Wrike vs Asana: Comparing Price and Functionality

Wrike and Asana are project management solutions that allow team members to collaborate, share documents and track everything they’re working on.

Product Overviews

Here’s information pulled from our Wrike and Asana reviews that summarize each product:

Wrike: Wrike is beneficial for many companies, including small businesses, business divisions within larger organizations or firms with remote workers. All users can collaborate to manage individual and team tasks from the same platform.

Wrike can be used by employees in a number of roles, including marketing, project management and product development.

The solution integrates with many different apps and programs, including WordPress, Google Drive/Gmail, Outlook, Zendesk, Hubspot, QuickBooks, LinkedIn and Microsoft OneDrive, to name a few. It’s also available as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

Asana: Asana is a project and task management solution for collaborating on every stage of a project. With tasks, workspaces, notes, tags and a dashboard that updates information in real time, Asana facilitates smart decision-making throughout a project’s workflow.

Work can be organized into shared projects as lists, and teams can create tasks within those projects for meetings, programs and initiatives.

Asana can be used for campaigns, launches or briefings. Teams can also assign permissions for each member and share project-related documents without having to use email. Asana is available for desktop, Android and iOS devices.

This solution integrates with other essential systems, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack, Zapier, Jotana, Github, Usernap, Wufoo, MailChimp, Harvest and WordPress.

How They Stack Up

Features

Wrike: As an all-in-one project management and collaboration tool, Wrike offers users visual timelines that give them complete visibility into the status of their projects. Wrike also helps speed up project delivery by letting users prioritize their tasks and connect the tasks to the project plans with discussions, files and emails. In addition, Wrike has a built-in time tracking system that allows users to track the hours they spend on tasks and projects, and allows managers to evaluate how effective their employees are.

Using Wrike, team members can collaborate on projects in real time. The tool lets users know exactly what they must do and how their work connects to the work of other team members. Since companies may have multiple teams and multiple projects running at the same time, Wrike’s real-time dashboard gives managers visibility into the work of their teams.

Asana: With Asana, users can create tasks, assign them to team members, schedule due dates or add recurring dates, upload or link to associated documents, write comments and add tags. Users can also subscribe or unsubscribe themselves and others to receive notifications whenever people make changes to tasks.

Asana also lets users create custom fields where they can track anything they want. It lets team members post comments or questions directly to tasks so others can respond immediately. In addition, this real-time communication cuts down on the need for time-consuming meetings. Conversations let teams discuss the progress of their projects, and even create tasks directly from conversations. Asana also has features, such as team pages, that allow managers to have conversations with entire teams. The tool lets team managers see all of their teams’ projects.

Bottom Line: Both Wrike and Asana are project and task management tools that allow team members to manage projects and collaborate with colleagues on every stage of a project. Both are strong players in this space. Wrike is more focused on project and team management, while Asana is strong in task management.

Benefits

Wrike: Benefits Include:

  • User-friendly navigation that simplifies work for companies and their teams.
  • Security measures to ensure that only authorized personnel can access data and other files stored in companies’ online databases.
  • Mobile apps that let users easily track and monitor progress from their mobile devices anytime, anywhere.
  • The ability to create detailed work assignments for large groups of people that can be tracked by the minute or the hour.

Asana: Benefits include:

  • Enabling users to add custom fields to track only what’s important to them.
  • Email notifications that eliminate many of the challenges large teams face trying to keep their teams together.
  • Real-time communication that allows for quick responses, minimizing the need for time-consuming meetings.
  • Securing all the data stored on its servers. All the data is backed up regularly and stored behind firewalls in secure data centers with restricted access.

Bottom Line: Asana has an intuitive interface for managing team workflows. Asana allows users to plan and manage projects online without the need for difficult-to-follow email threads. Wrike is a great tool for traditional project and work management. It has simple, easy-to-use features, making it a great team collaboration app.

How They Help

Wrike: With Wrike, project management teams can manage multiple projects and tasks simultaneously as well as access relevant, up-to-date information to combine planning and execution. Wrike is also a great marketing solution, allowing teams to track performance, create assets for campaigns as well as manage and launch useful events. Product management teams can also use Wrike to improve product development and delivery by allowing teams to prioritize between requests, and properly manage them from concept to completion. Wrike’s real-time dashboard lets project managers keep on top of their teams’ work without extra email and status meetings.

Asana: With Asana, companies can reduce email overload by allowing team members to view complete histories of completed tasks. Asana is great for project and task management because it allows users to easily track activities, break up projects into smaller tasks and help team members work more efficiently. However, Asana isn’t only meant for task management, it can also be used as a “communication super tool” for the entire company.

Bottom Line: Asana helps companies by combining elements of project management, file storage and collaboration. It also enables teams to manage projects without email. Asana is an easy-to-use tool with a basic layout, great for teams whose products aren’t too complex. Wrike offers companies organized project management. It also ensures team members are on the same page by making it easier for them to communicate with each other.

Pricing

Wrike: Wrike offers five different plans:

  • Free – Businesses can use the free plan for up to five users. It allows unlimited collaborators and offers 2 GB of storage space. This plan includes Wrike’s core elements, i.e., board and spreadsheet views, real-time Activity Stream, file sharing, tasks discussion, mobile apps and cloud storage integration.
  • Professional – The pricing starts at $9.80 per user per month (billed annually). It includes subtask management, storage space starting at 5 GB, shareable dashboards, Gantt charts, collaborators and advanced integration.
  • Business – This plan is also for five to 200 users and is priced at $24.80 per user per month. It includes advanced features such as custom fields and workflows, time tracking, real-time reports with scheduled notifications, report templates, user group and permissions, graphical analytics, calendars, request forms, projects and tasks approvals, integration with Salesforce and an automation engine and 50 GB of storage space.
  • Wrike for Marketers – This plan is intended for marketing and creative teams and includes all the features of the Business version, plus marketing-oriented functions, such as Wrike Proof (track proofing and approval processes), Wrike Extension for Adobe Creative Cloud, Wrike Publish (digital asset management), and tailored templates and workspaces. Interested prospects will need to get a custom quote.
  • Enterprise  – The Enterprise plan is aimed at businesses with an unlimited number of users or companies that have custom requirements. It includes even more advanced features, such as 100 GB of storage, two-factor authentication, real-time reporting, single sign-on and folder permissions. Companies have to get a pricing quote from Wrike (the average price is about $35 per user per month).

Asana: Asana offers five payment options: Free, Starter, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

  • Free – The free tier supports up to 10 team members, with access to limited dashboards and search functions as well as unlimited task projects and conversations.
  • Starter – The Starter plan costs $10.99 per user per month when billed annually. This tier supports up to 500 users and includes features, such as Gantt and Timeline views, unlimited dashboards and the Asana Intelligence tool.
  • Advanced – The Advanced plan costs $24.99 per user, per month (billed annually) and has all of the features of the Starter plan, plus portfolios, workloads, approvals and integration with Jira Cloud.
  • Enterprise – The Enterprise plan offers more advanced administrative controls, custom branding and same-day support. Prices are available upon request.
  • Enterprise Plus – The Enterprise Plus plan adds on even more advanced security features. As with the Enterprise plan, pricing is available by quote.

 Bottom Line: Although Wrike is very flexible and customizable, companies have to spend $9.80 per user per month to fully use its project planning and collaboration features. Although Asana’s free plan allows for teams with up to 10 members, it only provides standard dashboards. To use features, such as advanced search, custom fields, task dependencies and reporting, users have to upgrade their accounts.

Takeaways

Wrike is a customizable project management solution aimed at helping users manage projects and collaborate with colleagues. It provides the standard project management features, i.e., task creation and management, resource allocation, team communication and file sharing. Wrike also features built-in time and budget tracking, report templates for recurring tasks, Gantt charts view for projects, status and workflow, custom project fields and dashboards. Wrike is a good solution for teams that have to set up and get to work quickly.

Asana is one of the most popular project management tools on the market, with over 2 million users. It offers companies all the features they need to manage their projects, i.e., the ability to create tasks, set deadlines and assign team members to those tasks. Asana has an intuitive interface for managing team workflows, and offers a free plan for up to 15 users with all the basic features. It’s a great fit for teams of any size and it can be adapted for projects from HR and marketing to sales and support.

It’s important for organizations to evaluate each tool to decide which best fits their needs.

If you’re entirely new to project management tools, take a look at our Project Management Definitive Guide. It offers a full overview of market trends, must-have features and common challenges to avoid.

Finally, if you’re looking for software alternatives, our detailed reviews is a good place to start.