Wrike vs. Asana vs. Productive (2025) Comparison Guide

The main difference between Wrike vs Asana and Productive is their core focus and depth of features: Asana prioritizes ease of use and task management, while Wrike is flexible for larger teams with custom and complex workflows. Productive on the other hand completely takes care of project management and increases the efficiency of agency operations.

On the surface, all three are project management software with similar features and different pricing. However, if you dig a bit deeper, both superficial and significant differences start to pop up.

Wrike and Asana are both project management software, meaning that they are designed to support your projects from start to finish. However, Productive is made to support professional service companies as a whole, not just the way they handle projects.

Therefore, right off the bat, Productive is a tailored software solution for managing your business (from marketing agencies, consultancies, to professional service firms).

Wrike and Asana sell project management, which includes must-have features like:

Productive’s users get all of the features mentioned above + advanced financial forecasting capabilities and a streamlined CRM system in the form of an integrated Sales Pipeline.

In other words, Asana and Wrike offer fragmented project management, Productive provides a complete business operating system that connects your entire workflow, from lead to invoice, with real-time financial insights.

If you’re here for the project management part, skip the next section. In case you’re running an agency or professional service company, keep on reading because we’re getting to the best part.

Productive is an all-in-one project management platform. It’s designed to support companies of all shapes and sizes with their day-to-day operations, from tracking leads all the way to collecting post-project completion insights.

A unique feature of Productive is its advanced budgeting and resource management support, which gives you full control over your company’s financial future with utilization and capacity forecasting capabilities.

Productive saves the time and effort spent on managing multiple tools by becoming their single source of truth. Let’s expand on that with a quick overview of Productive’s key features to show how it manages to unite multiple tools into one comprehensive platform.

Productive’s Project Management offers six customizable project views, including Kanban and Gantt, which help teams organize their work as it suits them most.

Additionally, there’s the Time Tracking feature, with an integrated time tracker that can be used on the desktop, the option to manually add your times, or even pull them automatically from your resource bookings.

You can invite clients to your projects for free and cooperate directly on the platform, streamlining your communications. Productive also offers project and task templates for easy project initiation and execution.

With Productive’s Budgeting feature, you can get full control of your budgets on a single platform, whether you’re working on fixed, hourly, or mixed-price projects. Productive offers support for retainers with automatic budget creation, and for complex projects by letting you split up your budgets along phases.

Budgeting also enables automatic Billing and Purchase Orders, which simplify the administrative side of financial management and ensure that you’ve got all of the correct data in one place.

Employees and their time are the most valuable resources in any company. Productive’s Resource Planning lets you book your employees’ time and check your hiring needs for a bigger team even before taking on new projects with placeholders.

Productive integrates leave management into its resource plans, so you can accurately gauge your real utilization, and even forecast it. Additionally, you can also forecast your budget spend until project deadlines, as well as your profit and profit margins.

All of this gives you the chance to make informed decisions based on timely data and get the most out of your firm’s resources.

Productive’s Reporting comes with a library of 50+ templates that you can customize with your own parameters thanks to custom fields. You can get a visual representation of your data by choosing between six main chart types, such as column, line, or donut.

You can create reporting dashboards that you can share with specific teams and teammates. Finally, by setting up a Pulse you can automatically get key reports in your email, or even add additional recipients to share them with other project stakeholders.

Two additional features that Productive offers are Sales and Docs. With Sales, you can track leads through the sales funnel, manage reasons for lost deals, forecast your sales revenue, and convert won deals into projects automatically.

With Docs, Productive lets you include your documentation with your project activities so that you can tag teammates directly from pages and simplify how you collaborate and share information across project teams.

Integrations include: Xero, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Breathe, Zapier, Slack, Jira, Google Calendar, and more.

Productive also comes with a macOS and Windows mobile app version, so you can stay up to date with your project on whichever devices you prefer to use.

With Productive, you get more than just a project management tool—you get a complete system built to support your entire company. It helps you manage everything from project planning and management, time tracking, to financial forecasting and sales, all in one place.

You’ll gain real-time visibility into your budgets, profit margins, and team capacity, so you can make smarter decisions without juggling multiple tools.

It’s ideal for professional service companies that want to work more efficiently, cut software clutter, and stay on top of both project delivery and business performance.

According to the 2022 SoDa Global Agency Landscape Report, as many as 31% of agencies feel their financial visibility is “shaky”. Furthermore, only 14% of agencies have an integrated platform that enables real-time analysis, and only 33% track their project gross margin.

All of this goes to say that having a solid grasp on your project and overall company finances can put you a step beyond the competition. Productive is that step beyond.

Compared to most other project management tools, this software infuses financial visibility and real-time insights into key data.

In short, choose Productive if you want to find a go-to solution for most business and project-related operations, and take your performance to the next level with advanced financial management.

In case you want to learn what financial forecasting does for your business, view the webinar below:

Check out Productive with a 14-day free trial.

If you’re choosing between Asana and Wrike, you’re likely looking for a reliable project management tool that can support your team’s daily operations and long-term goals. While both platforms offer task tracking, collaboration tools, and multiple project views, they focus on different areas.

