Wrike Review: What Can the Project Management Tool Do?

Teamwork in the 21st Century is digital, global, and interconnected. How productive we are in this modern work environment increasingly depends on the software tools we use. That's why project management platforms like Wrike have become indispensable for many teams.

We put Wrike to the test — read on to find out how it measures up against other project management platforms.

Wrike* is project management software from San José, California. First released in 2007, the platform is used by more than 20,000 businesses worldwide, ranging from multinational corporations like Siemens and Sony to small firms and agencies.

The software promises to help teams of any size, branch, or background to collaborate more effectively and complete projects more efficiently.

We've heard all that before — namely from nearly every project management solution out there. Can Wrike deliver?

First, you'll need to create a Wrike account, which can be set up in just a few minutes. New users who want to test the platform's premium features can use a 14-day free trial without having to enter any payment details.

During registration, you'll need to provide some information about yourself and your company. At this stage, you can also set up your team and an initial project with tasks and views. Additionally, you'll have the opportunity to invite your team members via email.

After registration, you are taken directly to the project view of your newly created project. On the right, you'll notice a brief tutorial that explains Wrike's most important features and basic concepts.

But the interface requires little explanation anyway, as Wrike is quite straightforward. The project view is primarily divided into four sections:

Wrike's organizational hierarchy is also fairly straightforward. You'll use three elements to arrange your work: Spaces, Projects, and Tasks.

To start a new project, simply click “+ Project” in the sidebar of the appropriate space and enter a name. Then, you can populate the project with tasks.

In the project area, you can use the top bar to select different views to explore the project from various perspectives. The available views include:

Wrike covers all the essential views, but it's not as versatile as some of the other platforms we've reviewed. For example, ClickUp also offers dedicated views for milestones and workloads, as well as a map view with a geographical dimension.

Wrike also offers a smartphone app (which unfortunately does not allow screenshots). The, which provides you with access to your inbox, spaces, projects, and the most important task features, but not always intuitive.

For example, in the board view, tasks are not grouped by project phases as they are on the web browser. Other views, such as the calendar view — which would be handy on smartphones — are not supported at all. Additionally, we've experienced some synchronization issues.

As it stands, we would recommend using the app mainly for quick on-the-go checks, since the browser experience is much smoother and more convenient.

No one can accuse Wrike of being complicated: the interface is sleek and modern, the organization of projects is almost self-explanatory, and navigating between functions and areas is quick and straightforward.

It's unfortunate that this ease of use doesn't fully translate to the smartphone app — and a wider selection of views wouldn't hurt either.

Every specific step you need to take as part of a project should be created as a task (or subtask) in the Wrike dashboard. You can then further configure each task and break it down into sub-elements.

You can add tasks directly within any view in the project area or from anywhere in the interface by clicking the plus icon at the top right and then selecting “Task”.

Once a task is created, it can be edited in various ways. In the table view, you can adjust attributes by entering data in the table fields. You decide which fields are displayed by clicking the plus icon at the top right of the table.

You can also click on a task to open a more detailed view. Here, you'll see all fields of the selected task at a glance — from project status, project manager, start and end dates, to project description, budget, attachments, and any subtasks or dependencies (more on this below).

You'll also find a comments section that you can use to discuss the task with your team members.

If you want to add a property to your project that isn't covered by predefined fields, you can create custom fields. These are available in the field selection of the Table view.

Here, you need to name your custom field, choose a field type, and then describe its functionality and content depending on the field type. If you use the “Multiple Choice” field type, for example, you can set the response options and assign a color to each option.

Overall, Wrike supports the most important field types, including a nifty formula field that can automatically calculate table data. Still, the selection isn't as big as with competitors like Airtable or monday.com:

For larger projects involving many tasks, multiple stakeholders, or specific workflows, it might be helpful to further divide tasks or relate them to other tasks and certain project milestones. All of this is possible with Wrike.

Subtasks in Wrike are called Subitems. You can create them on the task details page, where they are displayed as to-do checkboxes, allowing you to tick off each step as it is completed.

Like regular tasks, subtasks are organized with all available fields and can be further divided into sub-subtasks. In the Table view, tasks can also be dragged and dropped onto another task to make them subtasks.

In the Task view, you can also define dependencies between various tasks of your project. There are four types of dependencies:

Tasks dependent upon another task will be noted as either “Predecessor” or “Successor” in the detailed view.

For a better overview of all dependencies within your project, open the Gantt Chart view, where they are visualized with arrows. Here, you can also create dependencies by drawing a line from one task to the beginning or end of another task.

Milestones are another way to monitor project progress. They are key events within a project—such as the publication of an article or the initial release of a new feature. Any task can be converted into a milestone (and vice versa) through the three-dot menu at the top right.

Wrike offers a solid suite of task management features, allowing users to plan, arrange, and monitor tasks and workflows in great detail. What's missing is a way to track overarching goals, a feature we appreciate in competitors like ClickUp or Asana, where you can specify objectives for particular areas, such as achieving a certain number of articles per quarter.

Wrike offers solid customization options for tasks, which should meet the needs of most projects. It could use more custom fields, especially compared to table-based tools like Airtable or Smartsheet, and lacks a few features like overarching team and project goals, but overall, Wrike covers the essential task management bases well.

Wrike's primary target audience are teams. To start distributing tasks and coordinating workflows, you first need to add your team members to your Space. There are several ways to do this: You can click the “Invite” button at the bottom right of the dashboard, use the “Share” button at the top right of the project view, or access the user management under Settings > Users.

