Workflow

Wrike Alternatives

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Project teams constantly juggle multiple tasks, creating an administrative nightmare for project managers. From disconnected teams and time and budgetary constraints to missing critical decision-making data, there’s no shortage of challenges threatening to derail a project. You need a project management solution that delivers the exact features to solve your biggest problems. 

Wrike is one such solution catering to more than 2.3 million users and 20,000 organizations worldwide. The software provides best-in-class work management features like task management, custom workflows, project portfolio management, and real-time reporting to help you get organized. Rather than use disjointed tools, you can now seamlessly track and manage every step of your project’s lifecycle in one place. 

The Best Wrike Alternatives 

We researched and tested numerous solutions to find the best project management software. We discovered multiple terrific solutions, including our Golden Eggs, which had the most significant positive impact on project management: 

Monday.com is our favorite project management solution because of its diverse features, easy customization, and high scalability when you need additional work management capabilities. Try Monday.com’s Pro plan commitment-free for 14 days

ClickUp makes light work of managing a global virtual team with built-in remote work features like task templates, document collaboration, and 15+ customizable work views. Get up to 45% off when you choose an annual subscription

Smartsheet is an Excel-style work execution platform with built-in work management, visibility, collaboration, and integrations. Sign up for the Smartsheet 30-day free trial with no credit card required

Crazy Egg's golden eggs with ClickUp logo, Monday.com logo, and Smartsheet logo.

More Top Project Management Software 

At Crazy Egg, we believe software should adapt to your processes and workflows, not vice versa. This philosophy is foremost in our minds when testing and reviewing software, including our reviews of the best project management software. The post pinpoints the top project management tools based on our tests and trials and highlights each software’s strengths, areas for improvement, and potential use cases. 

Our Take on Wrike 

Wrike is a popular project management solution for enterprise teams, with an impressive customer list of top brands like Sony Pictures, SIEMENS, and Walmart Canada. One of the software’s strengths is its extensive work management features, covering all project phases from initiation to closure. You may never need to switch to a different tool during the project’s lifecycle. In addition, you can assign and approve work, communicate with stakeholders, track project progress, manage task feedback, and share and store project documentation within Wrike.  

A robust platform can be confusing for users. Wrike simplifies data visualization, allowing you to manage teams with diverse technical literacy. Furthermore, its dashboard condenses your workflow on one screen, and all project-critical information and functions are available on one page. 

The software is also one of the most flexible solutions for cross-functional teams. Wrike provides pre-built templates for all departments, including marketing, sales, IT, and engineering. The templates contain the must-have elements and a basic structure to guarantee consistency regardless of your team’s makeup.  

Aside from general project management, Wrike’s add-on features allow professional service agencies, marketing teams, and creatives to create purpose-built applications to support specific workflows and business processes. For example, the Wrike Marketing Insights add-on connects to your digital marketing channels. Now, you can have real-time and easily digestible performance insights within your Wrike platform. 

Wrike also significantly reduces shuffling between email and project management software. The platform integrates with your email to perform Wrike actions from your inbox. For example, you can create, edit, set due dates, and update tasks from your email. 

Like other project management solutions, Wrike has its downsides. The software is expensive, which can be restrictive for individuals, rapidly growing teams, and startups. Navigating Wrike can also be difficult for beginners or when managing multiple projects, as you organize related tasks within projects, create folders for linked projects, and spaces for associated tasks and projects. So, you must consider the time it takes for new users to learn the tool.

Wrike may have its place in your work management software stack, especially for a professional service agency. But there are other platforms worth considering. Our review of the best project management software outlines some great alternatives, which we’ll dive into more below. We’ve also published an in-depth Wrike review if you want to learn more about the platform’s strengths and weaknesses. 

Let’s consider how Wrike faces up to the fierce competition. 

Wrike vs. Monday.com 

Monday.com is a robust work management platform beyond Wrike’s more general task management capabilities. Monday.com’s open platform lets you build specific workflows, applications, and integrations, so it’s a terrific Wrike alternative for organizations looking for a flexible all-in-one platform.  For example, you can use Monday.com as a task management tool, sales CRM, recruitment tracker, enterprise resource planning (EPR) solution, marketing hub, and sprint management app in one. 

Monday.com is also a terrific Wrike alternative for teams that frequently use templates. Monday.com provides over 200 templates with every plan, including the free account, whereas Wrike only offers templates in the Business plan and above. Wrike templates primarily center on project management, agile, and marketing, and Monday.com’s templates cover numerous use cases, including education, construction, HR, and real estate. 

There are still compelling reasons to stick with Wrike. For example, Monday.com isn’t a first choice for organizations with stringent or structured project approval processes. The platform doesn’t offer support request management for its base product. Wrike’s dynamic forms automatically create tasks, populate them with project information, assign tasks to members, and start approval when a form is submitted. 

