If you are looking for a platform to help you collaborate on team projects for work management, Wrike might just be for you. However, if you are not sure, here is a review of Wrike, for you to understand it better.
What you will see?
Wrike
Wrike is a robust team tool that excels at both collaboration and project management. It is now owned by Citrix and began as an online platform for team communication, project management, and task management. Also, it continues to expand in those areas while also adding related services. Since then, the app has introduced new work intelligence features. These forecasts when a project is about to fall behind schedule and alert users to potential causes. While Wrike is on the pricey side, it’s far easier to set up and use than many other project management software.
The platform allows you to rapidly begin monitoring collaborative projects and achievements. Although it lacks several essential features like integrated chat, time-based invoicing, and automatic due date adjustments when work takes longer than intended. As a result, Wrike is best for when you need to quickly set up a project management solution.
Pros
- Easy to use
- Special account types for marketing/creative teams and professional services
- Can manage both projects and ongoing work
- Smart features flag projects at risk of slipping
- Highly intuitive interface with customizable dashboards
- Edit documents on the cloud without downloading
- Support for recurring tasks and multi-day deadlines
Cons
- Difficult to choose the right plan without customer assistance
- Expensive
- Doesn’t offer integrated
live chat - Time tracking can’t easily be used for invoicing
Price and plans
Before purchasing project management or task management programme, organisations often consider budget and speed. Mid-sized businesses have the most flexibility in their alternatives because they frequently require unique features. Depending on the features your team requires, Wrike could be the best option. Wrike offers seven different plans, each with more features. Wrike has numerous different plan tiers, including one that is completely free.
Options
- Free with limitations.
- Professional ($9.80 per person per month), paid in groups of 5, 10, or 15.
- Business (averaging $24.80 per person per month), for 5–200 users.
- Enterprise (custom pricing), minimum of 5 users.
- Pinnacle (custom pricing), minimum of 5 users.
- Wrike for Marketing Teams (custom pricing), an upgrade from Business or Enterprise with tools for marketing and creative teams.
- Wrike for Professional Services Teams (custom pricing), an upgrade from Business or Enterprise with tools for professional services teams.
Some plan types are available for Add-Ons. These are extra features that you may purchase for a fee. Wrike Two-Way Sync is an add-on for technical teams who require two-way synchronisation between Wrike and another programme, such as JIRA or Github.
Account Types
Free
For small teams, the free account is just a shared task list with a number of different perspectives. You only receive 2GB of storage space with this account type. Moreover, you don’t get Gantt charts, a time-tracking widget, custom fields, or a few other capabilities. Also, you’re limited to a certain amount of active tasks and subtasks at any given time (200 altogether). With a free account, you can create teams of up to five people and add an infinite number of collaborators. Collaborators can view but not edit projects and tasks.
Professional
Professional accounts are helpful for project planning and collaboration. With this tier, you get Gantt charts, shareable dashboards, and 1–2GB of storage per individual. Additionally, you get the ability to link with Microsoft Project, Excel, and other services. Professional plans are $9.80 a month per user and are available in groups of 5, 10, or 15 people. This subscription comes with 5 GB of storage, but it lacks many project management tools.
Business
The Business plan adds work management features, reports, custom fields, time tracking and timesheets, project and task approvals, Salesforce connectivity, and more to the Professional plan. The price per member falls as the number of seats purchased increases on a sliding scale. This package includes 5GB of storage space for each user. The majority of capabilities that businesses want in project management software can be found in Wrike’s Business plan. This subscription offers custom headers for task classification, report templates, and more for $24.80 per user per month. You can avail of discounts for large enterprises.
Enterprise
Single sign-on choices, two-factor authentication requirements, password policies, as well as network access and compliance regulations are all available with enterprise accounts. Each member gets 10GB of storage space. User audits, Active Directory connectivity, and custom network access policies are all included in the Enterprise plan. For custom pricing on any of these programmes, you must contact Wrike.
Pinnacle
Wrike’s marketing describes Pinnacle as the Enterprise plan plus additional functionality for “teams with complicated work needs.” Tools for budgeting and billable hours, work roles, planning and tracking project effort and time, and so on are included in this plan. It includes 15GB of storage capacity for each user.
Wrike for Marketers
Wrike for Marketers is a version of Wrike intended specifically for marketing and creative teams. Everything in the Enterprise plan is included in this plan. Additionally, you get proofing and approval capabilities, a Wrike plugin for
Wrike for Professional Services Teams
Project, portfolio, and team resource management and capacity planning are included in this plan. Along with that, you get role-based resource management, backlog and demand management, project effort estimation, customized work schedules, time tracking, and timesheets. Billable hours planned vs. actual cost project financial fields, and more are included in this version. This account type is for you if you need budgeting, timesheets, effort allocation, workload view, team usage, billing, and invoicing.
How Do Wrike’s Prices Compare?
Comparing project management software prices is rarely an exact comparison. Small firms can use low-cost apps, while major businesses can use enterprise-grade suites. Furthermore, several of Wrike’s plans have bespoke pricing. Thus, making it difficult to determine where they fall. However, Wrike’s prices encompass both the mid-range and the high-end. A rough estimate for mid-to-high-end services is $20–$45 per month per user. The Professional grade of LiquidPlanner costs $45 per person each month. Smartsheet’s Business plan costs $32 per worker each month, which is perfect if you want to automate your processes. ProofHub, a proofing service, costs $99 per month for an unlimited amount of people. Celoxis features excellent time and resource management tools and costs roughly $25 per person per month. Paymo’s Business package is $18.95 per person per month and includes built-in billing and invoicing.
New added Features
There are three notable features that were released in late 2020 and are available for most account levels. Project Risk Prediction is one option available for Business plans and higher. When a project is in danger of missing its deadlines, this tool employs machine learning to notify the necessary personnel. It’s useful for teams working on numerous projects at once. The Risk Prediction assigns a label to projects that are at risk of going off track. Moreover, it can advise team leaders on which tasks or parts of the project are most likely to cause issues. Document Processing is the second component, which is an OCR feature for mobile devices. It allows you to scan a document and extract the content into a format that you can edit. It can handle both typed and handwritten material.
Previously, expensive OCR software was required to convert pages of text into editable files. Although, today many smartphone scanning apps can do it as well. The third component is Smart Replies, which is a mobile feature. Smart Replies gives quick autofill responses to messages you receive, similar to some email systems that suggest replies to messages. Users can view and manage projects in a variety of ways with Wrike. Gantt charts, lists, tables, and kanban boards are all available on the platform. Tasks are categorized into workflow categories to indicate whether they are active or complete, and custom headers can be defined to further sort tasks.
One of the best features of Wrike is how simple it is to set recurring activities. This enables you to utilize the software for overall job management rather than just project monitoring. Due dates can also span many days, though you won’t be able to set a specific time limit over those days.
Interface
Wrike features a sleek, modern design. It’s simple, straightforward, and neat overall. You can customise the look by changing the color scheme and turning on Dark mode. Wrike is available for macOS and Windows through a web browser and on the desktop, as well as Android and iPhone apps. It employs a concept known as Spaces, which might be compared to folders. The left-hand navigation bar contains spaces. They let you organize tasks and other work that should be grouped together. The platform provides a variety of customizable dashboards that can be shared among team members to encourage cooperation.
Widgets can be added to dashboards to display papers, notes, and other project-related resources. The main display of the platform is divided into three boards that provide a rapid overview of which tasks require attention. If you wish to dig further into a project, the first board provides an overview. While the second and third boards allow you to access tasks and subtasks. Wrike also includes a feed where you may leave comments on specific jobs and tag other team members. However, the software lacks tools for live text chat or video calling. Due to the lack of these features, you must connect directly with colleagues outside of Wrike, which reduces productivity.
Wrike’s Philosophy
Wrike differs from its competitors in that, it does not focus just on project management. It crosses over into a slightly different world of work administration. Traditional project management tools are available in Wrike, so you may plan out a project from start to completion. On a Gantt chart, you can see all the tasks in that project, define relationships between them, and track the progress of all the tasks that make up the project. Moreover, Wrike allows you to manage ongoing projects. Ongoing work often consists of tasks that do not have a definite deadline or a final deliverable.
