What is Wrike?

The Wrike project management tool is a full-scale solution for automated workflow planning, data visualization, resource allocation, and more. It’s available as both a mobile and desktop app, accommodating both local and remote team members, and it’s a highly useful collaboration tool for both large and small teams.

Considering all of the functionality included in the Wrike app, it’s easily a top contender for the title of best project management software. Although there are some great Wrike alternatives available on the market today, few of them offer the combination of features, customer service, and affordability we found in Wrike.

Read Our Complete Wrike Review.

What Does Wrike Do?

Designed to be a comprehensive system to fulfill all of your project planning and management needs, Wrike encompasses all of the standard features you’d expect from modern project management software.

This includes general project management, workflow automation, resource allocation, and collaboration. Additional tools, like informative dashboards and customizable elements, help you make the most of your Wrike experience.

Project management dashboards

Wrike’s built-in dashboards make it easy to track project progress, automatically prioritize tasks, and ensure visibility across your entire organization. Not only do they provide access to real-time data, but they’re easily customizable to track nearly any metric you need.

Additional features of Wrike’s project management dashboards include:

• Wrike Insights: With the ability to import data from 50+ third-party marketing solutions, your team won’t have to switch apps to access their data.
• Workload View: Organize and optimize schedules for individual team members, or create a master schedule for your entire project with Wrike’s Workload view.

Dashboards are a standard feature in modern project management software, but Wrike’s project management dashboards are organized, intuitive, and customizable to meet the needs of your business plan.

Project and workflow automation

Repetitive and recurring tasks can cause productivity to come to a standstill. Instead of facing potential delays and missed deadlines, use Wrike to automate the task management process, and let your team focus on their most important responsibilities.

Wrike’s Automation Engine supports rules, triggers, and actions to automate the most redundant activities. Custom reminders and notifications can also be triggered to give you a heads-up about potential obstacles and productivity blockers.

Depending on the size, scope, and scale of your project, Wrike’s project and work management platform can save your team hundreds of hours in lost productivity.

Resource and project planning

The Wrike project management tool features a built-in resource management platform that allows you to prioritize tasks, track progress, and optimize individual performance.

The development team with Wrike supplements this with a variety of premade templates that let you start maximizing your resources right away. Premade, customizable templates include:

• Product Roadmap: Outline project deliverables, monitor productivity, and complete all of your task management responsibilities. For better results, view your roadmap as a Gannt chart to track progress over the course of time.
• Objectives and Key Results: Disseminate project plans to clarify milestones and ensure the alignment of individual tasks and project goals.
• Communication Plan: Establish project owners, delegate responsibilities, and strengthen communications with team members and key stakeholders.
• Incoming Projects: Ensure your upcoming projects and tasks are covered and manage incoming requests directly from Wrike’s dashboards.
• Complex Projects: Manage complex projects by dividing the work into smaller, simpler tasks that are easily assigned to team members and tracked by managers.
• Kanban: Create your own kanban boards to optimize your workflow and increase efficiency on behalf of the entire team.

The advanced resource management platform included with Wrike helps you with task management, staying within your projected budget, and accelerating team performance.

Collaborative proofing

Use Wrike’s online proofing platform to monitor the creative process and ensure all marketing collateral aligns with your organizational vision and brand standards. Not only can you automate the approval process, but you can manually compare different file versions side-by-side, making it easy to spot mistakes and recommend changes.

External collaborators and reviewers can be invited to a project to share their feedback, too. This is a great feature if you lack expertise in a certain area or if you’re just unsure about the look and feel of a particular logo, image, or document.

Requests and approvals

Standardize the request process and customize request forms to make sure you’re receiving all the necessary information at once. Not only does this make it easy to approve or deny requests, but it also lets you anticipate the resources needed for the new project or campaign. To automate the process, Wrike’s dynamic request forms can create tasks and projects to streamline the project planning process.

Wrike’s built-in approval software is great for project managers who find it difficult to track requests or issue approvals in a timely manner. Use automated alerts to notify you as soon as a request is made, and keep track of approvals for long-term recordkeeping purposes.

Cross-tagging

It can be tough to maintain visibility when you’re juggling multiple projects or campaigns. With Wrike’s cross-tagging feature, you can use tags to earmark any task, subtask, folder, milestone, phase, or project for your team.

This lets you assign identical tasks to multiple workflows without having to duplicate the task over and over again. Moreover, each task can still be uniquely tracked as needed.

Wrike’s cross-tagging functionality offers several benefits, including:

• Streamlining and optimizing asset management.
• Strengthening team collaboration and connectivity.
• Increasing visibility across your entire organization.

Elements tagged within Wrike automatically appear in weekly reports, so you can easily access the tasks, subtasks, and projects that pertain specifically to you.

