Wrike - a very flexible project, task and resource management tool
Overall Satisfaction with Wrike
We use Wrike for the whole company throughout all our teams (we are a web software development company). It supports us at planning and breaking down projects, in collaborating via tasks and in handling tests and bug reports. Before, we didn't have a central place for all "the work that has to be done" - now we have centralized that in Wrike.
Pros
- Different views for different business needs: Our developers mostly use the list view, since they are most interested in "what are my tasks" and "how's the priority". For project planning, the timeline view is a great tool; our controlling people love the Workload view since this is a great place to do ressource planning. So it's all about tasks, but they different views on it makes Wrike quite powerful.
- Gmail integration. In our company, we use Google Apps/Gmail web client. The Wrike gadget for email integration really improves our workflows. Often, tasks which have to be done, are hidden in emails - with the Gmail gadget, it's easy to create and track tasks from within Gmail.
- The support. I have never experienced such a great and motivated support staff. No matter if I contact them via Email or web chat, they really want to solve my issues. Several times I had some questions and feature requests which then were handed to the Wrike developers - I always got a response on if/how the things can be implemented.
Cons
- Duration vs. Effort. For us, the two most important measures when planning projects and ressources are the duration and the effort. A task might take 4 days to fulfill, but is only 14 hours of effort (because of idle/waiting times,...). Right now, Wrike only is based on durations - there is no automatic way to calculate the effort or the other way round (this is an area where MS project still is the best in my opinion).
- The costs of the Enterprise version. The Enterprise edition costs about 3-4 times as much as the Pro version. Features like Custom Calendars or Custom Fields are only available there - although these features are awesome, we don't see why they are only available in the expensive Enterprise version. We would be willing to pay additional money for these single features...
- Since we are only using Wrike for 8 months now, it's hard to already come up with some hard numbers. What definitely improved is the overview. Before, many tasks were hidden in several people's inboxes - now it's centralized and transparent in Wrike.
- Redbooth,Asana
In Redbooth, the GANTT charts were not powerful enough. The main reason we chose Wrike was the Workload view for ressouce planning - no other tool we found offered this possibility.
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