Features & Cost (Hands-on Tested Review)

Wrike is among the many greatest mission administration software program choices as an industry-recognized answer for enabling group productiveness and collaboration. After utilizing Wrike, I can attest it’s a strong device with in depth options for a variety of groups.

A subsidiary of Citrix Techniques since early 2021, Wrike is part of the enterprise vendor’s portfolio addressing the rising adoption of hybrid and distributed work environments. The Wrike platform’s user-friendly interface makes the transition from conventional spreadsheets like Excel seamless for groups upgrading mission administration workflows. Add within the extent of templates, integrations and plans to select from, Wrike has a bit one thing for organizations throughout industries.

SEE: Hiring package: Undertaking supervisor (TechRepublic Premium)

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Assessment methodology

This assessment relies on my private expertise registering, configuring and executing a mission in Smartsheet. The pattern mission I constructed within the device is a three-month software improvement timeline with six sprints and over 20 core duties.

Under is the pattern mission (Determine A). The columns listed embody job identify, begin and finish dates, assigned contact, standing, length, completion share and notes. In the meantime, rows set up dash duties and subtasks into sprints. Two sprints include a number of subtasks.

Determine A

So as to add extra context, I familiarized myself with Wrike’s product documentation, demos, {industry} critiques and recognition and a comparative evaluation with different software program purposes. I ran a free trial of the Enterprise Plus plan to check this device.

What’s Wrike?

Wrike is a cloud-based mission administration software program that gives small to enterprise organizations observability and productiveness capabilities that allow collaboration between inside group members and exterior contributors. Whereas starter plans provide a spreadsheet-style interface, Wrike gives loads of decisions for visualizing mission information.

Based in 2006, Wrike launched its mission administration software program the identical 12 months. The corporate’s consumer base steadily grew in its first decade. The San Jose-based firm earned a number of rounds of funding earlier than its acquisition in March 2021 by enterprise expertise vendor Citrix Techniques. Right now, Wrike serves over 20,000 firms throughout 140 international locations.

The Wrike platform gives basic mission administration capabilities for IT mission groups in addition to advertising, inventive and repair options with a variety of plans for various group sizes and capabilities.

Determine B

Wrike alternate options & opponents

Wrike overview

Wrike gives a free trial and SaaS subscription for its mission administration platform. Further productiveness, information sharing and collaboration instruments could be added to any plan for an month-to-month price.

Begin with the Wrike desktop or cellular app

From the Wrike homepage, new customers can register for a free account by typing of their enterprise e mail. After verifying the e-mail handle, customers might be redirected to Wrike’s platform for finishing the preliminary registration course of. Wrike is out there by way of browser, desktop software, or cellular software for iOS and Android gadgets by means of the Apple or Google Play shops.

Wrike options and workflows

Navigate the consumer homepage

All customers begin with a private homepage exhibiting AI-recommended duties, current exercise, pinned gadgets and a bundle of entry factors to different platform areas. The homepage additionally contains your Areas, which is a gaggle of icons exhibiting workspaces devoted to totally different groups. Because the mission kicks off and fellow group members be part of Wrike, the left-hand facet will present updates from teammates managing duties.

As seen under, I belong to 2 Areas: Private and Undertaking Administration. These areas provide a view into folder and mission information devoted to my private duties and the mission administration group duties. The Current and Pinned sections in addition to different choices within the right-hand sidebar present totally different helpful filtered views of the work in these initiatives.

Determine C

Homepage buttons

On the right-hand facet, customers will see 12 listed gadgets cut up into three sections. Wrike permits customers to cover buttons within the center part, which is sweet as there’s a studying curve for brand spanking new customers.

Core buttons (Unhideable)

The unhideable buttons are the highest and backside three on the homepage. These are central to the consumer’s private workloads, created gadgets and storage.

• My to-do: A listing of duties belonging to the consumer and filter to go looking.
• Created by me: All duties created by the consumer.
• Starred duties: Duties designated by the consumer(s) as excessive precedence.
• Shared with me: All duties shared with the consumer.
• Blueprints: All designated blueprints accessible to the consumer.
• Recycle bin: Deleted gadgets with possibility to revive or empty recycle bin gadgets.

Hideable buttons

The center buttons are hideable and might be helpful to seasoned customers for fast entry to Wrike’s instruments for enhanced observability, evaluation and mission administration capabilities.

• Calendars: Create a calendar to view mission duties over a calendar grid.
• Timesheets: Create and observe time dedicated to the mission by way of a timesheet.
• Dashboards: Entry a private dashboard or create one with customized widgets.
• Studies: Create a report of mission information by duties, standing, time spent, and so forth.
• Workload: Create a workload chart for optimizing group member work capability.
• Stream: View the worldwide stream of updates shared with the account consumer.

Determine D

Banner buttons

On the prime of the homepage and all through the Wrike platform, customers have entry to a handful of buttons on the left and proper sides.

Prime left buttons

• Menu
• Inbox: fast hyperlink to the consumer’s messages
• My House: fast hyperlink to the homepage

Prime proper buttons

• Search: seek for duties all through the consumer’s initiatives
• Create: create a brand new job
• Extra: entry to apps
• Assistant: hyperlink to assist documentation
• Your profile: fast hyperlink to the consumer’s profile

Determine E

Creating initiatives

To create a mission, click on the plus signal within the banner and select New Undertaking or Folder. From there, give your mission a reputation, select whether or not you need to make a mission with trackable belongings or a folder that organizes a set of duties. For a mission, you’ll need to set a begin and finish date, assign a mission proprietor and select the default approach you’d like to visualise your duties. Lastly, select the sharing settings that may apply to the mission.

Determine F

Templates

Customers have entry to pre-built templates by group function together with Agile, inventive, IT, operations {and professional} companies. Examples from the Wrike Templates web page embody:

Agile and IT templates

• Agile teamwork
• Change management course of
• IT threat evaluation; IT service administration
• Kanban mission
• Undertaking administration workplace
• Know-how roadmap
• Web site mission plan

Different notable templates

• Enterprise continuity; enterprise course of administration
• Content material operations; inventive asset administration
• Skilled companies administration; companies scoping and initiation
• Quarterly enterprise assessment
• Ticketing and assist desk

Dashboards

Dashboards assist groups visualize the standing and progress of their work by making use of filters and reworking the duty information into charts, graphs and different visualizations for evaluation.

Widgets

Widgets in Wrike are prebuilt visualizations you may add on to a dashboard. Select the widget and customise the info it transforms into insights.

Examples of widgets embody:

Determine G

Studies

When a consumer opens or refreshes a report, the report updates with the latest modifications and exhibits the present standing of the mission. Studies could be constructed for all initiatives or inside a Area. The reporting will present the lively duties, however when you’ve got a big group or one which’s quickly working by means of duties, chances are you’ll need to refresh the report typically to get a greater understanding of the present workload.

Workloads

Accessible from the consumer homepage, Workload view is one other handy method to view how duties break down between group members, work effort anticipated for duties and progress. Just like the Gantt view, Workload charts provide a timescale view of duties.

For our mission, the Workload chart (Determine H) exhibits the mission at month-view with one registered group member proudly owning all duties. As group members be part of Wrike, they may seem beneath the mission supervisor and, in flip, be assigned duties — due to this fact, splitting up the work by assignee.

Determine H

Although the screenshot doesn’t seize Workload view’s potential, the demo tour provided a transparent view of how managers may allocate duties primarily based on assets and obtainable effort of group members.

By double-clicking on a job, a small in-chart window opens (Determine I) displaying the duty’s length, standing and the choice to allow Effort — the entire variety of hours anticipated to finish a job.

Determine I

To see a job’s particulars up shut, I modified the Workload chart to view by days, and chosen the Group onboarding job in Dash 2. This job already was set for 4 days upon opening so I enabled Effort and set the entire effort to eight hours. Wrike automates the mathematics to point out the time spent per job, per day and per particular person.

As soon as all group members and efforts for mission duties are set, managers can consider how the group distributes effort and make changes to ease particular person or group workloads with out sacrificing mission momentum. For directors, the Workload view is a superb device for visualizing group member bandwidth, and a group’s flexibility to tackle new or sudden mission duties. The Effort device is restricted to allocating hours moderately than different customary Scrum items like factors, which can imply that some groups would wish to reconfigure their items of labor to suit Wrike’s setup.