Wrike vs. ClickUp 

Wrike is notoriously difficult to navigate, often requiring special training. ClickUp is a good alternative if you’re concerned about employee buy-in for your new PM software. ClickUp has a straightforward task hierarchy and more intuitive navigation. ClickUp also has more powerful mobile apps for teams that like to work on the go. 

ClickUp is also a cheaper alternative to Wrike and has many of the same features. For example, ClickUp’s free plan supports unlimited tasks and users, compared to Wrike’s five-person limit. In addition, ClickUp’s entry-level plan starts at $7 per user per month, compared to $9.80 for Wrike’s entry-level plan. 

However, Wrike is still the better choice for managing the workload of a large team. Wrike lets you block off holidays and paid time off (PTO), which isn’t available in ClickUp. In addition, Wrike offers more options for allocating time. It also has an everything view for a quick workload overview, whereas ClickUp is more granular. 

Wrike vs. Smartsheet 

Smartsheet is an obvious pick for project teams looking for an advanced alternative to traditional spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets. The spreadsheet-centric software expertly integrates capabilities like flexible views, collaboration, and reporting onto the familiar spreadsheet format.  

Smartsheet is better for teams frequently working with freelancers and other external collaborators. The platform supports unlimited external collaborators with free reign to manage sheets and edit data. Wrike caps the number of free external collaborators depending on your plan and grants less collaborator access. 

Wrike is the better option for time tracking and a real-time social-media-style newsfeed, which aren’t available on Smartsheet. Wrike is also more scalable, with add-on solutions to expand the platform’s capabilities. In addition, agile development teams tend to gravitate toward Wrike for its story mapping feature. 

Wrike vs. Teamwork 

Teamwork has a significant edge over Wrike for client-facing teams because it is purpose-built for client work. The platform offers more advanced features for forecasting projects, tracking billable hours, and managing complex budgets than Wrike. Teamwork offers service-based core features like forecasting, billing, and time tracking in its entry-level plan. 

Teamwork also offers unlimited client access with similar permissions to standard users at the project levels. Of course, you can control permission levels. But client users can theoretically own projects, add project items like tasks and milestones, and reply to messages at no extra cost. While Wrike allows you to share timeline snapshots with clients, they’d need a paid account to get the same level of access that Teamwork offers for free. 

Keep in mind that Wrike outshines Teamwork in some areas, such as having one of the best free tiers if you’re looking for free PM software. Wrike is also more customizable, allowing you to tweak dashboards, request forms, and workflows to suit your requirements. 

Wrike vs. Asana 

Asana is a terrific Wrike alternative if you need to grow your team while keeping costs down. Asana offers unlimited user storage, while Wrike caps its per-user storage limits, maxing out at 15 GB of storage per user with its most expensive plan. Asana also supports 100+ native integrations with your favorite business applications starting with the free plan, while Wrike limits native integrations depending on your subscription tier. 

Asana is a simple project management tool with the essential features to manage projects effectively. The platform strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and practicality. Therefore, most users will find Asana more intuitive for daily workflows than Wrike. 

Some critical missing features in Asana make Wrike the better choice for some people. For example, although Asana now provides native time tracking, it doesn’t have a native budget-tracking feature, which is generally important for large-scale projects. Wrike also has better enterprise support, including 24/7 phone support for an extra fee.  

Wrike vs. Trello 

Trello is a practical Wrike alternative if you’re looking for a basic, low-cost, Kanban-style project management tool. Trello has a decent free plan, with paid plans starting at just $5 per user per month billed annually. It’s also unrivaled in flow efficiency and other Kanban work processes.  

Trello is also a terrific option for software development teams. It’s an Atlassian product, so software developers will appreciate its developer-centric features like engineering templates, agile workflows, and bug request monitoring and management templates. In addition, Trello offers extra views like a dashboard, timeline, calendar, and map for cross-functional teams. 

Still, Wrike has a Kanban view, so you won’t miss it if you choose it over Trello. Wrike also offers more extensive and robust project management features than Trello. For example, Wrike lets you create and share forms, has a Gantt chart, time tracking, resource management, and a slew of other helpful project management features unavailable in Trello’s base product. 

Wrike Alternatives in Summary 

Wrike is a solid fully-featured project management platform for teams of all types and sizes. The software has something to offer everyone, whether you are on the project management, creative, or business operation team. It’s a terrific solution for eliminating silos and managing mixed teams with diverse technical backgrounds under one platform. 

Wrike is also one of the best tools for managing client work. The software provides white labeling, visual timelines, native time tracking, CRM templates, custom intake forms, and resource management to streamline your client-facing projects. In addition, Wrike manages your internal projects equally well with granular access management and built-in collaboration. 

Like most software tools, Wrike has its shortcomings. Teams requiring templates for their daily workflow must pay extra or find an alternative like Monday.com. Similarly, Wrike isn’t the cheapest tool for budget-conscious users. Options like ClickUp offer similar core features at a significantly lower price. And if you prefer a spreadsheet-based platform, Smartsheet will be a top choice.


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