Thanks to the Internet, we see a lot of people from all over the world that are starting their own businesses. However, a lot of these new businesses have found out that selecting the best project management software solution to help automate and streamline their operations is somewhat complicated.
At the moment for instance, there are far too many project management solutions to choose from. It does not help that many of these project solutions profess to be the best choice for your business. Thus, reviewing and finally choosing a project management solution can be significantly time-consuming.
Of the many project management solutions in the market right now, Wrike and Asana are arguably among the best you can find. Both tools deal with similarly sized businesses—from new businesses to enterprise companies. A caveat though: while both solutions may offer similar features, you must remember there are subtle differences between Asana and Wrike.
Asana is a project and task management tool that allows you to perform more efficient team collaboration and communication. This project management solution can be used in your company to create projects and tasks within these projects. Asana allows your company to add employees to various tasks and projects, add staff as task followers, share the projects you have with them, or include your key employees in task comments to ensure that everyone concerned is on the same page.
Asana takes away the need for email in discussing and collaborating on projects. It allows you to immediately share notes on task descriptions. You can also upload attachments to tasks or even follow and search public tasks. The tool gives you the advantage of combining related tasks with just one click, creating business workflows, organizing tasks based on priority, receiving update notifications as well as task completions, adding staff as task followers, establishing task deadlines, or even putting “hearts” next to tasks to indicate your gratitude.
Your Asana inbox allows you to get notifications on various tasks and other project-related activities. This provides you with updates such as when a task is due, when your staff has been given a task, if a task has been updated or completed, if an employee has been added to the project or task as a follower, if a person adds a comment, if a specific attachment has been added to a task, and if the deadline of task has been changed.
Overview of Wrike’s interface
On the other hand, Wrike is a project management and collaboration tool that gives you real-time project insights. The solution has been created with the objective of making daily operations easier and more transparent for businesses. Wrike can serve as your project hub where users can discuss tasks and ideas, store files securely in the cloud, and manage schedules.
Teams using Wrike can organize projects and tasks in a single, unified workspace. Your company’s files can be easily accessible by your team members at any time. Your company managers can modify schedules with the use of interactive Gantt charts, join and participate in collaborative group discussions in real time, and assign tasks to your staff. The real-time feature is very helpful, since it gives users quickest and latest updates on the project status. In addition, Wrike gives you live updates with the help of group activity streams. The tool’s built-in analytics features also give companies an easy visual overview of project updates.
You may ask: which project management tool is better? Here is a detailed analysis of both project management tools, including their features, advantages and disadvantages, which tool works better depending on the type of businesses, pricing plans, and other critical factors.
Advantages and Disadvantages
As far as management tools go, Wrike’s dedicated management features seem to give you more benefits. It has some very efficient tools mainly designed for management purposes. Based on your management style, various features (including the time-tracker) are primarily effective in tracking how your company’s resources are being utilized. Wrike likewise allows your company to use interactive Gantt charts to help your company monitor its progress. Wrike’s project management features however will not offer you a dedicated management section or exclusive managerial tools. For businesses that want a “hands off” style of management, this can be a good idea though. This does not mean however that your company managers will not find the project management solution extremely helpful. Compared with Wrike, Asana’s notes, comments and tags are some of its best tools that your company can immediately use to any of your projects, allowing your company managers to provide feedback and guidance easily.
As far as ease of use goes, Asana’s wide-ranging integration features are very impressive. But to be fair, Wrike’s tools are also very user-friendly. For instance, Wrike makes it easy for your business to integrate its management tool into other existing solutions. Wrike also features Android and iPhone apps. In addition, Wrike is compatible with Apple Mail, Google Drive, Dropbox, and other major systems. Its interface is also very intuitive. However, Asana provides you with an easy to use and sleek three-pane dashboard, giving businesses such as yours all the crucial information you need to automate and streamline your operations without any problems.
As far as team sharing goes, both project management tools offer amazing features. For example, Wrike has a very effective email communication platform that you and your teams can use. The tool‘s effective use of the @ symbol enables team members to offer their comments in a discussion thread or topic. What does this mean? This means your tool’s inboxes would be limited to purely relevant conversations and would not overflow with redundant emails. Compared with Wrike however, Asana has built a system that contradicts the very notion of using e-mail. Established with the concept that e-mail may even hold back your company’s productivity, users of the tool are assigned to different projects, which details can be discussed without the need for e-mail.
A quick look at how Asana’s interface looks like
In terms of cost, both tools are using a pricing model that is mainly dependent on the number of users. Wrike, for instance, gives users a free plan for firms that have small teams of up to five end-users. The tool’s Professional package offers a number of extra management features. The Professional plan costs $49 a month (for companies with business teams that have more than five end-users) and more for those companies that have more than five users. Wrike’s Enterprise plan offers some extra features and enhanced security. With this plan, Wrike can be utilized even by thousands of users. The pricing plan’s costs are calculated individually.
Asana’s premium corporate package, called Organization, is calculated by quote based on individual price negotiation with the client. Pricing for plans will be higher depending on the number of intended users. Asana, compared with Wrike, may not be offering businesses a free pricing plan, but overall it is cheaper for small-scale users.
In terms of analysis and reporting, Asana has gone beyond the usual budgetary reporting features. To be fair however, Wrike offers some number-crunching opportunities as well. Its customized reports can offer you estimated and actual costs reports as well as revenue tracking. What’s more, the tool’s analytics allows users to establish job roles as well as quickly calculate costs. Therefore, Wrike may be an efficient budgetary tool, especially for companies that have smaller financial operations. Asana, on the other hand, uses Sprintboards in order to generate reports.
Head to Head Matchup
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| Price | $21 a month (paid on an annual basis) | $49 a month (paid on an annual basis) |
| Customer types | Freelancers, small business, medium business, large enterprises | Freelancers, small business, medium business, large enterprises |
| Milestone tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Resource management | No | Yes |
| Earned value management | No | No |
| Project portfolio management | No | Yes |
| Gantt charts | No | Yes |
| Resource leveling | No | No |
| Risk management | No | No |
| Recurring tasks | Yes | Yes |
| Pert charts | No | No |
| Hierarchical tasks | Yes | Yes |
| Critical chain management | No | No |
| Time tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Scrum support | No | No |
| Task dependencies | No | Yes |
| Baselines | No | Yes |
| Cost tracking | No | No |
| Kanban support | No | No |
| Critical path management | No | Yes |
Asana is great for businesses of all shapes and sizes. You can expect Asana to work effectively, whenever important teamwork needs to be done. Therefore, Asana is mostly used in designing teams, healthcare industries, technology, and marketing teams. Dropbox, Disqus, Foursquare, and Virginia Tech, are among the leading clients of this project management tool.
Wrike is ideal for teams and businesses of various sizes, beginning from solopreneurs and small companies up to the huge Fortune 500 enterprises. Tech firms, marketing departments, social media companies, or any other firm where project management solutions are needed can use this software solution. Google, Adobe, HTC, PayPal, and Electronic Arts, are among Wrike’s chief clients.
Conclusion
Both Asana and Wrike are impressive. Both solutions are good if you are in need of streamlining and automating your working operations. For general variety however, along with its pricing plan and key features, Asana is a better solution between the two project management tools.