Wrike Review — Tests & Best Use Cases in 2024

In this Wrike review, we share our test findings and discuss Wrike’s best use cases. We tried it ourselves, and found out why companies like Pfizer use it, but also why it’s not making headlines.

As the saying goes, ‘Work smarter, not harder.’ It’s a pretty good mantra to live by, especially if you’re running a business. Juggling multiple projects, keeping track of deadlines, and trying to improve your team’s collaboration can be overwhelming.

Wrike shares that mantra, which is why businesses of all sizes are turning to this popular project management tool to transform the way they work.

But if Wrike isn’t the perfect fit for your team, we’ve got some alternative solutions for you as well. Read on to find out how well Wrike integrates with other platforms, its pricing plans, the pros and cons, and its standout features.

Wrike Pros and Cons

Wrike’s software features in our shortlist of the best project management tools. But like the other solutions on that list, it has its strengths and weaknesses. Here’s a quick breakdown of what we found:

What Is Wrike – Product Overview

Wrike started in 2006 as an online tool to help teams collaborate and manage their workflow and projects. It was acquired by Citrix in 2021, evolving into a much more expansive tool aimed at simplifying today’s remote working environments.

As well as its project management features, Wrike comes with pre-built task, workflow, and communication templates. The customizable workspace lets you tailor the platform so you can work the way you want.

With a plethora of features and capabilities, it’s a perfect fit for teams that need to manage complex projects with multiple team members. It’s also compatible with Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.

The platform supports eight languages and includes industry-specific solutions. It’s no wonder some of the world’s largest global companies use Wrike to manage, organize, and run their business.

Is Wrike Good?

Wrike scored highly in our analysis of its collaboration and project management capabilities. It’s also praised for its comprehensive set of features like task management, Gantt charts, time tracking, and document management.

For many, Wrike has become an essential tool for project management as it allows real-time collaboration between teams.

Wrike’s software helps you manage your daily tasks, such as setting dues dates, adding assignees, and choosing and customizing statuses. You can also create custom fields, add subitems, attach files, and communicate with your team.

But what if you have many teams and departments? Deal with complicated processes, sophisticated projects, and multiple tools? Wrike’s software addresses all these modern challenges: it’s customizable, scalable, and easy to use.

But whether it’s a good solution for you depends on the type of projects you manage and your budget.

What Are Wrike’s Key Features?

From project management to process optimization to industry solutions, it likely has a solution to fit your team’s needs. Our Wrike review revealed several features key to the platform’s well-deserved reputation. Here’s a breakdown of what Wrike’s software can offer.

Views and Reporting

A feature we liked was how you can organize and view your tasks in a way that best suits you. Wrike has several customizable views you can choose from, including Gantt, List, Board, and Table.

Gantt Chart

Wrike offers everything you’d expect to see in Gantt views. You can set due and end dates, dependencies, impact, and statuses.

You can connect tasks and set dependencies to spot any conflicts. If you make a mistake when planning tasks, they’ll be automatically rescheduled when you add a dependency. The beauty of the Gantt chart is that you can adjust the schedule of your entire project with just a few clicks.

Board View

If you use an Agile methodology, your team may prefer Wrike’s Kanban-style Board view. With it, you can see each project’s progress, its due date, and the next planned projects. You can customize the statuses to reflect exactly how your team works.

Once you decide which view suits you best, you can set it as the default for each project.

Reports

Collecting status updates and analyzing data from multiple projects for different clients and across several teams is time-consuming and increases the risk of errors.

Wrike solves this problem. You can import data from 50+ digital marketing tools into your workspace and use filters to customize what’s analyzed.

Project Resource Planning

A unique feature of Wrike is that it also offers resource management tools to help you answer questions such as, ‘Can we take on a new project right now?’ and ‘Who should manage it?’

This functionality lets you see what your teams are working on, for example, what projects are assigned to whom and task effort levels, making it easy to see who’s overloaded or available to take on more work.

The time-tracking feature helps you see how long team members (or contractors) spend on tasks and projects. It makes calculating billable hours for invoicing much easier.

Knowing how many hours and resources you’ll need to complete a project allows you to monitor your spending in real time and keep within budget.

Advanced planning features, such as role assignment, are only available with the Pinnacle plan.

Workflow Automation

Wrike’s workflow automation capabilities (although ClickUp does offer more) let you automate and sync recurring and related tasks, streamlining your processes, minimizing errors, and helping you scale faster.

The Automation Engine notifies you of potential delays, new projects, and changes to task statuses. It then kicks in to move your work to the next step in your workflow based on status, priority, and risk.

Online Proofing

Wrike’s outstanding proofing software is where it shines (although it’s only available in the Business plan and above). You’ll be hard-pressed to find anything comparable. We think marketing teams especially will find it extremely useful for approval-based work.

