Wrike Product Review

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Wrike LogoWrike is one of my personal favorite SaaS PPM tools. You get a lot for your money. While priced for medium size organizations, Wrike contains many enterprise level features, like gantt charting and resource management. It also has a very clean, easy to use, and modern user experiences – lots of drag-and-drop, split screens, an interactive views.

Wrike has a few different ways to view and work with schedule and tasks. The simplest is a split screen with tasks on the left and details on the right – easy to pick a task and make quick changes. An expandable work breakdown view gives a better picture of task relationships. There is also an interactive gantt chart view which shows everything across a timeline.

Resource management is critical to larger teams or multiple concurrent projects. Wrike’s workload view displays resources and assigned tasks across a timeline. It highlights over-allocated resources, and shows unassigned tasks. You can easily balance workload by dragging tasks to other resources or to the unassigned bucket. Reversely, unassigned tasks can be dragged to a resource with available time. Tasks can be added, deleted, or updated from the workload view.

Wrike also contains several ‘standard issue’ features, like customizable dashboards, document management, comments, email notifications, search, filtering, and time tracking. A stream view shows things that are new and relevant to the current user (i.e. new tasks, activity, comments). Team members can share quick status posts, similar to Facebook or LinkedIn, which will display in the stream for other users. You can also mention people, tasks, and projects in posts and comments using hash tags, similar to Twitter. For remote users, Wrike has a native mobile application for viewing and updating tasks.

Wrike takes a unique approach to organizing projects and tasks. Tasks can be associated with multiple projects, and can be moved between projects. Similarly, projects are nested within a customizable folder hierarchy, and can be placed in multiple folders. For example, you could create a folder for each manager and folders for strategic initiatives, and put a project into both the manager and initiative folders. Similarly, the same “build dev. environment” task could be referenced in several projects.

At Aprelion, we use Wrike to manage some of our internal projects and initiatives. It is very intuitive and easy to use, while capable of handling larger teams and complex projects.

WrikePros

  • User interface
  • Interactive gantt chart
  • Resource management
  • Mobile app

Cons

  • Unable to estimate effort

Pricing

  • Free up to 5 users
  • $10/user/month
  • Unlimited collaborators

For more information, visit Wrike.com.

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