Wrike is a powerful tool for teams, one that ranks highly as both collaboration software and project management software. It started out as an online platform for team collaboration, work management, and project management, and it continues to grow in those areas while also adding related features. The app has since added 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.
Wrike scores highly in our testing and analysis, but whether it's the right app for your team depends on several factors, such as your budget and what kinds of projects you manage. If it doesn't seem like the right fit, PCMag has three Editors' Choice winners to recommend instead: GanttPro for anyone new to project management, Zoho Projects for small and growing teams, and Teamwork for client work.
Wrike Pricing and Add-Ons
Like many project management services, Wrike offers several different plans: Free, Teams, Business, Enterprise, and Pinnacle.
The Free plan costs nothing but is essentially a shared task list with a couple of different views for small teams. You get 2GB storage for the whole account (not per person) and you don't get Gantt charts, time tracking, custom fields, and other key features. Active tasks are also limited to 200. Most people could not reasonably use the free plan for managing projects, though you can play around with the interface and get a sense of how Wrike works.
The Teams plan costs $9.80 per person per month on average but is paid in increments of five users. It's meant for teams that need to plan projects and collaborate. It includes everything in the Free plan plus Gantt charts, shareable dashboards, 2GB of storage per person, and the option to integrate with Microsoft Project, Excel, and other services.
The Business plan averages $24.80 per person per month and supports between 5 and 200 people; pricing is on a sliding scale, where the per-person price decreases the more seats you buy. You get everything in the Teams plan, plus added work management tools, reports, custom fields, time tracking and timesheets, project and task approvals, Salesforce integration, AI risk prediction, 200 automations per user per month, and more. This plan comes with 5GB of storage space per person.
The Enterprise and Pinnacle plans both have custom pricing only available on request. The Enterprise plan adds user management and security controls that are typical in enterprise software: single sign-on options, multi-factor authentication requirements, password policies, 1,000 automations per user per month, as well as network access and compliance policies. You get 10GB of storage space per person.
The Pinnacle plan adds more features on top for "teams with complex work needs," as Wrike's marketing puts it. They include tools for budgeting and recording billable hours, job roles, locked spaces, SharePoint and HTML5 proofing, 1,500 automations per user per month, and tools for planning and tracking effort and time put into projects. It comes with 15GB of storage space per person.
Wrike has simplified its plans considerably since our last review, making it much easier to assess which tier of service is right for your team. Previously, the company had plans and packages that were specific to different industries, such as marketing. You can still get a customized instance of Wrike based on your industry or use case, but now it comes in the form of an add-on to your plan for an added cost. The prices are not listed publicly, so you have to contact Wrike for more info on them.
All of the add-ons, listed below, are available to customers with Business plans and higher, except Wrike Lock which is only for Enterprise and Pinnacle customers:
Wrike Marketing Insights helps marketing teams track data related to campaigns they run.
Wrike Integrate lets teams build custom automations and create more integrations with other services, along the lines of other automation software, such as Zapier for example.
Wrike Sync lets you sync your Wrike data with another platform, including Jira, GitHub, Salesforce, Airtable, Excel, and other apps.
Wrike Lock allows your team to manage its own encryption keys.
You can also pay extra to have a Wrike specialist help onboard your organization and provide training.
How Do Wrike's Prices Compare With Competitors?
Comparing prices for project management software isn't 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, however, Wrike's prices cover both the mid-range and high-end prices.
A ballpark figure for mid to high-end services is $20 to $45 per user per month. For example, LiquidPlanner costs $420 per person per year (equivalent to $35 per month) for its Ultimate tier of service—and while there are tiers of service that cost less with LiquidPlanner, we only recommend Ultimate. Smartsheet, which is great if you want to build automations into your process, costs $32 per person per month for a 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 $24.95 per person per month for a Business plan.
Small businesses don't need to pay nearly so much. With Editors' Choice winner Zoho Projects, you could pay as little as $3 per person per month, and no more than $6. Teamwork, another Editors' Choice winner, has paid plans starting at $8.99 per person per month.
