Review: Wrike (v. Basecamp)
A couple folks pointed out Wrike.com in the comments of some of my GoPlan posts as another option in the online project management game. To set the mood, I am a Basecamp user, have been so for a bit now. I go through phases with it, sometimes active, sometimes less so, but thus far it does what I need it to do. I don’t love it, but it does the baseline of what I need reasonably well. So I’m always on the lookout for new contenders, so I happily checked out Wrike and signed up for the 30 day trial of the most likely plan I would sign up for - the 15 user professional plan.
The short answer is that there are things I absolutely love about this service. I suspect, if left to my own devices, I’d probably come up with a service very similar to this - that brings with it the good as well as the bad. It’s treatment of users and generic handling of organizing tasks is fantastic. Unfortunately, it suffers in the UI and usability front enough that given that I need to work with a wide variety of clients on these projects it’s a show stopper. At this point I’m not switching of Basecamp - but I think Wrike’s foundation is a lot more interesting than Basecamp’s and with some tender loving designerly care I am really watching this to see how it evolves.
Pros:
· Universal membership only need one login no matter how many client accounts (v. Basecamp, 1 login per account)
· Excellent organizational system. Tasks, milestones, text and attachments all together under one hierarchy (v. Basecamp, todo, messages, milestones, files, text all completely separate and you have to somehow write in each how to find it’s related elements)
· Create tasks via email. Super convenient way to get things into Wrike. (v. Basecamp no email support of any sort)
Cons:
· User account management is intuitive and potentially very frustrating.
· No way to easily define the order of tasks and groups
· Odd naming conventions and little documentation are confusing
· The UI in general isn’t as intuitive as it could be
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Let me start with the good. For me, one of the most interesting things is that you are a user of Wrike when you register, not a member of a particular Basecamp account. That is, when I signed up for Basecamp I created an account and all the people I work with are given user logins as part of that account. What happens though is that several of my clients also have their own Basecamp accounts, so that means, I actually have several logins (my own and one for each client who has a Basecamp account). There’s no way to aggregate all my todo’s into one view - I have to login to each one separately. Since every account is global in Wrike, people can share tasks and groups (more on these later) with you and they all filter into your single account which you can organize and work with as you see fit. This is a huge benefit if you are a consultant who works with many clients. Of course, if you aren’t then this could be a non-issue.
The other monumental thing that I really appreciate about Wrike is their organizational system. There are basically two things in the Wrike universe - a Task, which has a little text, a start date, end date, duration, assignments and status - basically this combines a Basecamp ToDo item and Milestone (the division of which I have always hated and never understood in Basecamp land). Then there is a Group which contains an arbitrary number of tasks and/or groups, some text and it’s email notification status (so you can set it to alert you via email when certain things happen in the group). Also, wonderfully, any group or task can be contained by multiple groups, so if you want to organize things by Client you can create client based groups and if you additionally want to organize by task size (or whatever) you can put everything in size based groups, too. In this way groups act like Basecamp projects as well as tags.
Every group and task can have arbitrary attachments uploaded and associated with it - which allows you to very conveniently keep things together (something that Basecamp does not allow you to do - forcing you to upload files into a separate file manager and then kinda make notes of where to look for the file in your todo item. Bleach). I can not stress how great that is, and how frustrating Basecamp’s system is.
Also, every group and task has a big text area that can be edited at will. This allows cooperative writing - wiki style. The main problem with this and where it falls well short of Basecamp’s system is that there’s no version control on this - no sense of what it was in the past and who’s been editing it. If Wrike brought this up to speed, it’d be another big organizational win vs. Basecamp by keeping it in the single organizational hierarchy.
Oh and you can create new Tasks via email. That’s right, you get some email from a client and need to turn that into a task? Just forward it to a particular wrike address put an optional group you want to put it in and you’re done. It will be there within seconds (at least in my tests) right where you want it.
