Comparison

Wrike Alternatives: Comparing the Top Competitors in Project Management

Joanna Marlow

December 30, 2022

If Wrike hasn’t turned out to be all you were looking for in a project management tool, we can assure you that there are many great Wrike alternatives on the market.

If you are looking for a tool that can help you streamline your processes, track your projects, and manage the administrative side of things in one place, there are many options to choose from.

In this article, we will present you with the 15 best Wrike alternatives that are out there, including our all-in-one solution – Rodeo. We'll explain why each tool is a great alternative to Wrike, its key features, as well as the most important pros and cons.

Before we dive into the Wrike alternatives out there, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why you might be looking for a better software solution in the first place.

Why you might look for a Wrike alternative

It really seems like all project management tools promise the same thing; to help make your work processes more efficient. However, each tool does this in a different way, often focussing on different business processes and therefore offering a different set of features.

There simply isn’t a one-size-fits-all project management software, you need to find a solution that really matches your company's structure and workflow.

Wrike is a very popular choice, as it helps teams stay on top of their projects and offers management insight into their business.

Yet, some organizations have found that it didn’t meet their needs, here are a few reasons why:

The tool is quite complicated

It takes a while to get used to the software. The interface is not very intuitive, which makes the tool quite complicated to use.

With such a steep learning curve, onboarding new teams can cost a lot of time (and money), while the whole point is to make things easier.

But, don’t just take our word for it, check out some of the reviews about Wrike being complicated right here, here, and here.

High price per user

Compared to other tools that offer different payment packages and plans, Wrike’s price per user is much higher than most alternatives.

Naturally, it depends on the size of your team, but in most cases, this makes Wrike a costly investment. For example, Wrike's most popular Business plan will run you nearly $25 per user/month.

Limited collaboration features

In times like these, connecting remote team members is more important than ever, which is why having multiple collaboration features in a tool is a definite plus.

Adding comments and attaching files works fine to an extent, but having a built-in chat feature has also become essential. Unfortunately, this is what Wrike is lacking.

The 15 best Wrike alternatives to try in 2023

We have gone over some of the reasons you might be on the lookout for a Wrike alternative, so let’s kick off the list with the 15 best Wrike alternatives on the market.

1. Rodeo

Designed as an all-in-one tool that supports each stage of the project cycle, Rodeo is built for project-based teams.

This is in stark contrast to Wrike, where the features are not built around the project lifecycle or any workflow in particular. You have to create and structure the workflows yourself in Wrike, with limited templates. However, this means that the functionalities might not exactly complement these custom workflows.

Rodeo is a robust tool with built-in features, meaning you won't need to rely on integrations, which are often expensive and time-consuming. This will help you streamline your team's tech stack to get more done with fewer applications.

Overview of Rodeo's dashboard interface

Rodeo’s key features

Since all of Rodeo's features are built-in, they are designed to work interdependently. It doesn’t get more intuitive than that. To explain exactly how this works, let's go over what you can do with each feature:

Budgets
Every project starts with the project manager building a clear budget in Rodeo. Our software adopts a phase-based approach to budgeting, meaning you'll build your budget around the activities and tasks that comprise each phase of your project. This helps you build an accurate estimate by thinking through what resources are needed to complete your objectives right from the very start.

We also understand that many creative agencies frequently reuse the same budget framework, which is why Rodeo allows you to apply a previous project budget to a new project.

Once your project is running and tasks are being completed, you'll be able to track your budget spending in real time based on the time recorded by your team members. When the project is done, you can easily create an invoice ready to send to your client in just one click.

Budget planning in Rodeo

Estimates
Let your client know what they can expect by sending them an estimate directly through Rodeo. Once you build your budget in our software, it can be formatted as an estimate and sent to your client directly without using a third-party tool.

You will also retain full control over what gets shown on a client estimate. For example, if you don't want your client to see the hourly rate of your team members, you can easily hide that information. Additionally, estimates are fully customizable, meaning you can personalize them with your company's layout, branding, and terms and conditions.

Rodeo's budget split into phases

Planning
Success doesn’t happen overnight, you have to plan for it. Rodeo’s planner makes it easy to plan your projects as efficiently and effectively as possible. Divide all your projects into tasks and activities using the planner, while also adding the relevant deadlines.