Getting Started With Wrike: A Straightforward 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. Wrike runs in a web browser and on the desktop for macOS and Windows, and there are apps for Android and Apple mobile devices.
(Credit: Wrike/PCMag)Wrike uses a concept called Spaces, which you can think of as folders. Spaces appear on the left. They give you a way to group projects and other work that belongs together.
In 2022, Wrike’s default theme went through a major overhaul, and it now looks right at home with all the major SaaS websites. There’s ample white space, clear buttons, and a useful sidebar. That sidebar is always available and helps you jump quickly between Spaces, projects, your to-do list, reports, timesheets, and more.
Wrike's Philosophy
Wrike is a little different from its competitors because, as mentioned, 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, and Asana can be similar, depending on how you use it. 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 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 website 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 them there. Within a folder, you have the choice to organize the work in different formats and views: list, table, board (i.e., a Kanban board), or Gantt chart.
Views and Main Features in Wrike
Projects get the same view options as non-project work, including 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 (called a 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 tasks 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 want to make more accurate predictions about the next cycle of work and how long it might take.
(Credit: Wrike/PCMag)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 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 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.
Alerts for Projects in Danger of Slipping
One helpful feature in Wrike is Project Risk Prediction, available to Business plans and higher. This feature uses machine learning to alert the appropriate people when a project is at risk of not meeting its deadlines. It's especially useful for teams that juggle multiple projects at a time. The Risk Prediction labels 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.
LiquidPlanner is notably good at identifying when a project is at risk of slipping and alerting the relevant people also.
Wrike on Mobile
If you have team members who need to check in on projects while on the go, Wrike's mobile apps for Android and Apple devices are quite feature rich. You get native document scanning which uses OCR to scan and extract text from a document, turning it into an editable format. While there are several good standalone apps that do scanning and OCR, it's nice to see it integrated into Wrike.
The app also has a Smart Replies feature that offers short autofill responses to messages you receive. For example, if someone sends you a message asking a question, you can answer with one tap, "Yes," "Let me check," "I'm not sure," and so forth.
Time Tracking With Wrike
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 offers time tracking, but how you can use it depends on the tier of service you buy.
(Credit: Wrike/PCMag)You only get 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. If you're looking for a project management app that includes billing and invoicing, you should consider Teamwork and Paymo.
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.
Automating Workflows With Wrike
Wrike’s automations can help you set up some tasks in a workflow to happen automatically. Setting them up is pretty straightforward and doesn't require you to know how to code. You just pick a trigger (the action that kicks off the automation) from a list of available triggers and then select the following action you want to happen and any parameters for it.
An example of an automation is: When the status of any task in Project X changes to "ready for approval," assign that task to Sandra. Another example: When a new task is created in Project Y, automatically assign it to the art director. How many automations you get per month varies based on the plan you have (see the pricing section above).
(Credit: Wrike/PCMag)Communication in Wrike
For communication, Wrike has a comment box for every task and @ mention, as well as a Stream showing all activities. 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.
Proofing in Wrike
Wrike also has stellar proofing features that support more than 30 file types, including video (available in the Business plan and above). Clicking on a file attachment opens it up in a new tab where you can highlight, annotate, comment, and tag anyone of your team members. When you have multiple iterations, Wrike also lets you compare them using a sliding tool.
(Credit: Wrike/PCMag)Not many project management apps include proofing tools. ProofHub does and might be a better option than Wrike if your team is small and budget-conscious.
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 easy to intuitively pick up certainly helps, and most teams should be able to pick it up quickly. If Wrike offers more than you need, look to GanttPro if you are new to project management, Zoho Projects if you manage a small but growing team, or Teamwork for client work. 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 suggest check out LiquidPlanner, too, as it includes rich resource management tools and some great options for automatically rescheduling timelines and redistributing work when projects get messy.
