The short answer
A mirror column is a live window into another board’s item, not a real column on your board. monday.com treats it as a read-only reference, which is why a mirrored status column can’t do the things a normal status column can. That’s by design, and for light cross-board reference it’s fine. The problems start when you try to run a workflow on mirrored values.What exactly doesn’t work with mirrored columns
- Views and grouping — a mirrored status column is not recognized as a real status column, so Kanban lanes, grouping, and some filters won’t treat it like one.
- Automations — most automation recipes can’t trigger on or write to mirrored values.
- Forms — mirrored columns can’t be used as form fields.
- Formulas and integrations — many can’t read mirrored values reliably.
- Dashboards — several widgets ignore mirrored columns or handle them inconsistently.
- Performance at scale — long chains of Connect Boards + Mirror columns get slow and hard to maintain as boards and teams grow.
When mirror columns are the right tool
Use native mirrors when you only need to see a handful of fields from another board — for example, showing a deal value from the CRM board on a delivery item. They’re built in, free, and simpler than any app. Don’t replace them where they work.What to do when you need real columns on both boards
When the workflow itself needs to live on two boards — real statuses you can build views on, automations that fire, one updates thread — the item has to actually exist on both boards. That’s what Same Item Multiple Boards does: the same item lives on every board you share it to, and every column on it is a real, native column.- Build any view or automation on it — monday sees a normal column, because it is one.
- Statuses, dates, people, numbers, and text stay in sync across all boards (supported column types).
- Updates and comments are one shared thread.
- Mirror and formula columns can still be used alongside it — see how SIMB works with Connected Boards and formula columns.