Customizability

The Wrike project and work management platform is also highly customizable. Project dashboards can be customized to display the exact data you need, automated processes can be customized with timely alerts and notifications, and Wrike’s resource management templates are fully customizable to meet your project needs.

Custom item types can also be created to accommodate the business plans and processes you already use on a day-to-day basis. Instead of changing the way you do business, you can easily customize Wrike to work for you.

Integrations

While Wrike is designed to eliminate the need for separate planning, tracking, calendaring, and collaboration applications, at some point in any project’s career, ypu’ll need to work with systems outside your team’s Wrike instance. Wrike’s got you covered, with more than 400 apps it can integrate with, including Salesforce, Slack, GitHub, Tableau, and hundreds more.

Read All About 10 Top Wrike Integrations to Keep Your Team Connected.

How Does Wrike Make Project Management Easier?

Wrike simplifies the typical project management process in numerous ways. Novice project managers can benefit immensely from the brand’s free online learning portal, Wrike Discover, and experienced project managers can still learn a thing or two from the extensive Wrike community.

Those who still have issues with the Wrike platform can access the dedicated support hub for assistance, while Wrike’s other professional services can transform your entire organization.

Training

According to Wrike’s own research, employees experience a 102% increase in Wrike productivity when they attend at least one Wrike Discovery course as part of their initial onboarding and orientation. When you consider that most courses can be completed in a matter of minutes, it’s well worth the extra time and effort.

Wrike has courses designed for beginners, individuals, project leaders, and experienced admins, so you’re sure to find a training program that’s right for you and your team members.

Online help center

Wrike’s online help center is a one-stop shop for access to its training courses, informational videos, product release notes, and the community-at-large. A comprehensive list of common best practices helps you make the most of your time with Wrike project management software, and you can join live monthly webinars from the help center, too.

Those who need technical support will find an intuitive and easy-to-use knowledge base. It covers everything from getting started to advanced project management strategies, and it even provides tips and tricks that help you enhance your Wrike experience by bolstering collaboration and driving productivity.

Premium customer support

Wrike’s project and work management tool offers a basic support package as part of its free plan, but there is a premium customer support service available for the various paid subscription packages. Depending on your subscription, some features may include:

• Dedicated customer support available via telephone, web form, or online chat.
• 24/7 availability with a guaranteed response time of one hour.
• Designated support agent.

In addition to its premium customer support, the development team with the Wrike app works quickly to patch any new bugs found within its software, thus minimizing issues and improving the Wrike platform for everyone.

Community engagement

Before heading to customer support, you might find the help you need within Wrike’s online community. Wrike’s website features an online message board where you can read posts from others, ask your own questions, or even provide your own solutions to the questions of Wrike users. You’ll also find a handy list of popular community topics that make it easy to navigate the message board and find exactly what you’re looking for.

Additional professional services

Wrike isn’t just a full-scale project and work management platform. It offers a plethora of additional services and solutions, known internally as facilitated services, that can help you make the most of your time with Wrike.

With professional services focused on change management, data migration, workspace renovation, process optimization, custom analytics, and business plan consultation, Wrike can help your company succeed in many different areas.

Is Wrike Hard to Use?

Between online tutorials, training courses, and a highly intuitive interface, Wrike is easy to use for novices and experienced professionals alike. If that’s not enough, Wrike integrates with more than 400 different third-party apps and professional services, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Project, Adobe Creative Cloud, Gmail, Salesforce, and many others.

Wrike also provides access to its application programming interface (API), so development teams can ensure compatibility between Wrike and their own software. Full instructions for registering and integrating your app can be found on its website.

Get Hands-On Experience with Wrike

Like many project management software solutions, Wrike has invested considerable resources in making it easy and intuitive to get Wrike set up and running for teams of every size. But first-hand experience will be the real deciding factor in deciding if Wrike is right for your team. After reading our Wrike review, it’s time to get started with a free trial.

Learn More About Wrike

If you want to learn more about Wrike project management software, or if you’re still trying to decide if Wrike is the best project management software for your day-to-day project needs, feel free to continue your research with these Wrike reviews and Wrike resources.

• How to Use Wrike for PPM (Project Portfolio Management)
• Wrike Dashboards – Improved For Greater Visibility
• Wrike Software Update: Marketing Team Solution Tools
• Wrike Time Tracking
• Wrike – The Amazing Patent-Pending Intelligent Email Engine
• Wrike Launches New Real-Time Reports, other Enhancements
• Wrike Introduces Dynamic Platform Release
• Wrike Reports – Providing Instant Visibility and Insight

Trending Project Management Software

We find Wrike to be a robust and very capable project management system that will meet the requirements of small, medium, and enterprise-sized businesses. If you’re looking for other options, consider the following: