Wrike and Smartsheet are web-based project management solutions that allow team members to collaborate and track every aspect of their projects, including dates, dependencies, time, assignments, resources and more.
Product Overviews
Here’s some information from our reviews of Smartsheet and Wrike to summarize each product:
Smartsheet: Smartsheet is a versatile software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that’s used to make collaboration and work management tasks easier. It uses spreadsheets to help streamline project management tasks, but is different from other spreadsheet-based applications because of the many collaboration options incorporated into it.
Smartsheet is designed to make planning, tracking, automating and reporting on work projects seamless, allowing teams to work together to keep projects moving. Smartsheet integrates with a number of third-party apps, including Google Apps, Google Drive, Google Chrome, Box, Salesforce, DocuSign, Evernote, MailChimp, Marketo and Jira. Smartsheet is also available as a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
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 is useful for many departments, such as marketing, project management, product development and more. For instance, a marketing team could use Wrike to plot out tasks associated with marketing campaigns and lead generation programs.
Wrike integrates with many different apps and programs, including WordPress, Google Drive/Gmail, Outlook, Zendesk, Hubspot, QuickBooks, LinkedIn and Microsoft OneDrive. It’s also available as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
How They Stack Up
Features
Smartsheet: Smartsheet is an online project management tool that makes collaboration and work management tasks easier. It offers a simple and intuitive spreadsheet-like interface as well as Gantt charts, file sharing, and work automation features. With Smartsheet’s simple interface business users can quickly configure, adapt and improve their work processes to get work done more quickly – without the need for technical resources. Smartsheet allows users to easily plan, manage, track, automate and report on work. It enables teams to manage every aspect of complex projects as well as visualize tasks in Gantt, card and calendar views. However, Smartsheet doesn’t offer a time-tracking feature or a central hub for communication.
Wrike: This all-in-one project management and collaboration tool offers users visual timelines that give them complete visibility into the status of their projects. Wrike also helps speed 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. Wrike’s implementation process is covered in eight stages.
Bottom Line: Smartsheet and Wrike are both cloud-based project and task management tools that let team members manage projects and collaborate with colleagues on every stage of a project. Depending on the scope of the implementation and the size of the team, it can take up to a month to deploy Wrike.
Benefits
Smartsheet: Benefits of Smartsheet include:
- User-friendly and intuitive interface that lets users improve their work processes without the need to involve the IT department
- Automation of key business processes using simple rules, saving time
- A standard set of components so teams can immediately and accurately create and prepare new projects and operations
- Real-time information using live reports and Smartsheet Sights. Similar to dashboards, Sights helps users visualize, summarize and share important aspects of their work, such as project status
- Share important documents by saving files within a project for quick access
Wrike: Benefits of Wrike include:
- One hub for all users’ work.
- User-friendly navigation that simplifies work for companies and their teams.
- Real-time news feed.
- 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.
Bottom Line: 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. Wrike enables people to see their tasks and progress detailed via real-time news feeds or overview charts. Some users, though, complain that Wrike’s user interface is poorly designed and the platform is difficult to use. Smartsheet is an intelligent and intuitive collaboration and project management tool. However, because Smartsheet doesn’t offer a central communication hub, it’s hard to keep track of users’ comments, edits and additions.
Support
Smartsheet: For questions that can’t be answered on the website, or through various tutorials, Smartsheet has phone and email support. The company also provides weekly webinars as well as on-demand video tutorials. There are also instructional articles and social media channels for customers to ask questions and access information about software updates.
Wrike: Wrike provides a knowledge base for users with a getting-started guide and information about billing issues, email integration, reports and more. It also has video tutorials and live webinars. Users can submit support requests right from the knowledge base. Wrike also offers email, phone and chat support.
Bottom Line: Both Smartsheet and Wrike offer an extensive help center/knowledge base as well as email and phone support. Wrike also lets customers submit requests from the knowledge base. But some users say that Wrike’s customer support is inconsistent. Unlike Wrike, Smartsheet doesn’t offer chat support.
Pricing
Smartsheet offers three pricing plans:
- Pro – This plan costs $7 per user, month when billed annually and is good for people who want to be more efficient and collaborate with anyone involved in a project. Features include email support, the ability to create up to 10 widgets per dashboard, attachment reminders and notifications, commenting, card view, Gantt charts/critical path, forms and integration with all top cloud productivity apps.
- Business – This option costs $25 per user, per month when billed annually. It has a minimum purchase of three users and is made for teams that want to drive execution with automated actions. This package includes all of the features of the Team plan, plus unlimited sheets per report, automated actions, activity logs and custom branding.
- Enterprise – This plan offers industry-specific solutions and company-wide plans. It’s available for businesses that want to execute at scale production while keeping security, visibility and control intact. Teams interested in the Enterprise package will have to get a price quote from Smartsheet. The Enterprise plan offers all features of the Business plan, plus single sign-on capabilities and enterprise access control.
Each plan allows an unlimited number of collaborators to work on a user’s sheets at no cost. However, these collaborators can only view and edit sheets.
Wrike offers five different pricing 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, including board and spreadsheet views, real-time Activity Stream, file sharing, tasks discussion, mobile apps and cloud storage integration.
- Professional – This paid version is for five to 200 users. The pricing starts at $9.80 per user, per month and includes subtask management, storage space starting at 5 GB, shareable dashboards, Gantt charts, collaborators and advanced integration.
- Business – This version 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, report templates, user’s group and permissions, and 50 GB of storage space.
- Wrike for Marketers – This version is aimed at marketing and creative teams. It includes all the features of the Business version and offers video proofing and an Adobe Creative Cloud extension. Contact Wrike for pricing.
- Enterprise – The Enterprise version is for 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. Contact Wrike for pricing.
Bottom Line: Smartsheet is reasonably priced, given what it offers. In addition, users can change or upgrade their plans at any time, even if they’re locked into annual subscriptions. Although Wrike is very flexible and customizable, companies must spend $9.80 per user, per month to fully use its project planning and collaboration features.
Takeaways
Smartsheet is a work management platform designed to help companies plan, track, automate and report on projects. It can be used across a wide variety of applications. Its spreadsheet style is great for capturing the tasks and subtasks teams need to complete projects.
Smartsheet’s simplicity and features let business users rapidly turn ideas into plans, schedules and actions. It enables teams to save time and improve productivity. However, Smartsheet doesn’t allow managers to track their employees’ hours. Because Smartsheet doesn’t offer a central communication hub, it’s hard for teams to keep track of members’ comments, edits and additions.
Wrike is a customizable project management solution aimed at helping users manage projects as well as collaborate with colleagues. It offers tools for time tracking, project planning and communication to enable managers and team members to run their projects and work on tasks from a single central hub. With this solution, teams can schedule, discuss and prioritize their tasks as well as track progress and see everyone’s changes in real time. Although implementation may take up to a month, Wrike is a good solution for teams that are looking for good reporting features, communication tools and project organization.
Before making a purchase, organizations should evaluate each tool to decide which best fits their needs.
If your organization is starting fresh with project management tools, check out our Definitive Guide to Project Management Software. It offers a full overview of key features, costs, and common challenges found with the software.
If you’re looking for project management solutions alternatives, our lineup of reviews is a good place to start.