Wrike is a powerful and flexible collaboration app that also contains project management tools. Wrike started out as an online platform for team collaboration, work management, and project management, and it continues to grow those areas while also adding related features. Most recently, the app got some new work intelligence features that can, for example, predict when a project is at risk of falling behind and call attention to possible causes. While Wrike is on the expensive side, it’s easier to set up and start using than many other comparable project management apps.
While Wrike scores highly in our testing and analysis, whether it’s the right app for your team depends on several factors. The best project management app for you has to have the right features based on the type of work your team does and the number of people who will use it. Budget and speed are two other common factors. PCMag has three Editors’ Choice winners for budget-conscious small business, mid-size teams, and large organizations. They are Zoho Projects, Teamwork (formerly Teamwork Projects), and LiquidPlanner, respectively. That said, we find the most wiggle room for “best” pick among mid-sized organizations, because they often need some specific special features, which vary across competing products. Wrike could easily be the best fit, depending on what special features your team needs.
We’ve also included Wrike in our comparison of time tracking software. It falls short of our Editors’ Choice TSheets, which is remarkably easy to use—although TSheets is time tracking software and Wrike isn’t. Wrike merely offers it in some plan types in conjunction with work management tools.
How Much Does Wrike Cost?
If you’re considering using Wrike, we recommend speaking with a representative to make sure you get the right account type, as it’s not an easy one-two purchase process.
Wrike offers eight plans. Because there are so many of them, we provide a summary first and then list in more detail what each plan offers.
Options
- Free; up to 5 people
- 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 people
- Enterprise (custom pricing); minimum of 5 people
- Wrike for Marketers (custom pricing); an upgrade from Business or Enterprise with tools for marketing and creative teams
- Wrike for Marketers Performance (custom pricing); an upgrade from option 5
- Wrike for Professional Services (custom pricing); an upgrade from Business or Enterprise with tools for professional services teams
- Wrike for Professional Services Performance (custom pricing); an upgrade from option 7
You can buy other upgrades, called add-ons, for some plan types. For example, Wrike Proof is an add-on that gives you a streamlined proofing process for reviewing and approving files. Not all accounts are eligible for add-ons, and some accounts already include one or two of them.
Account Types
Free: The Free account is essentially a shared task list with a couple of different views for small teams. You can have up to five team members, plus unlimited collaborators. Collaborators can see and discuss a project, but they can’t create or edit tasks. There’s no limit to the number of projects you can create. You get 2GB storage space. You don’t get Gantt charts, subtasks, task dependencies, a time-tracking widget, bulk actions for tasks, dashboards, and a few other features.
Professional: Professional accounts are good for planning projects and collaborating. They include everything in Free, plus subtasks, Gantt charts, limited integration options, shareable dashboards, and collaborators. It includes 5GB storage space and 15GB per month for video uploads.
Business: Business plans give you everything in Professional, plus added work management tools, reports, custom fields, time tracking, project and task approvals, Salesforce integration, a calendar, and more. Pricing is on a sliding scale with a maximum of 200 people. The per-person price decreases the more seats you buy. This plan comes with 50GB storage space plus 15GB per month for video uploads.
Enterprise: Enterprise accounts add user management and security controls that are typical in enterprise software: single sign-on options, two-factor authentication requirements, password policies, as well as network access and compliance policies. You get 100GB storage space and 15GB space for video uploads per month.
Wrike for Marketers: This version is designed for marketing and creative teams. You get everything in the Business or Enterprise plan (depending which one you choose), plus Wrike Proof for proofing and approvals, Wrike Publish for publishing content online, Wrike extension for Adobe Creative Cloud, as well as tailored templates and workspaces.
Wrike for Marketers Performance: This plan adds analytics to the Wrike for Marketers plan to help teams see how effective their marketing efforts are. It adds dashboards, reports and data visualizations, integration with Salesforce and Marketo, and more.
Wrike for Professional Services: This version gives you everything in the Business or Enterprise account, plus Wrike Resource (resource management tools), a tailored workspace and templates, and 50GB storage. If you need budgeting, timesheets, effort allocation, workload view, team utilization, billing and invoicing, this is the account type for you.
Wrike for Professional Services Performance: This plan is an upgrade to Wrike for Professional Services and it adds dashboards, advanced reporting and data visualization, and integration with more than 400 apps, including Salesforce, NetSuite, and QuickBooks.
How Do Wrike’s Prices Compare?