You can proof more than 30 file types, including videos, images, web pages, and documents. It allows you to highlight, comment, annotate, and tag any team member with @mentions. You can also compare versions with Wrike’s sliding tool.

Wrike Integrations and Scalability

Our testing found that you can easily integrate Wrike with almost any tool. It boasts over 400 integrations, with its nearest competitors, Monday and Smartsheet, offering 200+ and 100+, respectively.

Wrike Integrate lets you connect with as many apps as you need, sync your data (between Wrike and 22+ apps), and add as many automations as you want. Automating your workflows enables your team to focus on their work better.

You can access Wrike Integrate only if you sign up for the Business plan or higher and only as an add-on, which will cost you extra.

Unfortunately, integrations are limited on the Free and Team plans. You can only access Wrike Integrate by signing up for the Business plan or higher and only as an add-on, which will cost you extra.

Wrike Android and iOS Apps

Wrike’s mobile apps for iOS and Android are feature-rich so come in handy if your team is always on the go. For example, you can use the app’s document scanner to digitize text and turn it into an editable format. It’s particularly useful as it’s integrated into Wrike, so you don’t need to use standalone scanning and optical character recognition apps.

With Wrike’s Smart Replies Feature, you can choose from pre-defined responses like ‘Let me check’ or ‘I’m not sure’. It’s a handy tool when you’re on the road and need to respond to messages quickly.

Is Wrike Easy to Use – A Step-By-Step Guide

Wrike’s modern, minimalist interface is tidy and straightforward to use. You can play with the color scheme, which is a nice touch.
The home screen is a central hub where you can control all your projects, teams, and budgets. Plus, you can create and assign tasks, and set deadlines, all from the same place.

However, compared to Monday, which is more visually intuitive, learning to use Wrike’s platform may take longer.

Here, we explain how to get started with Wrike, step by step.

1. Navigate the Workspace

When you open up Wrike, you’re presented with the default dashboard with three panes.

The navigation bar is on the left, where you’ll see all your teams and projects. The spaces in the middle pane are where you set up your tasks and subtasks. Clicking on a space brings up its details on the right.

2. Create Spaces, Projects, and Folders

Spaces are at the highest level of Wrike’s grouping type. They’re a centralized hub to store all your team’s information. You can create a space in three ways:

You use projects to report on, manage, and organize your work. There are also three ways to create a project:

1. From the green + on the top right (1)
2. From ‘Projects and Folders’ in the left navigation pane (2) and clicking on ‘Project’ in the menu that appears (3)
3. From ‘+ Item’ in the middle pane of the list view (4)

Folders help you create a structure so you can easily save and find information. You can create them in the same way you create projects, selecting ‘Folders’ instead of ‘Projects’.

You then choose where to store the folder (in a space, project, or another folder), the workflow, view, and who can access it.

3. Launch a Project

A marketing campaign, product launch, or go-to-market plan are all examples of projects. Here’s how to launch a project so everyone knows what to do and by when.

To create your project, right-click on the ‘Digital’ folder in the left pane, hover over it, and choose ‘Project’. Then name your project (in this case, ‘New Blog Post’). You’ll see that your project has its own attributes, including owner, start and finish dates, and status.

Once you’ve created the project, add the tasks needed to accomplish it. So, to create our blog post, we need to create the copy, proofread it, get the images, SEO it, and finally publish it.

Then, assign the tasks you’ve created. We found it’s best to assign only one person to each task so it’s crystal clear who’s responsible for what.

The best place to schedule tasks is a Gantt chart. Click the mass edit button (next to ‘By Priority’) and set the duration and due dates. The last step is to interconnect the tasks with dependencies.

By connecting the tasks, Wrike sees them as a single entity, not a set of random tasks. So, if you need to reschedule one task, Wrike automatically reschedules all the others accordingly.

Also, dependencies let everyone know when they need to start working on their task: once a team member has completed their task, the person responsible for the next one is automatically notified that it’s their turn to start.

You can also plan and work with your tasks on the Board and Table views.

Wrike Pricing – Does It Offer Good Value?

From teams getting started to those with complex work needs, Wrike offers five plans to cater to businesses of all sizes, budgets, and project-specific needs.

Paid plans range from $9.80–$24.80/month/user with custom pricing for Enterprise and Pinnacle plans. They are a tad pricier than other options (Smartsheet’s starting price is $7/month/user) but do come packed with features.

There is a 14-day free trial (Smartsheet offers 30 days), and you don’t need a credit card to sign up, meaning you’re not automatically charged for the plan at the end of the trial period.

It’s worth noting that premium features such as Wrike Integrate, Lock, and Two-Way Sync are only available from the Business, Enterprise, and Pinnacle plans at an extra cost.

