We performed a comparison between Microsoft Project and Wrike based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Project Management Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable feature of Microsoft Project is the reminder feature. This feature allows for the system to send notifications or reminders to individuals who have a task to complete once someone has finished their task. This has been especially useful in situations where multiple people are involved in a task. For example, if I have completed my task and the next person is just beginning, the system will send them a reminder to notify them of my completion. This feature has proven to be very beneficial and convenient for me in my tasks."
"The reporting features are quite strong. Being able to do team reports and find out what work is pending, what work needs to be done are key in my day-to-day management of the team. The earned value analysis capabilities and critical path capabilities inside the tool help me make sure that I'm keeping the projects on track."
"I find all the features of the solution valuable."
"In my experience, this solution is one of the best for the waterfall management model."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is planning."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Project is scheduling. The solution is useful on a daily basis."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution is very complete. It makes it a great option for project managers and they can use it extensively in almost any organizational setup."
"We utilize time tracking and reports most often."
"Visibility and organization are the most valuable features of Wrike."
"The most valuable feature of Wrike is the tag functionality."
"The product is intuitive. It is easy to learn and update. You can follow the project from the beginning till the end with the help of the solution. The tool helps to update the project in seconds."
"It's a very easy-to-use and flexible tool. We can easily write and create queues for different themes. It's very user-friendly."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"In our company, we heavily rely on Wrike. Wrike has helped in communication, managing all sorts of projects and tasks, and having a history of all our correspondence items."
"We can easily write down the tasks and reorganize them as well as have a progression index. Wrike offers several views including a kanban view and Gantt chart view."
"It should be easier to break things. Breaking up the visualization from the task is sometimes a little bit tricky to do. You can do it, but it takes a minute. It's not an easy function to do. The way you have to format it and stuff like that takes a minute."
"There are some things about it that I've always hated, and they haven't really changed them. It makes a lot of assumptions. It is also difficult to put business rules in it. You have to de-link it from the consecutive task if you don't want to do a What-If analysis, and sometimes, if you forget to do that, it changes everything. It is a pain in the neck to undo it. I would also like to see better integration with graphics. The graphics are primitive, and they need some major work. I would like to have the ability to do some small macros within the project for fuzzy logic. For example, if you're not sure how long a task takes, you can get the earliest guess. It is very time and manpower intensive to keep it up to date. You need to constantly update it. You will find that you are spending more time working on the Microsoft Project file rather than working on your project. I don't want to devote a person to just do that. That's silly. You can link it to some more modern applications so that it is dynamic when a real-time resource schedule changes, but it is not at all dynamic. It is only as dynamic as the person using it. It would be nice if we could plug it in real time for each project, subproject, or task. If something is going on, I want to see it in real time. Sometimes we have international clients, and they don't use the same calendar. They have a Thursday and Friday weekend, and we have a Saturday and Sunday weekend. I can change it in Microsoft Project, but I would like to be able to do it globally. There may be a way to do it, but I just haven't figured it out yet. I would like to be able to specify globally what weekend we want or what we want to call a weekend. We might have a project that works seven days a week. Some tasks are automated outside, like manufacturing processes. Embedding external processes is almost impossible because, in a practical sense, we don't have people who can do a lot of programming here, and also the interface of Microsoft Project is not the easiest because a lot of it is proprietary. It would be nice if we can link different tasks to external sources of inputs and outputs so that we could integrate them with a master project plan and see in real time what's going on. For example, you are manufacturing a batch of a chemical, and I have to rely on if a customer is making some type of complex chemical. Their system does not interfere with ours. We have to get the outputs from their system and enter them manually into the project to see the effect. That takes time. If you're talking about hours, you going to spend three to four hours, but there is the risk of getting it wrong or making a mistake. On tight projects, every minute counts. I would like to see some control system interfaces with Microsoft Project. A modern machine shop has a lot of computer numerical control (CNC) computers. In fact, virtually