In an online age, it’s hard to feel accomplished when you finish your work. All your work is done through the internet, all the parts of your project are intangible, and you can’t see the progress you’re making. It’s not like building a house—you can’t see the walls go up, or feel the wood beneath your hands.
So for many business teams, it can be hard to stay motivated. Humans are designed to be motivated when they see their progress, and the tasks ahead. So how can you help keep your team motivated?
Tools like Wrike and Trello can help. These allow you to make your online items visible tasks—and to see exactly where you are in the process of accomplishing your goals. Wrike and Trello both want to help motivate teams—but which one is better for you? Let’s dive into today’s review, and compare their price, ease of use, and customizations for your team so you can see which one is right for you!
Wrike vs. Trello: Meet the Sites
Wrike
Wrike is a project management application service, based out of San Jose, California. It uses Kanban Boards to help take your tasks from to-do, to in-progress, to done! Used by employees at Google and Airbnb, Wrike is a “fast, easy, efficient task manager.”
Wrike’s tasks live as cards beneath a certain label (the standards ones are in-progress and done, but you can customize them to your needs, whether that’s waiting for feedback, or out for delivery). You can add subtasks and notes one these tasks, as well as tag your fellow team members.
Wrike also allows you to attach photos, documents, and videos, and have subtasks within a task. Each task-card can be modified to meet your needs.
Trello
Trello is also a Kanban-style list-making application. “Trello cards are your portal to more organized work—where every single part of your task can be managed, tracked, and shared with teammates.” Trello is used by Google employees as well, along with employees at Squarespace.
Trello cards function as individual tasks—whether that’s buying groceries, scheduling a meeting, or organizing marketing materials. Each of these cards is organized into lists (such as to-do, in progress, done, and long-term projects), so you can see where each task is in the pipeline. Finally, the lists are on boards—your whole project. On these cards, you can have checklists, due dates, attach files, or make comments and assign the card and task to particular teammates.
Trello is all about the progress of tasks—so when tasks are in progress or completed, they’re moved to the correct list. Since assignees are broadly displayed, you can see what everyone is working on—and how the team as a whole is doing too! Gone are the days wondering if you’re the only one working.
Wrike vs. Trello: Ease of Use
Wrike
Wrike helps make using their app easy by giving you an onboarding process—asking you what you will be using Wrike for, your position in your team, and even what kind of business you’re a part of, so they can give you customized templates.
One unique feature of Wrike is that it gives you the ability to comment directly on a photo in a task itself. Don’t want to type “there’s a weird red spot about two inches from the edge of this phot by the third door?” Just click on the exact problem spot, and comment from there.
Moving cards involves just click and dragging, and adjusting scheduling of tasks works the exact same way. Want to know what you have to do today? Your dashboard shows your to-dos from team projects, as well as individual tasks that you created for yourself.
Wrike also integrates with different tools—from Google Drive and Microsoft office to Excel and RSS.
Trello
Trello, on the other hand, doesn’t offer any sort of onboarding system, except for one example video. Fortunately, using Trello is intuitive—hit “new to create a list, board, or card, and then click on it to edit and add more details. Trello also offers helpful templates for different types of businesses.
But Trello does have a secret weapon of its own—an automation “Butler.” This automation system helps you with tasks by moving lists, bringing upcoming deadlines to your attention, and schedule team member’s assignments. Trello also integrates with many different apps—from Slack to Google Drive to Confluence to Evernote.
Conclusion
Though Trello doesn’t offer an onboarding system like Wrike, it doesn’t need it—Trello is easy to use from start to finish. Though Wrike also offers some unique commenting tools, Trello’s automation butler and wider variety of integrations makes it easier to use Trello for most anything.
Wrike: 4/5
Trello: 4.5/5
Wrike vs. Trello: Pricing
Wrike
Wrike’s pricing can be complicated. They do offer a free version—though it is rather bare-bones. In the free version of Wrike, you have access to board view, can create tasks, share files, integrate with Drive and Office, but have limits on how many active tasks you can have.
The next level of Wrike, Professional, costs $9.80 per user per month, and gives you access to a gnat chart view, along with integrations with MS project, RSS. You also get access to a sharable dashboard.
After that is the Business level of Wrike, which costs $24.80 per user per month. This allows you to customize fields (so more than just to-do and done), see the workflow of which employees have completed which tasks, and real time reports on how quickly projects are getting done. You have access to a calendar view as well, along with time trackers and an automation engine.
You can also have “add-on features,” special engines Wrike has created to help you pick the right person for a task, or for writing projects. However, to add these, you have to talk directly to customer support.
Trello
Trello also has a free program—but theirs is much more useful for your everyday needs. On the free plan, you can create unlimited cards and add unlimited members—though you can only create 10 boards and use 50 automations. But you can still assign people to certain tasks, and put due dates on the cards as well.
Trello’s Business plan costs $10/month, and gives unlimited everything, as well as access to the dashboard view, timeline view, calendar view, and advanced checklists. You also get admin and security features—so this is a great plan for larger businesses that need to keep some customer information private.
Conclusion
Trello clearly pulls ahead here—their top-level price for all users is the same as Wrike’s first price for a single user! Trello also offers more features within a single package—and their free version has more features than Wrike’s free version as well.
Wrike: 3.5/5
Trello: 4.3/5
Conclusion: Wrike vs. Trello
Both Wrike and Trello are very similar tools—but Trello offers more features than Wrike. While Wrike has a snazzy onboarding process, and allows you to comment directly on photos and documents; Trello offers an automation butler and more integrations—all for a lower price. If you love being able to see your project, and want to help motivate your team to move their motivation from bleh to yeah! then Trello is a great tool for you. Want to test it out? Trello is offering a free 30-day trial, so you can see if it is right for you!Want to see how Trello stacks up against other productivity apps? Check out our review for Trello vs. Todoist and KanbanFlow vs. Trello!