Free Plan

If you’re just starting out and looking for a basic solution to collaborate on a shared task list with your team, the Free plan may be for you.

It’s not often a free plan allows unlimited users. By comparison, Smartsheet allows one, and Monday and ClickUp allow two. You also get a generous 2 GB of storage, although this is per account and not per user.

A significant plus is that the Free plan comes with Work Intelligence, which includes features such as smart search, document processing and text recognition, and generative AI.

However, you can’t track project progress, and the limit of 200 active tasks and subtasks can be restrictive. And if you deal with sensitive information and need enhanced security, you’ll need an Enterprise or Pinnacle subscription.

Team Plan

Designed for teams that need to collaborate and plan projects, the Team plan is Wrike’s entry-level paid subscription for 3–25 users.

You can create shareable dashboards and customize them to fit your specific projects, tasks, and files. These dashboards increase visibility so your team can focus on what’s important.

The Team plan unlocks the interactive Gantt charts and pre-built project management dashboards that provide a detailed progress overview at department, team, and individual levels.

Your storage allowance increases to 2 GB of storage per person, and you can integrate with certain productivity apps and tools: G Suite, Office 365, MS Project, Excel, and Slack.

Business Plan

The Business plan is Wrike’s most popular for teams of 5–200 people. This tier steps up the customization options a notch. It also includes calendar views, time tracking, timesheets, and 5 GB of storage per person.

Other advanced features introduced include projects and task approvals, AI risk prediction, Salesforce integration, and 200 automations per user per month.

Enterprise and Pinnacle Plans

To find out Enterprise and Pinnacle plan pricing, you’ll need to talk to a sales rep, as they’re only available on request.

Both these plans are designed for larger teams. You can have unlimited users (with a minimum of 5). The Enterprise plan focuses on upgrading security and scalability. The noteworthy security controls included are two-factor authentication, single sign-on, and role-based access.

You can also unlock Wrike Lock as an add-on, which allows you to manage your encryption keys to control data access.

With its advanced resources and capacity planning, the Pinnacle plan is for teams with complex work needs. This tier, described by Wrike as its most enhanced, gives you access to premium features such as advanced reporting, performance dashboards, and HTML5 proofing and approvals.

You also get 15 GB of storage and 1,500 automations per user.

Is it Hard to Cancel?

If you want to cancel a subscription, you need to contact the support team at least 30 days before the renewal date, otherwise, it will auto-renew.

Also, note that Wrike doesn’t refund unused periods.

Wrike vs Leading Project Management Software

There’s no one-size-fits-all project management solution. You’ll need to assess key characteristics like price, compatibility, and features to determine the best fit for your team.

So, how does Wrike compare to the best project management software solutions around? Here’s a TL;DR table comparing the basics of each tool.

Wrike vs Monday – Side-by-Side Comparison

Wrike and Monday are two of the most popular project management tools, but which one should you use? Both shine in task management, collaboration, and reporting; however, there are key differences that may influence your decision.

What Do Wrike’s Reviews Say?

We’ve described our experiences in this Wrike review. But what do others say about it? Well, we liked it, and so did the users who left reviews on G2, where it scored 4.2 out of 5 (3,512 reviews).

Users also praised the software’s flexibility, communication features, and organizational capabilities. However, there were some comments relating to its steep learning curve.

Unfortunately, Wrike didn’t fare so well on Trustpilot, although there were only 172 reviews, and most were from users who were frustrated by its billing and cancellation policies, which may have skewed the rating. Others mentioned difficulties integrating the Wrike software.

Wrike Alternatives – What Else Can You Use?

While Wrike has an impressive number of features and functionalities, it may not be the right fit for you. In this case, take a look at some of our other guides, where we review some of the top project management solutions.

Why You Can Trust Our Review of Wrike

For our Wrike review, we thoroughly tested this project management tool against criteria such as features, ease of use, and price. We’ve used the same approach to test Wrike’s competitors so you can easily compare the different providers.

We’ve included verified user reviews from reputable sites like G2 and Trustpilot for different perspectives, ensuring our Wrike review is comprehensive and unbiased.

Is Wrike the Right Project Management Choice for Your Business?

Wrike is a terrific project management solution, although beginners may find it tricky to navigate, and it could be a bit pricey for smaller businesses.

That said, if you’re a marketer, agency, or company needing a customizable tool with advanced project and resource management functionalities, then Wrike might well be for you. It’s also a good option if easy collaboration is just as important to you as project management.

If you’re looking for a simpler, more intuitive solution, try Monday, or ClickUp if you’re budget-conscious.

However, the best way to see if the Wrike app works for you is to try the Free plan or sign up for its 14-day free trial. If it’s not the right fit, one of the alternatives we’ve mentioned may suit your needs better.

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