Import current mission information

Keep away from the trouble of manually inputting all your mission information by importing an current Microsoft Excel or Initiatives file. Wrike additionally requires that consumer information meet information enter necessities and formatting earlier than a profitable import into an current platform folder.

Relative to different mission administration instruments, this course of was tedious and time consuming as I needed to add my Excel spreadsheet a half-dozen occasions earlier than assembly the necessities of the Wrike template.

Working from a Mac gadget with mission information saved in a Google Sheets file for our ongoing prime PM instruments collection added to this issue. Each add try was met with a unique error requiring I am going again into the Sheets file, edit the spreadsheet, obtain as an Excel file and check out once more. Wrike’s template was useful in rearranging columns to suit add parameters, however errors continued.

Sadly, with a view to get the add to work, I needed to take away current information relating to job standing earlier than submission, Wrike refused to acknowledge Assignees that didn’t exist within the platform, and extra columns throughout the spreadsheet didn’t make the lower. With out extra teammates, all assignments are owned by me till I onboard new teammates to Wrike.

Determine J

When transitioning to a brand new PM device, being able to import current information is important to lowering pointless work and protecting the mission shifting. What adopted was two steps to replace Wrike information to replicate actuality.

1. Replace job place to point out the connection between guardian duties and subtasks. With the unique PM template in thoughts, I used to be in a position to drag-and-drop subtasks inside their corresponding dash (seen in Determine Ok as indented).
2. Replace job standing by choosing from an inventory of: New, In Course of, Accomplished, On Maintain and Canceled. I used to be in a position to drag and drop “New” for many duties as they’re set for future sprints, which saved me time and clicks.

View mission information in another way

For imported initiatives, the preset views are Desk and Listing. Customers have the choice so as to add views for Board, Gantt Chart, Assets, Recordsdata, Stream, Timelog and Analytics.

Desk view

The Desk view is most just like conventional spreadsheets for groups transitioning from legacy instruments, providing a traditional row and column strategy to creating and managing mission information.

After taking steps described within the earlier part, Determine Ok exhibits the imported and adjusted mission information specifying the duties for every dash, assignee, job standing, begin and finish dates, and job length throughout the Desk view.

Determine Ok

To vary job information within the Desk view, customers can double-click column values aligned with a job. Equally, customers can view and alter all of a job’s information by hovering over the duty and opening an in-browser window or new tab detailing the chosen job.

Determine L is the expanded take a look at Dash 2: Inception in a brand new tab exhibiting the dash’s job, description and house for communication between stakeholders.

Determine L

In between the highest row and the duties, customers have entry to a handful of fast entry buttons:

• Period: Change begin and finish dates to point out anticipated length.
• Approvals: Create new approvals with superior settings for assigning duties.
• Time Entries: Quantify time spent on initiatives with a built-in timer for stakeholders.
• Subtacks: View current subtasks or create a brand new merchandise.
• Connect Recordsdata: Connect information out of your PC, Google Drive, Dropbox, Field, OneDrive, SharePoint, or hyperlinks to YouTube and different web sites.
• Add Dependency: Create dependencies by choosing predecessor and successor duties.
• Share: Share the duty with others by e mail or Wrike identify to collaborate.

Collectively, group members can view, edit and optimize the workflow to finish a job with project-related attachments, ongoing communication and supervisor proofing.

Column configurations

Wrike gives various built-in column sorts to make use of in organizing mission information or the choice to create a brand new discipline primarily based on frequent enter circumstances. Along with values beforehand listed (title, assignee, standing, dates and length), different column choices embody:

• Undertaking supervisor approval and accomplished date
• Anticipated time and effort spent
• Proportion full or progress
• Predecessors (dependencies)
• Job metadata (writer, job ID)
• Job significance by low, medium, or excessive precedence

Exterior of the above, customers can create new fields with a customized column identify for information together with textual content, numbers, percentages, dates, checkboxes, a number of alternatives and formulation.

After the final column within the Desk view (far prime proper of spreadsheet), customers can add a column by means of the plus signal (+) button. When chosen, customers can shortly decide one of many pre-built column sorts or create a brand new one.

On this mission, I created a brand new column for the price of duties requiring a third-party contractor in USD. Determine M exhibits the create-your-own-column choices for foreign money embody selecting a nationwide or mission foreign money, default aggregation (sum or common), variety of decimal locations and whether or not to incorporate a 1000’s separator.