In this section, we’ll break down the core features of Asana and Wrike to help you see how they compare, so you can decide which one fits your workflow best.

Wrike is a project management platform that supports diverse teams in driving their efficiency, improving visibility, and delivering business outcomes faster.

Wrike offers workspace configuration and project visibility through four main project views, including Gantt and Kanban. Additional features that support project management are pre-built project templates and custom item types for tasks.

Wrike also offers time tracking with a live timer, manual input, and a timesheet locking feature. It’s a great tool for workflow automation.

Wrike’s reporting provides all of the essential features you would expect from collaboration software, including shareable, customizable dashboards and data visualizations. Wrike also lets you schedule reports so they arrive in your inbox, and it allows you to manage multiple projects by comparing data with project portfolio tools.

It keeps your team up-to-date with its direct reports.

Wrike offers key workforce planning features with resource booking and team workload charts that help project managers spot uneven team member workloads. With Wrike, you can also track your hourly rates on the platform for essential project budget management and oversight.

Though Wrike has app integrations with various work collaboration and communication tools, such as Slack, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Jira, it doesn’t integrate with popular project accounting tools such as Xero or QuickBooks. This is a big drawback of this work and project management app.

Wrike provides a macOS and Windows desktop app and an application for mobile devices.

The main benefit of Wrike is that you’re getting solid project management software that comes with fully-fledged collaboration and project tracking features, as well as the added benefit of essential resource management, budgeting, and automatic billing support.

It can be a good choice for agencies that are just now starting to branch out into automation, custom workflows, and project management software.

Find out more about project management: End-to-End Project Management: A Beginner’s Guide

Additionally, Wrike can be a suitable pick for startups, as it offers a scaled-down free version that includes task and project management only.

Although Wrike is a good starter solution for agencies, it doesn’t offer fully comprehensive agency management support. There is no built-in CRM solution, and users report that some features that could be expanded and handled with more depth are reporting, basic capabilities for managing resources, and budgeting:

(Source: Capterra)

Consider that in Wrike, budgeting is only available if you invest in the most advanced plan. Compared to Wrike, Productive builds your workflows on the basis of your budgeting, meaning that essential capabilities are available from the most affordable plan onwards.

Therefore, Wrike might not be the most suitable option for agencies that want to invest in their future by getting a grip on their financial health.

Check out our Wrike vs. ClickUp vs. Productive comparison: Wrike vs ClickUp vs Productive: An In-Depth Comparison

Asana is one of the biggest Wrike competitors. Wrike focuses on workflows, while Asana simplifies how its users manage their tasks and work. Let’s zoom in on how this tool handles basic day-to-day project management, reporting, and resources.

Asana offers five different project views, which include Gantt and Kanban. Some specific functionalities that make task management simpler with Asana are custom labels, the notification inbox for project alerts, and the personalized tasks dashboard.

Asana also provides time tracking with an embedded timer or manual entry for your team members.

Asana offers key functionalities for supporting project analytics, including reporting dashboards, a templates library, and the option for various data visualizations. You can also filter your reports and share dashboards with various teammates.

Asana helps companies manage their teams’ workloads with a real-time chart for visualizing capacity on a timeline, with filtering for specific people or projects. Additionally, you can easily reassign and rebalance your bookings to adjust workloads across team members.

We’ve added Asana to our top capacity planning software review list, along with 13 other tools.

Asana offers a wide range of integrations and solutions that support company operations. It also provides a native desktop app for macOS and Windows, along with a mobile version.

Asana can be a great choice for teams that are looking to simplify project management. It has streamlined functionalities that include task management, collaboration, and efficient resource scheduling. It can also provide support for various types of client projects, including those Agile or Scrum.

We talk more about managing Agile and Scrum projects in our detailed website project management guide.

Due to Asana’s simplicity, users might find that the user interface is also somewhat more streamlined in comparison to more complex software, which can be compatible with smaller teams and startups lacking experience with project management software platforms.

Asana is not the most suitable solution for firms that are looking for more advanced management support. A review by a Capterra user reports the following:

Asana also lacks the ability to manage your project budgets and get advanced financial analytics and forecasting features. While this might not seem like a large minus for smaller agencies, this also means that Asana lacks billing support, which is a useful feature for businesses of all sizes.

It also means that if you go with Asana, you’ll be missing out on tracking key business management data that can help you realize your growth potential.

In the final section of our comparison guide, we’ll take a look at the key features that these tools share and compare Wrike and Asana side by side. We’ll also include Productive’s work management approach.

Asana, Wrike, and Productive all offer extensive project management support in the form of a time tracking tool, task management features, automated notifications, and various project views. Although all three solutions are strong picks, some users have reported dissatisfaction with Asana’s inability to open a task in full-screen mode (Source: Capterra), while some Wrike users had issues with notifications disappearing instead of being stored in their inbox (Source: Capterra, G2).

However, these differences are slight enough to say that all three tools can be a good choice for project management support.