Comparing prices for project management software is rarely an apples-to-apples affair. There are low-cost apps for small businesses and enterprise-grade suites for large ones. Furthermore, with many of Wrike’s plans under custom pricing, it’s hard to get a sense of where they fall. Generally speaking, it covers both the mid-range and high end.
A ballpark figure for mid to high-end services is $20-$45 per person per month. LiquidPlanner, our Editors’ Choice winner for high-end software, costs $45 per person per month for its Professional tier of service. Smartsheets, which is great if you want to build automations into your process, costs $32 per person per month for a Standard Business plan. ProofHub, which specializes in proofing, runs $99 per month for an unlimited number of people. Celoxis, which has great tools for managing time and resources, costs around $25 per person per month. Paymo, which has built-in billing and invoicing, runs $18.95 per person per month for a Business plan.
Small businesses don’t need to pay nearly so much. With Editors’ Choice Zoho Projects, you could pay as little as $3 per person per month, and no more than $6. Teamwork, another Editors’ Choice, has paid plans starting at $12.50 per person per month.
What’s New in Wrike?
If you’ve used Wrike before, there are three new and noteworthy features that came out in late 2020, which are or will be available for all account levels.
One is called Project Risk Prediction. This feature uses machine learning to alert the appropriate people when a project is at risk of not meeting its deadlines. It’s helpful for teams that juggle multiple projects at a time. The Risk Prediction puts a label on projects that are at risk of falling off course and it can suggest to team leaders the tasks or areas of the project that are most likely causing problems.
The second feature is Document Processing. It’s a mobile app feature (currently for Apple mobile devices only) that lets you scan a document and extract the text from it into an editable format. It works with both printed and handwritten documents. Turning pages of text into editable files used to be the realm of expensive OCR software, but now quite a few mobile scanning apps can do it, too.
The third feature is a mobile app feature called Smart Replies. Similar to a feature that’s common in many email programs, Smart Replies suggests short replies to messages you receive that you tap to autofill. For example, if someone sends you a message asking a question, the suggested replies might be “Yes,” “Let me check,” “I’m not sure,” and so forth. As of this writing, the feature is available in Wrike’s Android app and is due out for its iPhone and iPad apps in 2021.
Getting Started With Wrike: Interface
Wrike has a modern, contemporary look. Overall, it’s simple, straightforward, and tidy. You can change the color theme and turn on dark mode to adjust the look to your preference. Wrike runs in the web, on desktop for macOS and Windows, and on Android and Apple mobile devices.
Somewhat new to Wrike are Spaces. Spaces appear in the left side navigation bar, and you can make as many Spaces as you want regardless of the type of account you have. They give you a way to group together projects and other work that belong together. You can think of them like folders, providing structure and organization.
Wrike’s Philosophy
Wrike is a little different from competitors because, as mentioned above, it doesn’t stick strictly to project management. It crosses into the realm of work management, which is slightly different. LiquidPlanner does the same thing. Wrike has traditional project management tools, so if you need to plan out a project from start to finish, you certainly can. You can view all the tasks in that project on a Gantt chart, create dependencies among tasks, and keep tabs on the progress of all the tasks that make up the project.
In addition, however, Wrike also lets you manage ongoing work. Ongoing work typically comprises tasks that don’t necessarily have a final deliverable or a fixed deadline. Updating the company blog once a week is an example of ongoing work, whereas launching a new blog is an example of a project.
In Wrike, you can create a project and populate it with tasks. Every task can have one or more people assigned to complete it, a description, deadline, comments, attachments, and other details. Each task also has status options, which are by default active, completed, deferred, or canceled. Whoever is responsible for a task changes its status as appropriate. Project managers or project leads use that information to filter tasks to see how many are, for example, deferred currently, which ones are active, and so forth. With a Business account, you can customize these statuses to be whatever you want.
For non-project work, you create folders within any Space and keep it there. Within a folder, you have the choice to organize the work in different formats and views: list, table, board (a Kanban board), or Gantt chart.
Views and Key Features in Wrike
Projects get the same view options as non-project work: list, board, table, and Gantt chart. Two additional view tabs show you all the files that have been uploaded to a project (Files) and a scrolling list summarizing all the activity on the project (Stream). The columns on the board view match the task statuses, so you can’t change them unless you have a Business grade account or higher.
The table view gives you visibility into effort and time on task across your team. Tables can show the total amount of time that went into completing different tasks and the projects as a whole. This data is useful for teams that know how to look at them and make more accurate predictions about the next cycle of work.