These things are, in my opinion, fundamentally better building blocks for the system. It allows everything to be well organized and all disparate bits to be kept together regardless of what type of data they happen to be. If you have a spec that is associated with a group of tasks, it’s right there with the group. If you have some images that will be needed to complete a task, boom, right there again. And if you’re working on this with a bunch of people and need to organize things differently, you are free to do so, so the process suits your workflow.
Unfortunately there’s a few problems to go with all this goodness. I think it’s a very programmerly system - that is, I can see database structure and naming in this. It’s pretty raw, in terms of intuitiveness and polish. Take something basic like creating new accounts. In Basecamp, it’s very, very easy, you go in to the account manager type in their name and email address and it happens - the entire process is intuitive from the management and user point ov view. In Wrike you can’t actually create an account - you need to share a task or group with an email address - which causes a flurry of emails to be sent out to that address. It took me a little while to figure this out.
Then, because that person gets an email saying that they now have access to this particular group or task that you’ve shared in addition to an email with their registration link - if they happen to get the “share” email before the “registration” email - things get very confusing. That is, they get to a page asking them to login or register, neither of which work. Registration with their email address, in fact, tells you that you are already registered. This caused a lot of confusion for me until I actually gave up assuming the system was broken only to find that the “registration” email showed up in my inbox sometime later. Sigh. It would kind of suck to submit a client to this sort of frustration.
Beyond that, there is a little trouble in the paradise of their organizational structure. One big issue is that there’s no way to group users. So if you are working with several clients and each client has several users who need access, there’s no way to create a “client group” and share groups and tasks with this group as a block. Instead you need to go one by one through all the email addresses for each thing you need to share. This is both, more work than it’s worth and error prone as it would be easy to accidentally leave someone off or even worse share with someone who wasn’t with the client. For some clients this privacy breach could be a serious issue.
Also, within a group, there’s no way to arbitrarily order it’s contents. That is, you can order alphabetically or by dates or what not, but there’s no way to give something a priority. In Basecamp, in fact, this is the only way to organize things and arguably the most useful. Here, you’ll have to precede the title of each task or group with a number, which is annoying especially if priorities change and you have to renumber everything. Beyond that, it only works from 0-9 - 10 will come before 1 since the ordering is alphabetical not numeric. They do this very thing - notably stopping at 9 - in their examples. This is very sub-optimal.
Those are the main problems and the ones really keeping me from switching over, but there’s some more nits I have. The programmerliness is also problematic in how things are named. For example, every task has an optional start and end date. Strangely, it also has a field for duration. I thought to myself, “Oh, that’s interesting, so you can say something starts on the 1st and last 4 days, instead of setting the end date.” But no, actually the duration has very little to do with the end date - it affects how the timeline view is drawn for that task, but other than that, doesn’t seem deal with an end date. I’m not sure how they envision this distinction being used.
They call everything Tasks but I think that is both an injustice and confusing. Both of these because a Task can be anything, it could be a meeting it could be a todo item or a repository for related attachments or just a note. And to call everything a Task is too limiting. Also for me a Group is a group of users - I wish they’d make Groups groups of users and rename what they currently call a Group a folder - which is a more standard term for how they are using it.
And some of the views are limiting - there’s tons of tasks within a group and there’s various ways to filter them. I’ve found myself in a wierd filter of a group that I didn’t think I’d set and wondering where all the tasks were. It would be nice if there was some indication of how many tasks completed and active you were not seeing. Otherwise, you may miss some very important things. Also if they provided an easy way to view all nested tasks within a group (that is, tasks within sub-groups of the current group).
Overall, I think Wrike is a really strong entrant into the online project management space. It’s got a really great foundation but is a little raw on top. I think that it wouldn’t take too much more effort for them to polish this thing up and for my purposes, I believe it would easily trump Basecamp’s usability. It is definitely worth checking out and I’m going to keep checking in on them to see how it progresses. For reals.