This will create a project plan and timeline that can be tracked by using different viewing options. Assign all the project tasks to team members according to their availability, and add important information or documents where necessary too.

While the project is running, teams and managers will always have a detailed overview of the progress thanks to real-time updates.

Assign tasks in Rodeo

Time tracking
Nobody really likes to track their time, but if you make it as simple as possible, there is nothing to it. In Rodeo, there are different ways to let team members track their time in order to eliminate obstacles.

You can simply set the timer once you start a task, which allows you to pause it when you want to go out for a coffee and start it again until you clock out for the day. But if you find working with a timer to be distracting, you can simply record the hours you've worked later using our timecard function.

Tracking time spent on projects is such an important part of maintaining a healthy profit margin because you need to be able to bill clients for the correct number of hours worked. Failing to do so can be detrimental.

Simply use Rodeo's timer to track worked hours

Invoicing

Getting paid has never been so easy! Once your project is underway and your team is tracking time toward it, you can easily create a client-ready invoice in just one click. And just like with estimates, these invoices can be personalized using your company logo and layout.

What’s more, you can automate all your recurring invoices so that you won’t have to keep manually preparing them again. At one glance, the overview of your invoices will show exactly which ones are outstanding, paid, or overdue.

Reporting
Something that makes Rodeo different from so many other tools is our expansive reporting function. Not only can managers view real-time updates to know the status of their projects instantly, but the comprehensive reports also allow them to make better decisions based on relevant data.

The closed projects reports, for example, will show any discrepancy between budgeted and actual hours. This shows exactly how profitable projects are in the end.

The closed projects report shows the difference between budgeted, tracked, and billed hours.

What customers are saying about Rodeo

While some reviews show that people often find Wrike is complex to use, users are very positive about the simplicity and sleekness of Rodeo’s interface. Customers agree that the tool is very user-friendly, making it easy to onboard new team members.

This is corroborated by Sophie van de Togt, Head of Account at creative social media agency Dorst & Lesser: “We have a lot of young creatives working with us who really appreciate how modern Rodeo feels. The interface looks very neat and refined, and they all quickly get used to it because everything is so straightforward.”

Moreover, onboarding new employees is a piece of cake for the same reasons. Sophie adds: “Whenever I show a new intern or employee how it works, we just go through everything once and that’s it.”

Other users also praise Rodeo for its reporting function, saying that the insights provided by the reports have been extremely valuable.

According to a 5-star review on Capterra, Rodeo helped a user gain an enormous amount of insight, showing exactly how the company should make adjustments to work more efficiently. This user was also satisfied with the thoroughness of our customer service team.

Axell Avalon van Staveren, Brand Director of Digital Agency JaxX, can certainly attest to this. Since her team started using Rodeo, they have been able to pinpoint exactly which of their projects were not profitable enough, as they previously had no idea how many hours went into their projects.

Axell: “Once we started using Rodeo, we had an accurate overview of how much time team members really needed to complete their project. For the first time, we were able to pinpoint discrepancies exactly in comparison with our estimates.”

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Rodeo has a flexible pricing model. Not only do you pay a monthly price per user, but the cost per user is based on the number of features they need rather than charging by feature set. If a user needs fewer features, you pay less. Why pay for features you won’t use anyway?

Starting price of $29.99 per month for 1 administrative license
+ Additional full license: $14.99 per user/month
+ Additional standard license: $8.99 per user/month (access is limited to dashboard and time tracking)
+ Add-on (planning and task management): $4.99 per user/month

To make sure Rodeo is the right tool for you, claim your 14-day free trial here (no credit card required).

2. ClickUp

Project management tool ClickUp has solid reviews, helping teams manage projects and workflows. Just like Wrike and many other tools on this list, the tool is highly customizable, yet still very user-friendly.

Furthermore, the solution offers a wide range of features. What stands out from customer reviews is that there seem to be a lot of contrasting opinions. Some reviewers corroborate how user-friendly ClickUp is, while others counter by saying its seemingly endless features make it quite complicated to use.

ClickUp's dashboard view

^{Source: ClickUp}

Key features

Task planning
Gantt charts
Reports
File sharing

Who is this tool for?

This project management tool is ideal for any size organization, but with a decent level of tech-savviness when it comes to creating customizable workflows.

Also read: Top 20 ClickUp Alternatives to Try [Free & Paid]