You can build a project in Wrike and fill it with tasks. Every job can contain a description, deadline, comments, attachments, and other details, as well as one or more people assigned to accomplish it. Each job has four state options: active, finished, deferred, and canceled by default. Whoever is in charge of a task adjusts its status as needed. That information is used by project managers and project leads to filter tasks to see how many are currently delayed, active, and so on. You can change these statuses to whatever you like if you have a Business account. You create folders in any Space for non-project work and keep them there. Moreover, you can organize your work in several forms and perspectives within a folder: list, table, board (a Kanban board), or Gantt chart.
Views and Key Features
Projects have the same list, board, table, and Gantt Chart display choices as non-project work. Two extra view tabs display all of the files that have been uploaded to a project. Additionally, a scrolling list of all project activities called a Stream is also displayed. Because the columns on the Board view correspond to task statuses, you can’t edit them unless you have a Business grade or higher account. The Table view allows you to see how much effort and the time your team is putting into jobs. Tables can display the overall amount of time spent on certain tasks as well as the entire project. This information is beneficial for teams that understand how to analyze it and generate more accurate predictions about the next cycle of work.
You can adjust the length and dependencies of items in the Gantt views by sliding, dragging, and dropping them. In fact, it runs more smoothly than the rest of the program. When you move a task incorrectly, it becomes a subtask by accident. It’s simple to make adjustments in the Gantt view. Wrike supports time monitoring, but how you utilize it is determined by the service tier you purchase. Wrike allows you a lot of flexibility when it comes to assigning due dates and recurring dates. A task can be due on a certain day or over several days, but you can’t specify a deadline with a precise time. Wrike also doesn’t allow team members to estimate best- and worst-case scenarios for how long a work will take. Wrike offers a remark box for each task and @ mention, as well as a Stream that shows all activities for communication.
Time Tracking
Time tracking is typically used by teams to calculate billable hours and charge clients. However, some people utilize it to enhance their estimations of how long jobs and projects will take in the future. Your projections will be more accurate the more accurate data you collect now. In Business accounts and higher,
Time tracking tool
Wrike offers time tracking. You can use an in-app timer to record time while working on any job, or you can manually log time worked. Unless you have Wrike for Professional Services, anyone with appropriate access can extract time records from across a team and send them to a billing and invoicing program.
Although keep in mind that Wrike’s time-tracking is not meant to be a stand-alone tool for that purpose. Moreover, it’s behind other apps in terms of simplicity of use for time tracking among project management tools. Wrike allows you to build a time log report based on your team’s recorded time. You can customise a report and specify which days you’d like to get an email update. If your job requires you to be away from your desk regularly, you can use the mobile apps to track time spent on tasks. You can work offline with the apps’ time tracking. The time is immediately updated to the proper places when you rejoin.
Creating a task first
Before you can start logging time, you must first create a task in the platform. It adds some difficulty to the process, especially when you only have a few minutes to work on a document. Wrike lacks the tools to distinguish between billable and non-billable hours that other project management software does. Moreover, it also lacks an invoicing or billing function. As a result, Wrike’s time tracking features are primarily confined to workload tracking.
Document Editor
The document editor in Wrike is a great function. It allows you to edit Word documents, PDFs, and photos in the cloud without having to download them. This is a significant benefit for collaboration and can save a lot of time when working on cloud-based papers.
Support
Wrike provides a lot of support to help you get the most out of the product. You have access to an interactive training module and monthly webinars hosted by the Wrike team in addition to video material. A community forum can also help with frequent questions. If you have any problems, Wrike offers phone and email support Monday through Friday.
Alternatives
Wrike is a bit pricey, especially when you consider it lacks
Conclusion
Wrike is a fantastic and adaptable platform for teams to interact and track work, whether it’s recurring tasks or large projects. It’s intuitively easy to pick up and most teams should be able to do so fast. Wrike has a lot to offer, however, it’s difficult to know which features come with certain account kinds. You’ll need to talk to a sales rep before purchasing this software. This is because of the sliding scale pricing and possible add-ons. If you’re a larger company and aren’t sure, you can check out other alternatives available in the market. Wrike is a decent project management tool, however, it has some significant faults. The time tracking features aren’t comprehensive enough to assist your business with billing tasks. Moreover, the lack of an integrated chat system makes collaboration and productivity difficult. These errors aren’t fatal, but Wrike is a lot more expensive than similar systems.
Which software do you use to manage your work? Tell us in the comments section below.