Here, you can invite contributors via email, choosing from several types of users:

Unfortunately, user and team permissions have quite a few paywalls, and the features are somewhat fragmented.

Only users from the Business tier upwards can create different user groups to quickly share data with certain users; custom access roles are available from the Enterprise tier.

In the more affordable Team tier, options are quite limited, and you can’t manage detailed access rights or group contributors into teams.

When it comes to digital collaboration, Wrike offers only basic features. You can assign tasks to one another and discuss tasks in comments, tagging team members.

Tagged users receive a notification (both as an email and in their inbox) and are added as task followers.

Wrike isn’t really designed for direct communication and real-time collaboration: it lacks dedicated chat and messaging features, and doesn’t offer advanced collaboration tools like document editing or whiteboards.

That said, higher subscription levels do offer some additional tools, like a Proofing feature to streamline the approval process for images, PDFs, videos, and other files. But if you're looking for an all-in-one project management/communication platform, Wrike might not be the best fit. You'll be better off with alternatives like Basecamp or ClickUp.

Wrike provides teams with a streamlined platform solely for project management—nothing more, nothing less. You can assign tasks to each other and chat via comments, but for everyday team communication, you'll need to use a different tool.

Depending on the plan you're on, Wrike offers many additional features we haven't covered yet:

All paid subscribers can create request forms. These forms allow you to collect data, both internally from your team members and externally from clients and other users.

You can create and manage these request forms with the form editor found in the Spaces settings. They can be personalized with custom fields.

You can then manually share the created forms with internal and external users via a link. Your team members will also find these forms in the Project view and can fill them out as work requests. Submitted requests are then stored as tasks in the respective project.

This feature is especially handy for standardizing the process for new requests — such as for new projects, proposals, or changes. Creating external forms is equally straightforward.

From the Team tier upwards, Wrike supports basic statistics with an Analytics view. You can visualize selected aspects of your projects and their progress with interactive charts based on real-time data, such as column, donut, or bar charts that you can filter by different fields.

Business subscribers get even more reporting features: they can create custom real-time reports and compile them into dashboards, for instance, to prepare data for different target audiences in presentations.

Wrike’s automations allow you to reduce manual work by setting fixed rules for recurring processes that then run automatically.

There's a range of preconfigured automation rules you can choose from — but of course, you can also build custom rules yourself. Each automation consists of two or three parts:

You can also specify whether automations should be applied across the entire Space or only in specific locations, and whether they apply to entire projects or just tasks.

Overall, Wrike's automation features are solid: there’s a sizable selection of predefined rules, but creating custom automations is also straightforward and versatile.

There are multiple ways to integrate Wrike into your existing software landscape — including classic app integrations, predefined connectors to specific applications, and an API.

We still haven't covered everything: in the higher tiers, Wrike supports several additional features — from time tracking and resource management (available from the Business plan), to budget planning (Pinnacle tier). A few AI features are included as well, but those aren't particularly impressive.

Overall, Wrike has a lot to offer beyond the basics — more than many other platforms we've reviewed:

Wrike is a feature-rich productivity platform that offers a lot more than just the standard project management tools. Of course, many advanced features are hidden behind paywalls, but that's to be expected.

Wrike's extensive help center is filled with a wealth of video tutorials, guides, and webinars.

If you're new to Wrike, you should start with the knowledge base. Organized into categories like “Getting Started” and “Collaborating and Communicating”, it includes step-by-step guides for all of Wrike's features. Articles feature plenty of screenshots, info boxes, and hyperlinks. There's also a blog and an active community forum.

Overall, the content in Wrike's help center is both plentiful and high-quality. One nitpick: sometimes, it could be more transparent which features are included in which plan.

You can contact Wrike support directly via support tickets. We received a satisfactory email response within a few hours. We were also contacted by a helpful Wrike staff member just a day after creating our account, who was able to answer a few pressing questions from a newbie right away.

Overall, our experience with Wrike support has been quite positive. Of course, having more communication options, like live chat, would be great.

Wrike offers five pricing tiers: Free, Team, Business, Enterprise, and Pinnacle.

You can view a summary of Wrike’s pricing tiers here:

How does Wrike compare to other project management platforms? It depends on the features you need. If you can manage within the limits of the Free plan, you might not need to pay anything. The Team tier is also relatively affordable.

For the following ranking, we've looked at the cheapest plan for each provider that supports ten users and unlimited projects:

Wrike provides small and large teams with a centralized hub for managing joint projects, tasks, and milestones. It's quick to set up, easy to navigate, and should be intuitive even for beginners. With various views, from tables to Gantt charts, you can manage and visualize your projects in lots of ways that best suit the needs of your team.

However, Wrike isn't quite as versatile as some of its competitors: the Table view is lacking in customizability, the selection of custom field types is limited, and collaboration features are kept to a minimum. Plus, many useful features are hidden behind paywalls.

Still, Wrike is a flexible project management platform that can adapt to the requirements of different team sizes and project processes.

How do Wrike’s customers view the solution? We read through verified reviews on reputable aggregators and summarized the most common feedback:

Looking for an affordable and versatile platform that is also fully functional for solo users? ClickUp might be worth a look, as there is no minimum license requirement for the premium tier.

In need of an all-in-one solution that offers more communication tools? Teamwork or Basecamp might fit the bill.

Here are more alternatives to Wrike: