gmail, Outlook, and Zapier with minimal configuration, reducing friction for teams already using these tools.
  • The flexible column system lets teams build custom CRM views — deal value, close date, lead source — without needing a developer or pre-defined schema.
  • Teams already using monday Work Management can layer CRM features onto existing boards rather than starting from scratch.

Object mapping

How Act! objects map to monday CRM

Each row shows how a Act! object lands in monday CRM, including any object-level transformations, lookup resolution, or schema-design dependencies.

Typical mapping — final map is confirmed during the sample migration step.

Act!

Contact

maps to

monday CRM

Item on Contacts board

1:1
Fully supported

Each Act! Contact becomes an Item on the Contacts board. Item name is typically the Contact's full name; standard fields map to typed columns (Email, Phone, Title, Address).

Act!

Company

maps to

monday CRM

Item on Accounts board

1:1
Fully supported

Act! Companies become Items on the Accounts board. Connect-boards column links Contact items to their parent Account item.

Act!

Opportunity

maps to

monday CRM

Item on Deals board

1:1
Fully supported

Act! Opportunities become Items on the Deals board. Stage column (Status type) holds the pipeline stage; Value column (Numbers) holds the deal value; connect-boards columns link to Contact and Account.

Act!

Opportunity Product

maps to

monday CRM

Subitem on Deal item or Item on Products board

1:1
Fully supported

Two options: products as subitems on the parent Deal (simpler, board-isolated) or as Items on a dedicated Products board with connect-boards linking back to Deals (richer, supports product master data).

Act!

Activity

maps to

monday CRM

Subitem on parent item or Item on Activities board

1:1
Fully supported

Scheduled activities map to subitems on the parent Contact/Account/Deal item (with Date column and Status column for completion). Alternatively, a dedicated Activities board with connect-boards relationships for richer activity reporting.

Act!

History

maps to

monday CRM

Subitem (closed status) or Updates feed

1:1
Fully supported

Completed History items map to closed-status subitems on the parent or as entries in the Item's Updates feed. The Updates feed is monday's discussion thread — appropriate for high-volume historical entries that don't need structured columns.

Act!

Note

maps to

monday CRM

Update on parent item

1:1
Fully supported

Act! Notes become entries in the parent item's Updates feed with original author and timestamp.

Act!

Group (Static)

maps to

monday CRM

Tag column value + Filter View

1:1
Fully supported

Act! Static Groups become tag values applied via a Tags column on the relevant board, with a saved Filter View that surfaces tagged items.

Act!

Group (Dynamic)

maps to

monday CRM

Filter View with conditions

lossy
Fully supported

Dynamic Groups translate to Filter Views with column-based conditions. Some Act! query operators don't translate 1:1 and get rewritten with customer sign-off.

Act!

Custom Table

maps to

monday CRM

Custom board with connect-boards relationships

lossy
Fully supported

Act! Custom Tables become new boards in the workspace, with connect-boards columns linking back to Contacts/Accounts as needed. Column types designed per Custom Table field types.

Act!

Document

maps to

monday CRM

File column attachment

1:1
Fully supported

Act! Documents upload to monday File columns on the parent item. Storage counts against monday's per-account file storage allotment.

Gotchas + challenges

What specifically takes care here

Platform-specific issues from each side, plus the pair-specific challenges that don't show up on either platform's page on its own.

Act! logo

Act! gotchas

High

Act! Premium Desktop and Cloud use different export paths and cannot share a single migration script

High

Act! Custom Tables (v18+) have no standardized schema across customers

Medium

Activity Series (recurring activities) explode into thousands of occurrences

Medium

Act! Marketing Automation campaign history is in a separate database

Low

Act! contact layouts can hide fields without dropping them from the schema

Low

Document attachments in Act! Desktop are file-system pointers, not blobs

monday CRM logo

monday CRM gotchas

High

Subitems are not included in bulk exports

High

Daily API call limits vary sharply by plan

Medium

Legacy automations (Sentence Builder) are being deprecated

Medium

Excel and account exports only include table views

Low

Enterprise admins can disable non-admin exports

Pair-specific challenges

  • Board architecture must be designed before extraction

    monday CRM data lives in boards with typed columns. We design board structure (single board per object vs combined boards), column types, connect-board relationships, and View configurations during scoping. Trying to migrate without this design done means landing items but not being able to query them effectively.

  • Column type selection is irreversible after data loads

    Once a monday column has data, changing its type (e.g., from Text to Status) is disruptive. We classify each Act! field to the right monday column type during pre-flight — Email, Phone, Status, Numbers, Date, Dropdown, People, Link, etc.

  • Subitem vs separate-board decision for Activities

    Act! Activities can migrate as subitems on the parent Contact/Deal item, or as Items on a dedicated Activities board. Subitems are simpler but harder to report on across boards; a dedicated board is richer but adds setup time. We discuss the trade-off during scoping.

  • Custom Table boards need separate connect-boards configuration

    Each Act! Custom Table becomes a new board with connect-boards columns linking to Contacts/Accounts. The connect-boards configuration is one-shot — once items load, changing the relationship is rework.

  • File storage limits apply to Document migrations

    monday's per-account file storage allotment caps Document migration volume. Large Act! Document libraries may require a storage tier upgrade or selective document inclusion.

Migration approach

Six steps for a successful Act! to monday CRM data migration

  1. Discovery + board architecture design

    Confirm Act! deployment, design monday board structure (Contacts, Accounts, Deals, Activities, Custom Table boards), specify column types per Act! field, define connect-boards relationships.

  2. monday pre-flight

    Create boards, configure columns with correct types, set Status column values per Act! Stage/ID/Status taxonomy, configure connect-boards links, build Filter Views for Group equivalents.

  3. Sample + customer review

    Migrate 50 Accounts, 200 Contacts, 30 Deals with subitems, 100 Activities. Customer reviews board UX and column mapping before commit.

  4. Full extraction + Document download

    Bulk Act! extraction. Documents prepared for File column uploads.

  5. Full load via monday GraphQL API

    Accounts → Contacts → Deals + Subitems → Activities → Files. Connect-boards columns populate after items exist. Field-level diff after load.

  6. Cutover + decommission

    Delta sync on cutover day. Sales reps switch to monday. Act! read-only for safety window.

Platform deep dives

Context on both ends of the pair

Act! logo

Act!

Source

Strengths

  • Deep, mature contact-management feature set: layouts, custom fields, secondary contacts, and relationship-tracking refined over 35+ years of releases.
  • Available as on-premise (Act! Premium Desktop) for teams that require local data residency — most modern CRMs are cloud-only.
  • Per-user pricing is predictable and competitive with mid-market CRMs for SMB use cases without integration complexity.
  • Strong fit for relationship-driven verticals: financial advisors, accountants, insurance brokers, real-estate, legal — workflows where the contact record is the center of the universe.
  • Built-in Act! Marketing Automation add-on covers basic email marketing without needing a separate Mailchimp/Constant Contact subscription.

Weaknesses

  • Dated UI and on-premise legacy architecture — the look and feel hasn't kept pace with modern cloud CRMs.
  • Small integration ecosystem (low double digits of pre-built integrations) versus thousands on HubSpot/Salesforce/Pipedrive.
  • Act! Premium Desktop requires customer-managed Windows Server, SQL Server, and IIS — ongoing IT overhead.
  • Team-collaboration and real-time-feed features lag behind modern collaborative CRMs.
  • Reporting is rigid — most teams export to Excel rather than build dashboards inside Act!
monday CRM logo

monday CRM

Destination

Strengths

  • Board-based UI makes pipeline stages and deal progress visually obvious without training.
  • No-code automation builder requires no developer resources to create lead routing and stage-triggered actions.
  • Flexible column system supports custom CRM fields without schema changes or admin involvement.
  • Integrates natively with Slack, Gmail, Outlook, and Zapier with minimal configuration overhead.
  • Layered product means teams already on monday Work Management can add CRM without migrating existing data.

Weaknesses

  • No native Contacts object separate from Items — contacts are managed inside a CRM module's People feature.
  • Pipeline and deal relationships use a flat item model rather than a relational object model, making complex CRM associations awkward.
  • Automations are plan-gated (250 actions/month on Standard, 25,000 on Pro) and the legacy Recipe system is being deprecated.
  • Customization and advanced views (Chart, Formula, Dependency) are locked behind Pro and Enterprise tiers.
  • Per-seat pricing with non-refundable annual billing creates cost lock-in risk during migration.

Complexity grading

How hard is this migration?

Standard CRM migration. All 8 core objects map 1:1 between Act! and monday CRM.

B

Overall complexity

Standard migration

Derived from compatibility, mapping clarity, API constraints, and data volume across Act! and monday CRM.

  • Object compatibility

    A

    All 8 core objects map 1:1 between Act! and monday CRM.

  • Field mapping clarity

    C

    Field mapping is derived from defaults — final spec confirmed during the sample migration.

  • Timeline complexity

    B

    8-object category — typical timelines run 2–7 days end-to-end.

  • API constraints

    B

    Act!: Not publicly documented for Cloud; Desktop is limited only by the customer's SQL Server and IIS capacity.

  • Data volume sensitivity

    B

    Act! doesn't expose a bulk API — REST + parallelization used for high-volume runs.

Estimator

Estimate your Act! to monday CRM migration cost

Rule-based pricing — no per-record fees, no manual quotes. Migrations over 2M records are scoped individually.

Step 1

What are you migrating?

Pick a category, then your source and destination platforms.

Category

FAQ

Frequently asked questions about Act! to monday CRM data migrations

Answers to the questions buyers ask most during Act! to monday CRM migration scoping. Not seeing yours? Book a call.

Can't find your answer?

Walk through your Act! to monday CRM migration with a real engineer — 30 minutes, free, written quote within 24 hours.

Book a free 30 minute consultation

Every object becomes a board in monday — Contacts board, Accounts board, Deals board, plus Activities and Custom Table boards. Items on those boards have typed columns (Email, Status, Numbers, Date, etc.) replacing Act!'s fixed schema. We design the board structure and column types during scoping so you get a workspace tailored to your workflow, not a generic CRM template.

Adjacent paths

Related migrations to explore

Other ways to leave Act!

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Act! to Freshsales Migration
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Act! to HighLevel Migration
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Act! to HubSpot Migration

Other ways to arrive at monday CRM

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aACE to monday CRM Migration
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Accelo to monday CRM Migration
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Access CRM to monday CRM Migration

Same-CRM migrations

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Freshsales to HighLevel Migration
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Freshsales to HubSpot Migration
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Freshsales to Mailchimp Migration

Ready when you are

Move from Act!.
Land in monday CRM, intact.

Tell us record counts and timeline. We'll come back with a written quote inside 1 business day — no commitment, no sales pitch.

Book a call
Accuracy guarantee Rollback included Quote in 1 business day