While Asana doesn’t offer much budgeting, Productive and Wrike both have certain budgeting software capabilities. Both tools let you monitor your billable vs non-billable hours, set hourly rates, get budget-related analytics, and generate invoices from the platforms. However, the two tools have different approaches, in that Productive offers the feature in its most basic pricing plans, while Wrike treats it as an additional feature for its most advanced business plan.

Therefore, for companies of all sizes that want to manage their projects with a larger focus on the financial side of their performance, Productive would be the best choice.

Asana, Wrike, and Productive all offer resource management in some capacity, including workload charts that help project managers visualize their resource capacity and balance allocation. However, two advanced features offered by Productive are built-in leave management and financial forecasting.

Although both Wrike and Asana offer integrations for managing days off and absences, Productive lets you define and associate leave on the platform. Additionally, Productive lets you forecast financial metrics such as utilization, profit margins, and project budgets for robust financial management.

Therefore, for advanced resource scheduling and management, Productive is your best bet.

Although all three tools offer reporting capabilities, users frequently mention that Wrike and Asana have certain cons in this area. For example, an Asana user mentioned that “reports that did exist were sometimes frustratingly incomplete” and that Asana should “provide more exhaustive reports” to give project managers a better idea of project performance (Source: Capterra).

As for Wrike, a review by a Capterra user has mentioned that “customization options” are lacking, making it difficult to tailor data to specific company needs. Productive might be able to resolve these issues by providing a large number of specialised templates, with custom fields that help you add parameters not tracked by the platform.

Due to this and the financial forecasting feature, our vote goes to Productive as the best choice for reporting, though all three types of software support it to an extent.

Learn more about how Productive supports agency reporting:

Many teams look for Wrike and Asana alternatives because they eventually understand that they need more than just task management.

Asana is great for simple task management, and Wrike has flexibility and cool automated workflows, but both can fall short when it comes to deeper needs like financial tracking, forecasting, or full operational visibility.

Companies often stitch together extra tools just to cover budgeting, invoicing, sales tracking, or real-time reporting. That means more complexity, higher costs, and scattered (or fragmented) data.

If you’ve outgrown your current setup or feel like you’re constantly jumping between platforms to manage one project, it might be time to look for a more integrated solution that keeps everything under one roof. Since Productive is a robust agency tool, it’s best suited for companies that are ready to dig deeper into their workflows in order to optimize profitability and performance:

You can learn from ENKI’s story of a small team delivering big projects using Productive.

Although Productive has excellent learning help docs, with both written and video materials, as well as highly-praised customer service and success specialists that can help you set up your accounts, teams that are looking to be onboarded in a matter of hours might not find what they’re looking for here.

However, even smaller companies could do worse than consider Productive, as it’s a solution that will be able to scale with your growth – this means that you won’t have to switch tools and export all of your critical data during sensitive times.

Another great thing about this particular project management software platform is that it offers a 14-day free trial, meaning that you can try it out first, with no strings attached.

Finally, after the in-depth app comparisons between these three project management software platforms, we’ll summarize our findings here.

Your choice between Wrike against Asana, and Productive will likely amount to the question of how robust you want your platform to be, and what your company (not only the project) needs.

With Productive, you can support your project management, resource planning, financial management, and simple sales tracking, all in one platform.

Interested in learning more? Book a demo with Productive today to find out how you can scale your business with an integrated solution for professional service firms.

Whether Asana, Wrike, or any other software, such as Productive, is the best solution for your projects will depend on your industry, your company size, and your team composition. However, speaking generally, when comparing Asana vs Wrike, Asana’s streamlined approach to project management might be a better choice for smaller agencies. However, teams that are looking for software that has some advanced features, such as budget tracking, might want to opt for Wrike as the better alternative software.

Wrike can be a good choice for teams that are looking for comprehensive project management capabilities. It has built-in time tracking, essential resource management features that help manage larger teams across individual projects or different ongoing projects, and some basic budgeting capabilities in the more expensive plans. However, if you manage a big team or need more advanced financial management, a more all-in-one project management software that supports forecasting might be more suitable, such as Productive.

Project managers can use Asana to manage their work and projects in various ways, from setting up custom workflows to implementing popular methodologies such as Agile or Scrum. Asana offers multiple project views to support this, as well as custom task fields that can help you define your daily tasks and cooperate with the entire team however you best see fit.

There are many alternatives to Asana, such as Wrike, for somewhat more advanced project management capabilities with basic expense tracking. A tool like Productive goes even further by serving as your source of truth for all your business operations on a single platform, from sales tracking to advanced financial insights.

As a generalized project management tool, Wrike can support various popular project management methodologies, including Waterfall. Some of Wrike’s features that support Waterfall’s sequential and planning-based approach to project execution are Gantt charts, workload charts, and task dependencies.

Although Wrike is not specialized Agile software, as a customizable solution for project tracking and management, it can support Agile methodologies. Wrike helps managers organize their projects and manage tasks with Kanban boards with drag-and-drop task cards, create and prioritize backlogs, plan roadmaps, track sprints, and more.