The Gantt views are interactive, meaning you can slide, drag, and drop items to change their duration and dependencies. In fact, it’s smoother than other parts of the app. In testing, we found it easier to make changes in the Gantt chart than in the list view, where dragging and dropping tasks to reorder them felt fussy and imprecise. Miscalculate where you’re moving a task and it becomes a subtask accidentally. Making changes in the Gantt view is a breeze.
Wrike offers time tracking, but how you can use it depends on the tier of service you buy. We have more on time tracking in its own section below.
Speaking of time, Wrike gives you good options for assigning due dates and recurring dates. A task can be due on a specific day, or you can set the due date to stretch for several days, although you can’t set a deadline with a specific time, like 9:00 a.m.
Wrike also does not let team members estimate best- or worst-case scenarios for how long a task might take, which LiquidPlanner handles with ease. In LiquidPlanner, you can configure the app such that the moment a task takes longer than expected, all the other people and tasks that will be affected have their due dates adjusted accordingly.
For communication, Wrike has a comment box for every any task and @ mentions, as well as a Stream showing all activity. You don’t get any built-in tools for text chat or video calls, although with so many teams using Slack and Slack alternatives, having them in your project management or work management app doesn’t seem like a necessity. Still, sometimes it’s nice to have a central place for companywide announcements or those that apply to the top level of any project or are not specific to any one project. Basecamp isn’t traditional project management software, but it’s pretty good for that sort of communication. And ProofHub has a central announcements board that helps in this regard as well.
Time Tracking
Teams that need time tracking usually use it to tally up billable hours and invoice a client. That said, some use it to improve their estimates for how long future tasks and projects will take. The more accurate data you collect now, the more accurate your predictions will be.
Wrike includes time tracking in Business accounts and higher. You can record time while you work on any task with an in-app timer, or you can log time worked manually. Those with appropriate access can export the time records from across a team and send them to a billing and invoicing program, unless you have Wrike for Professional Services Teams, which includes billing and invoicing. If you’re looking for a project management app that includes billing and invoicing, two others are Paymo and Teamwork.
While we have evaluated Wrike’s ability to track employee time, keep in mind that it’s not intended as a stand-alone tool for that purpose and isn’t exactly comparable to apps such as TSheets (our Editors’ Choice), VeriClock, and others that may function as systems for clocking in and out.
Among project management apps, however, Wrike’s time tracking falls a notch below Zoho Projects and Mavenlink in terms of ease of use for time tracking. In Wrike, you must open the task before you can start recording time. In Zoho Projects, you can do it directly from the list view. Zoho Projects and Mavenlink put a timer icon at the top of every dashboard, making it easy to see and access.
Wrike lets you create a time log report from the tracked time across your team. You can configure a report and choose the days you want to receive an update via email.
If your work takes you away from your desk frequently, you can record time on task via Wrike’s mobile apps. The time tracking in the apps allows you to work offline. When you reconnect, the time automatically gets added to the appropriate places.
Extras
As mentioned in the pricing section, Wrike offers add-on services that extend the app’s functionality. There’s a document editor, a publishing service, proofing workflow, and so on. You download and install these apps locally, and they let you handle the specific tasks they’re meant to tackle within Wrike, saving you from having to open additional applications. For example, with the Document Editor, you can open a file that someone has uploaded to Wrike, make changes and annotations, and close it all from the Wrike window. Wrike keeps the version history and automatically saves your copy to the same location as the original.
Another add-on, called Wrike Resource, is the piece you need if you want to do any kind of resource management with Wrike. Resource management includes being able to see at a glance who on the team is overloaded with assignments and who has extra bandwidth at any given time to take on more work. You can also generate reports to see, for example, how much time various teams spend on billable work versus non-billable work. Wrike Resource comes with Wrike Professional Services accounts and is available as an add-on to Business and Enterprise accounts.
Is Wrike Right for Your Team?
Wrike is an excellent and flexible hub where teams collaborate and track work, whether it’s ongoing tasks or complex projects. The fact that it’s fairly intuitive to use certainly helps, and most teams should be able to pick it up quickly. That said, expect to be slowed at the point of purchase. Wrike offers a lot, but it’s really hard to figure out which features come with which account types. With sliding scale pricing and possible add-ons, you’ll need to chat with a sales rep before buying this app.
If Wrike offers more than you need, look to Editors’ Choices Zoho Projects (for small businesses on a budget) and Teamwork. You get a lot of bang for your buck with those apps, and the setup time is much shorter. If you’re a larger business considering Wrike but are still undecided, we would suggest considering LiquidPlanner, too, as it includes rich resource management tools and some great options for automatically rescheduling timelines and redistributing work when projects get messy.
