How to Copy Subitems from One Item to Another in monday.com (or Many at Once)

Direct answer: monday.com has no native button to copy subitems from one item to another. People have been requesting one for years. The closest built-in path is selecting the subitems, duplicating them, and moving the duplicates to the target item, one item at a time. To copy a set of subitems to another item (or to fifty at once), use an app like SubItems Pro’s Clone tab. Both routes below.

What does monday.com offer natively, and where does it stop?

There is no copy-subitems-to-that-item action anywhere in the native UI. Nothing in the item menu, the subitem menu, or the automation center will read one item’s subitems and reproduce them on another. It has been a recurring request in the monday.com community for years. What native does give you:

• Duplicating an item includes its subitems. monday.com support confirms that duplicating an item, group, or board that contains subitems duplicates the subitems too. Useful when you want a fresh copy of the whole item (see duplicating an item with subitems), but it creates a new item. It can’t put subitems onto an item that already exists.
• Subitems can be multi-selected, duplicated, and moved. This is the real native workaround, covered next.
• Automations can create predefined subitems when a trigger fires. That’s a template feature. It can’t read what’s already on an item.

Native workaround: duplicate the subitems, then move them

monday.com’s support docs describe selecting subitems, duplicating them, and moving the duplicates to the item where you want them:

1. Expand the source item’s subitems.
2. Select the subitems you want to copy (checkbox to the left of each).
3. Click Duplicate in the menu that appears at the bottom of the screen.
4. Move the duplicated subitems to the target item.

For copying two or three subitems to one other item, this is the right answer: free, no apps. Its limits:

• One target item per pass. Copying a six-subitem checklist onto 20 items means repeating the whole dance 20 times and hand-moving 120 duplicates.
• Everything happens within the same board.
• On a busy board it’s easy to lose track of which duplicates have been moved where.

What other workarounds do people use?

• Re-typing. Fast enough below roughly five subitems, and the reason this feature request keeps resurfacing.
• The Excel round-trip. Export, edit rows, re-import. The catch, stated in monday.com’s own import docs: rows from Excel arrive as items, not subitems, and you convert them manually afterward. The round-trip relocates the manual work rather than removing it.
• Automation recipes with fixed subitems. Recipes like “When an item is created, then create a subitem” (chained for several) recreate a standard checklist on every new item. Great for subitem templates, but the set is hard-coded in the recipe, so it can’t copy what’s on an existing item.

How do you copy subitems to another item (or fifty) with SubItems Pro?

SubItems Pro’s Clone tab exists for exactly this gap: pick one source item, and its subitems are copied to every item you’ve selected.

1. Install SubItems Pro from the marketplace and add its board view to your board.
2. On the board, select the target item — or multi-select as many as you like.
3. Open the view and switch to the Clone tab.
4. Pick the source item whose subitems you want to copy.
5. Untick any subitems you don’t want to bring along.
6. Decide whether to Include column values: on copies statuses, dates, owners and the rest; off copies names only (useful when each target should start from a clean slate).
7. Run. Every selected item receives its own copy of the source subitems.

What does not copy: updates, files, and activity history stay with the originals. Clone brings over the structure and the column values only.

What it costs: one action per subitem created, so cloning 6 subitems to 10 items uses 60 actions. The free plan includes 20 actions per month, enough to verify it on your own board. Paid plans are flat ($8–$118/mo), never per-seat. Setup details are in the user guide.

Which route fits your situation?

You want to…	Use
Copy 2–3 subitems onto one other item	Native: select → Duplicate → move
A full copy of an item, subitems included	Native: duplicate the item
The same checklist on every new item	Native automation recipe
Copy one item’s subitems onto many existing items	SubItems Pro Clone
Reusable subitem sets across projects	See the templates guide

If you’re copying to one item, once, the native route is enough. Install the app when “copy these subitems” starts meaning twenty items instead of one. And if you’re creating fresh subitems in bulk rather than copying existing ones, that’s a different job: see bulk-create methods compared.