Wrike vs Teamwork vs Productive: In-Depth Comparison

While Wrike vs Teamwork are both powerful project management tools in their own ways, are they the best choice for your business?

If you’re looking to take your project financial planning and business reporting to the next level, chances are that the answer is no.

We’ll discuss the benefits and downsides of these two solutions (with user reviews) and then discuss how they compare to Productive, a unified platform for comprehensive agency management.

Wrike is a project management tool with standout features for resource planning management and scheduling.

Key features:

Wrike’s best selling point includes powerful project management features, expanded to include resourcing and budgeting. It’s also a fairly customizable solution (featuring a customizable dashboards system, custom fields for tasks, automations, etc.), so teams and project managers can collaborate in the way they prefer most.

Source: G2

These are some of the basic features needed for basic project planning and business workflows.

However, the tool falls behind on its financial features. Budgeting and billable hours management are available only in the highest pricing tier, and in general, the reporting could be more advanced according to customer reviews:

Source: Capterra

Teamwork is a cloud-based project management platform with task management tools and resource allocation capabilities.

Key features include:

Similarly to Wrike, Teamwork is one of the best project management apps if you’re interested in essential collaboration features and supporting the project management process, while benefitting from some advanced features.

Source: Capterra

However, there are some quirks. For example, budgeting lacks some advanced customization options, and accounting integrations include only QuickBooks and not Xero. So, if you’re looking for truly powerful features for business finances, you might want to consider some Teamwork substitutes, such as Productive.

Productive is an end-to-end platform for managing agency workflows in businesses of all shapes and sizes (marketing, consultancies, software development, creative teams, etc.).

Some of its key features include:

We’ll discuss three main features that set Productive apart from Teamwork or Wrike: resource scheduling, financial management, and reporting.

Wrike is a good resourcing solution, but there’s one notable feature missing. Employees can add time off and sick leave through their calendar, which is then applied to the global company calendar, so resources can’t be scheduled then. However, there’s no way to handle time-off requests and approvals through the platform itself, which is a built-in feature in Productive.

It’s the same with Teamwork, although an additional downside is that there’s a lack of reporting options associated with resourcing in general; for example, a revenue recognition and profitability system. A G2 review states that they’re “not really able to do extensive tracking regarding profitability and reporting” in the software.

In Productive, your resource scheduling is connected to financial management.

How does it work?

Your employees have all their associated info, such as cost rates, holidays, and time off. When you handle your allocation, this data is used to create a real-time report for your revenue, profit margins, and budget burn over time. Changing your allocation updates these metrics in real time.

If you want to take your agency’s financial planning to another level, Productive is your best choice by far.

While Wrike does offer budgeting and billable hours management, these capabilities are only available if you invest in the most advanced pricing tier. Compare this to Productive, which integrates budgeting on the core level of the platform and offers it as part of the most affordable pricing tier.

With Productive, you’ll be managing your comprehensive financial data by managing employee data, assigning cost rates, bundling services into rate cards to simplify generating deals and budgets, creating and sending invoices (in the platform or with Productive’s Integrations), and accessing detailed budgeting reports (such as estimated time, billable time, total revenue, costs, current profit, profit margin, and more).

Productive supports all types of pricing models, including hourly, project, hybrid, and retainer. You can also slit up budgets into multiple phases to manage long-term projects more easily.

While Teamwork also provides some budgeting features in the lower-priced tiers, their budget creator is more limited, especially regarding expense management.

There are no options to add markup, reimbursement, quantity, or mark expenses as non-billable, or even specify which services are included in the budget.

While Productive has all of these additional options and more, you can also streamline the process by using the Simple Budget Editor instead to input essential data only.

Finally, when it comes to accounting software solutions integrations, Productive takes the lead again. Wrike provides no native integrations for accounting as of yet (though there is an API if you have time to tackle this yourself). Teamwork provides QuickBooks, and Productive has native Xero, QuickBooks, and Exact integrations.

Business intelligence is connected to capabilities like resourcing and financials. Basically, the more in-depth these features are, the better the general reporting is.

For both Teamwork and Wrike, users report that they have basic reporting capabilities but could be more advanced.

Wrike offers the following features for reporting:

Again, keep in mind that Wrike’s budgeting, billable hours tracking, as well as advanced reporting and BI (including utilization, forecasting, and customizable dashboards) are included only in the highest-paid tier.

In comparison, Productive provides many of its reporting features as part of the more affordable paid plans (learn more about Productive’s Pricing).

Teamwork offers the following for reporting:

Within the features Teamwork offers, there’s no mention of revenue recognition or any financial forecasting in general, which can significantly impact the decision-making process.

With Productive, reporting pulls from various data sources across your platform to deliver insights into complex project details, including budgeting, resourcing, time tracking, and more.

Here are some of the core features of Productive’s Reporting:

You can also use Productive’s powerful financial forecasting features to manage revenue recognition, profitability insights, and budget burn across projects. This also includes metrics for your internal teams, such as forecasted sales revenue.

With project revenue recognition, you can get a more accurate overview of revenue on fixed-free projects, understand exactly which financial items contribute to your recognized revenue, and manage spikes in profit and loss.

Productive can handle revenue recognized on a single date (start of budget, upon delivery), and spread across the duration of your project

To summarize, Wrike and Teamwork are both solid project management apps. Wrike is best used as a resource management tool, while Teamwork is a client-facing option with a range of tools for successful project delivery.

Businesses interested in a management tool that considers various agency processes won’t be too disappointed with either. Additionally, both tools offer a free plan for startups and individuals.

However, Productive is the clear winner for agencies interested in advanced financial management and forecasting. This tool provides all of the features necessary to manage projects and resources while also enabling top-tier support for accounting and business intelligence.

You can also check out a 14-day free trial to test the tool out. Book a demo with Productive today to learn more.