Determine M

Rows: Job placement, sharing and deletion

Customers have two choices for partaking with rows:

1. maintain and drag rows vertically
2. double click on a row for added choices

The drag-and-drop function is handy for shifting duties inside applicable sprints, however gives little extra use.

By double-clicking a row, Wrike opens an in-table menu (Determine N) the place customers can:

• Change the duty standing.
• Open the duty’s particulars in a separate tab, or copy the permalink to this tab.
• Add a sub-item beneath a guardian job.
• Delete the row and job information.

Determine N

Listing view: Minimize out the noise

All customers begin with entry to mission information by means of an inventory of all duties and subtasks. The Listing view permits customers to open duties, mass edit duties by situation, and drag-and-drop duties as wanted.

Customers can filter this view of duties to see a whole folder or mission. For filtering, customers have the choice of seeing all duties, lively duties, private duties, or extra filters primarily based on column header values like assignee, job kind and deadline. Fast entry choices for seeing record information embody by Precedence (as seen under), Date values, Standing, Significance and Title.

With an imported model of our PM template, the Listing view (Determine O) began with all sprints collapsed. As seen under, I expanded the primary three sprints and (just like the Desk instance) chosen “Dash 2: Inception”. This opens a platform window on the precise facet protecting job particulars and metadata.

Determine O

At first look, an inventory with just a few values (job identify, date and standing) may not be interesting. Nonetheless, for these trying to keep away from the litter of conventional spreadsheets and even Desk view, Listing view gives a less complicated perspective for seeing and interacting with duties.

Gantt view: Duties over time

With Gantt view, prospects have entry to a timescaled perspective of mission duties, their length and dependencies.

Determine P

Board view: Drag-and-drop playing cards

The Board view gives customers a Kanban board with lanes dividing duties primarily based on a situation like progress standing. This view is greatest suited to drag-and-drop performance as group members can drag duties vertically inside lanes to point out job precedence, or horizontally between lanes to indicate job progress.

The Board view in exhibits New, In Progress and Accomplished duties, in addition to job information on every card has the duty identify, assignee and deadline.

Deploy request kinds for amassing information

Request kinds assist streamline the consumption and group of group information by translating a request on to a group, mission, or folder. These kinds are customizable and obtainable to share with all the firm and outdoors stakeholders.

How a lot is Wrike?

Wrike is out there in 5 core plans and two plans designed particularly for advertising and inventive groups and repair supply groups.

There are additionally three kinds of consumer licenses for normal customers, exterior customers and collaborators. All plans provide full license customers (common and exterior customers) 20 invitations for collaborators or 15% of the licensed variety of customers beneath a marketing strategy. Collaborators can entry restricted options beneath a visitor license.

Wrike pricing & plans

Free: $0 per consumer per 30 days

• Multi-language assist
• Wrike for Home windows, Mac, iOS and Android gadgets and purposes
• Folder hierarchy, job and subtask administration, account-wide work schedule
• E-mail integration and notifications
• Customized work views together with desk view and kanban
• Work intelligence together with AI beneficial duties, sensible search, VoIP and OCR
• Use case mission templates
• Integrations with open RESTful API and cloud storage platform

Skilled: $9.80 per consumer per 30 days

• Space for storing of 2GB per consumer
• Dynamic Gantt chart
• Pre-built dashboards and widgets
• Add collaborators for an asset
• Productiveness apps and instruments

Skilled is a bounce up from Enterprise however pales compared to premium plans. A lot of what comes with Skilled is already obtainable within the free version.

Enterprise: $24.80 per consumer per 30 days

• Space for storing of 5GB per consumer
• Branded workspace
• Private and account-wide work schedules
• Customized fields, workflows and statuses
• Undertaking portfolio administration
• Actual-time experiences and calendars
• AI mission threat prediction
• Customized templates and blueprints
• Customized and dynamic request kinds
• Superior workflow automation
• Job and mission approval
• Customized approval flows
• Automation engine with as much as 200 actions per consumer per 30 days
• Useful resource administration together with workload charts, time and effort monitoring
• Visitor approvals, file proofing and extension for Adobe Artistic Cloud

The variety of options will increase sharply from Skilled to the Marketing strategy, including capabilities in nearly each class and a stack of useful resource administration instruments.