all machining is done with a CNC machine. Even 3D additive manufacturing is made with CNC. That data can go to a computer, and that computer can spit it out to a project so that you can see in real time whether you are going to finish a day ahead. If you had to finish a day ahead, you could talk to the systems' software, which can say that if I have this machine working for another hour and this one for one hour or less, I would be able to meet the schedule. It can then make those changes, but it can't do that. Everything needs to be done manually, which takes more time, and there's a risk of mistakes. It requires smarter automation and more machine learning. There is no machine learning capability in Microsoft Project. It just doesn't exist. That's why I say it is only suitable for small-sized to medium-sized companies and small projects. Most people don't have the problems that I have. I don't have them all the time, but when I have them, they're big. When you're bidding on a project that has to get done, you find yourself spending most of the time working on Microsoft Project, whereas you should be spending these hours managing the project. Thinking on a bigger scale, I would like better integration with Office, Visio, and Access. If you make a change in one, it should cascade to others and vice versa. It doesn't do that. It is not a dynamic program. I would like to see a dynamic program or at least the capability of being dynamic, that is, even if it is close to real time where it outputs to a module, and the module then talks to real-time things. The real-time data goes back into the module, and the module updates the project plan. Such dynamic capability would be nice. It may not be real time, but it is at least close. I would like to be able to link directly to the data in an Excel spreadsheet so that I don't have to keep going back and forth updating it. I don't want to have to create a dynamic link library. Whenever I change the data in Excel, it should update in Visio or PowerPoint. If I'm doing a pie chart or any kind of graphic, I don't want to constantly update my graphics. I want to link them together, and I want them updated automatically. I know it is a wishful thing. They don't make major changes every time they come out with a new version. They don't fix the issue. They just add a few features."
"The solution is currently a bit slow and can be faster."
"It's hard to reach technical people to get the help you need."
"Its price can be improved."
"Tech support needs improvement."
"This solution needs more customization."
"The new version has made it a bit more complicated."
"The response from the website is a little bit slow, and the tool is too expensive for a small team."
"The product needs to send direct emails to customers updating the latest aspects since it is better to hear directly."
"This solution could be improved if we were able to better analyze how the application consumes cloud resources as this can cause a delay in performance."
"We faced an issue with the Wrike outlook add-on; it is only available for Microsoft Office 365, and not the on-premise version."
"What annoys me with Wrike and things that I would like to improve is that you need to have a very organized workflow that everyone in the company follows, and only then will Wrike work."
"Wrike needs to be more responsive to community requests for new features."
"On one side, it's very easy to create a task with text, but on the other side, it's not very well-formatted. Therefore, it's difficult to track specific data written in a task. We are making templates, but it's not enough to use a template to know the exact status of different tasks. One thing that we are looking for in Wrike is a better workflow. Because we can only move the status of tasks, we can't really manage workflow and send a task to a specific person. This is what is really missing in Wrike as compared to other tools. We are looking to replace Wrike because we need support for workflow. Another issue with Wrike is that they bring a lot of versions of the tool, which it's not so easy. They bring new versions very frequently, and these versions look similar. For example, we are using robots to read the tasks in the tools, which is problematic with Wrike because it is changing very frequently."
"We feel that the actual project reports and roll-ups could be a lot different. We are seeking something more for the dashboard. We would like a high-level dashboard that can be broken down into individual product roll-ups and tasks that are assigned. If you assign someone to a task, it assigns them all of the tasks under that. We want to be able to break those down so that a person doesn't have an 800 task list, for example. We want more separation with that and a higher-level dashboard experience."
Microsoft Project is ranked 2nd in Project Management Software with 77 reviews while Wrike is ranked 6th in Project Management Software with 58 reviews. Microsoft Project is rated 8.0, while Wrike is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Project writes "A stable solution that very accurately runs projects". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Wrike writes "Convenient Tool for Project and Task Management, comes with extra features including Analytics and Reporting ". Microsoft Project is most compared with Asana, Jira, Microsoft Project Server, Smartsheet and Bitrix24, whereas Wrike is most compared with Asana, monday.com, Adobe Workfront, Trello and Smartsheet. See our Microsoft Project vs. Wrike report.
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