Enterprise: Quote

• Space for storing of 10GB per consumer
• Enterprise intelligence API and Tableau integration
• Automation engine with as much as 1,000 actions per consumer per 30 days
• SAML 2.0 single-sign on, two-factor authentication and allowlist IP
• Superior consumer entry controls, password coverage settings and consumer audit experiences

The Enterprise plan is just like Enterprise and provides useful administrative and safety controls.

Pinnacle: Quote

• Space for storing of 15GB per consumer
• Superior analytics and information visualizations
• Automation engine with as much as 1,500 actions per consumer per 30 days
• Superior useful resource and capability planning together with job roles and budgeting
• Superior proofing in HTML5 and Sharepoint
• Digital asset administration integration
• Locked areas

The Pinnacle plan is designed for firms that combine Wrike into each a part of the corporate’s work or want extra in depth analytics and automations to drive extra environment friendly work.

Add-on options

Buying extra options is simply obtainable to Enterprise, Enterprise and Pinnacle prospects, with 4 capabilities to select from.

Wrike Combine

With Wrike Combine, shoppers can add customized automations and combine important software program from an inventory of over 400 connectors. These purposes embody cloud and on-premises enterprise software program protecting productiveness, gross sales, analytics, collaboration, AI modeling and developer apps.

Wrike Two-Manner Sync

Past customary integrations, Wrike Two-Manner Sync gives technical groups a totally synchronized expertise between Wrike workflows and apps protecting a spectrum of wants. Choices embody:

Wrike Lock

The corporate’s cloud information safety answer is Wrike Lock, providing an additional layer of encryption, request administration, and encryption key administration for customer-managed information and third-party companies. Saved by way of the AWS Key Administration Service, directors can use a grasp encryption key and particular person keys to guard account information.

Determine Q

Wrike Advertising and marketing Insights

Supreme for advertising groups and corporations, Wrike Advertising and marketing Insights gives prospects the wanted marketing campaign administration options and data-centric integrations to maximise a advertising price range. Purchasers can import information from greater than 50 purposes for information administration, enterprise intelligence and digital advertising, together with automation instruments for common social media platforms.

Determine R

Just like different prime enterprise software program, Wrike’s interoperability can eradicate information silos, consolidate such information in an user-friendly interface, and conduct ongoing evaluation for the group and marketing campaign’s profit.

Wrike enterprise evaluation

Wrike use instances and viewers

In 2022, Wrike’s consumer base contains over 20,000 firms and a couple of.3 million customers in 140 international locations. For this myriad of potential customers and corporations, Wrike specifies options for 33 use instances and 15 kinds of groups or organizations, together with:

Use instances

• Agile mission administration
• Bug monitoring
• Enterprise continuity
• Marketing campaign administration
• Capability planning
• Consumer administration
• Occasion administration
• Portfolio administration
• Product roadmap
• Dash planning
• Useful resource administration
• Working from wherever

Roles and groups

• Agile builders and IT service managers
• Firm-wide and enterprise ops groups
• Artistic and digital advertising groups
• Product administration groups
• Undertaking administration for consulting, design and engineering groups
• Skilled companies and program administration groups

Wrike integrations

Via the Wrike Combine add-on, shoppers have entry to greater than 400 purposes to combine information from databases and cloud or on-premises apps. Along with apps featured beneath the “Two-Manner Sync” part, different common enterprise and enterprise apps embody:

• AI: Amazon Lex, Google API.ai, Watson Tone Analyzer and Workbot.
• Collaboration: Cisco, Confluence and GotoWebinar.
• Buyer Relations: Freshdesk, Oracle, Zendesk and Zoho CRM.
• Developer: AWS, Anaplan, Jenkins, MySQL, PagerDuty, PostgreSQL and Snowflake.
• Finance: Contemporary Books, NetSuite, QuickBooks, SAP, Shopify and WooCommerce.
• HR: ADP, BambooHR, Expensify, Specifically, Workday and Zenefits.
• IT: LDAP, New Relic, ServiceNow and Splunk.
• Advertising and marketing: Apttus, Fb, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, Marketo and Twitter.
• PM: Airtable, Asana, Basecamp, Smartsheet and Trello.

Assist Middle and studying alternatives

Via the Wrike Assist Middle, potential customers and shoppers can entry interactive coaching, video demos, launch notes and the client neighborhood boards. Overarching subjects with a bundle of articles embody getting began, studying the platform, speaking with collaborators and dealing securely.

For studying content material, the Wrike Training Guides covers pertinent subjects like go-to-market, agile software program improvement, Scrum, distant work, skilled companies and digital advertising.

Wrike Uncover: Practice totally free or get licensed

On the Wrike Uncover homepage, groups can discover studying plans, observe progress and enroll new staff into conveniently-timed programs. For directors onboarding a company or massive group, the Wrike Uncover Group Supervisor is the designated function for managing course and coaching registration.

For mission managers and directors trying to increase their abilities, Wrike’s academic alternatives embody free coaching and 4 fee-based certifications. candidates can select from Bronze or Silver editions of certifications in Product Mastery or Report Mastery.

All certifications come within the type of a web based course with hands-on workout routines, assignments and a remaining evaluation. Although the better and cheaper certifications provide a foundational understanding of platform options, there aren’t any formal conditions. Quick learners can bounce straight to RM Silver and skip decrease certifications if desired.

Wrike certifications, time dedication and value

• PM Bronze: For contributors studying core functionalities and managing duties.
• PM Silver: For mission managers requiring coaching, workout routines and assessments.
• RM Bronze: For acquainted customers studying to construction, observe and report mission information.
• RM Silver: For acquainted customers utilizing Wrike Analyze to construct boards.

Determine S

Wrike skilled companies

The Wrike Skilled Companies connects firms with consulting options for platform onboarding, designing and optimizing.

The Wrike Deployment Information covers the handful of levels skilled companies consultants do to assist firms absolutely deploy the Wrike answer. Phases for deployment embody initiation, change administration, discovery, configuration, go-live and closeout. Particular examples of PSC companies embody workspace transformation, integration companies, customized coaching and engagements and analytics.

Wrike associate program

Companies curious about partnering with Wrike be part of an intensive international ecosystem of resellers, distributors, consulting corporations, international system integrators and unbiased software program distributors. The Wrike Companion Program permits firms to generate new options and alternatives for shoppers by means of the mission administration platform’s capabilities.

Featured Wrike companions embody firms like Adobe, AWS, Dropbox, Google, Ingram Micro, Microsoft, Slack and Zoom. Apply now as a expertise or channel associate.

Wrike buyer assist

Buyer assist is out there for greater than 15 languages and in 20 currencies. Customary assist choices come included in every paid plan, and Premium and Premium Plus plans can be found by way of quote.

The quantity and availability of assist varies primarily based on plan. The freemium plan, for instance, can entry assist by way of an internet type 24 hours a day and 5 days per week with no minimal response time. In distinction, the Premium and Premium Plus Help plans have a response time of 1 hour for all 4 contact channels: internet type, assist middle chat, cellphone and workspace chat.

Sustaining information privateness

Wrike’s dedication to information privateness contains a number of third-party certifications to make sure compliance with GDPR, CCPA and different mandates. These certifications embody SOC2 Sort II, CSA STAR, and ISO 27001 (2013) and 27018 (2019).

Execs & cons of Wrike

Wrike benefits and advantages

• Intensive variety of mission administration options and capabilities
• Simple to zoom out and in between duties, initiatives and groups throughout the platform
• Energy in safety requirements

Wrike disadvantages

• Import course of requires assembly actual perimeters for column names and discipline inputs and is simply interoperable with Microsoft Excel and Initiatives.
• Could also be overwhelming for brand spanking new customers who must get used to the variety of buttons, pages and options

Conclusion

• Enterprise-ready mission administration software program chief
• Strong options by means of a user-friendly interface and in depth documentation
• Vary of plans and add-ons provide choices for basic and area of interest groups

Wrike is a basic mission administration platform talking to groups of various sizes and mission sorts. Although it gives lots for software program improvement and IT service groups, organizations throughout industries can simply as simply profit from incorporating Wrike into enterprise course of administration.

Whereas the educational curve is intimidating, Wrike proved to be a featured-packed answer that may do as little or a lot as a group needs. For small groups, the free plan gives lots however bigger groups will acknowledge the worth of Wrike’s premium options for information integration, safety, advertising and productiveness.

Further protection on Wrike