Trello vs Wrike Compared (2025): Review + Bonus Tool

A lot of project and agency management software solutions appear super similar at first glance. They all target roughly the same audience and provide certain project planning and task management features. Although they all seem similar on the surface, there are significant differences that you should be aware of before making your purchase decision.

Trello is an online project management tool that provides task management and workflows to managers and their project teams. The key features of Trello include various project views, workspace templates, and project-specific data visualizations.

Wrike is also a project management tool for various agency project teams, but it has some advanced features compared to Trello. Along with essential project management and time tracking, Wrike includes resource booking, workload management charts, and budgeting and billing capabilities.

Compared to Trello and Wrike, Productive is different in that it’s an all-in-one professional service management software. This means that it goes beyond simply supporting projects — it supports your business as a whole.

Some of Productive’s standout features (in addition to project and team collaboration support) are business budgeting, financial forecasting, CRM, and an integrated Sales Pipeline for lead management.

Below, we’ll make a detailed comparison of Trello vs. Wrike for project management, managing company resources, and tracking finances.

Both tools focus on straightforward project management. However Wrike has more advanced features in terms of reporting and collaboration. Trello does an excellent job at task organization, but it lacks detailed project tracking (e.g., the time spent on the most important activities, or tracking project status updates in a consolidated view).

Wrike and Trello provide most of the same basic task management features. A big plus of Wrike is that it has customizable workflows, resource view and real time reports.

On the other hand, Trello’s basic task management functionality can be a problem for larger organizations working on complex projects with multiple phases, which often involve dependencies, budgets, timelines, and other factors.

What makes Productive a standout choice here is its integrated and easy approach to task management:

Productive makes task management more efficient with its subtasks and milestones, a task activity log that can be filtered by different update categories, customizable notifications stored in your inbox, easy file attachments, and custom fields.

This approach makes it easier to stay on top of project progress. 

The elephant in the room we should address at this point is time tracking. Many companies struggle with this because forcing their staff to track their billable hours seems like micromanagement and adds unnecessary non-billable work.

Productive and Wrike offer multiple methods for teams to track their hours, including a live timer and manual input. Trello doesn’t come with a built-in agency time tracking tool but instead offers various integrations to provide this feature.

If you’d like your team to track time on tasks, avoid using fragmented tools that require moving data between sheets and integrations. You should utilize features like Productive’s built-in time tracking, which can be placed on your desktop (so you don’t have to switch between tabs to start or stop your tracking).

Additionally, if you book workloads using Productive’s resource management, you can automatically generate time entries for your teams.

Wrike and Trello both give users the option to switch up their project views. In Trello, you can switch between a Kanban-style, timeline, calendar, and table view. With Wrike, you can choose between table, board, Gantt chart, chart view, and calendar views.

Productive offers the most options out of the three. Our users can structure their task assignments in:

How your team collaborates on tasks is a really big deal. Having to bounce between different Google Drive folders or wasting time going through too many boards destroys your productivity. In Trello, all collaboration happens on task comments, which isn’t ideal for big teams.

Productive’s collaboration Docs and file sharing can be linked to your custom workflows by tagging team members and creating tasks directly from pages. We talk more about this topic in our what is end to end project management guide.

With all three powerful tools, you can create and store project and task templates to get quicker management for future projects. Trello has community-based templates for various project types, including those for project management for graphic designers and software development boards. Wrike also has a huge template base that can be customized.

Users of Productive report the following:

Read the full story of how Clear Launch Gained Predictability and Consistency With Productive.

Trello is a popular PM tool because of its simplicity. It provides a highly visual and straightforward interface that can be suitable for newcomers to project management tools. It also has a free (but limited) plan. Trello can be a good option for smaller freelance teams that require basic PM capabilities and are used to Kanban.

That’s why we’ve added it to our big creative agency project management software list.

Wrike can be a solid pick for a project management solution, as it offers most of the basic features that teams need for a streamlined project management process. Despite some minor shortcomings, users generally appreciate Wrike for its work organization and collaboration capabilities.

When it comes to resource management, Wrike and Productive are more in-depth solutions compared to Trello, which lacks resource management capabilities. Let’s expand on that statement below.

Compared to Wrike and Trello, Productive can track your team’s hours, manage their sick days and leave, and gain insights into utilization across various key metrics, including seniority, team, services, clients, and more. 

Our users also get:

Aside from utilization insights, the most powerful feature is the ability to forecast various agency KPIs. First, by creating and assigning your project resources, you can create a comprehensive and highly reactive resource plan.

Then, once you’ve allocated your resources, you can forecast your budget spend until the end of the project to check whether you’ll stay in the green or cross into the red. Then, by switching to the profitability view, you can also forecast your profit margins.

If you input any changes into your plan, these charts will update in real time to reflect them.

Forecasting can also be applied to your utilization. Trello falls short here because it has no forecasting options or utilization tracking capabilities. There’s no visibility into team workload distribution, and this isn’t a good thing in the long term.

Wrike on the other hand has basic forecasting packed as Resource Bookings. You can use Wrike to estimate how much time each job role or user needs to spend on upcoming initiatives, and that’s petty much it.

In Productive you can forecast your availability across different teams or skill sets to determine whether you have enough resources to take on a new project and decide whether you need to start hiring more talent.

Real results speak real volumes- DotDev grew 50% using Productive. If this caught your eye, definitely check out our short, but detailed resource planning guide.

Although Wrike has essential features for workforce scheduling, it requires extra integrations for resource planning. Productive is the clear winner here. Its fully-fledged resource map includes days off and gives full resourcing visibility, which is particularly useful for complex projects.

Wrike and Productive bot have forecasting capabilities. The difference is that Productive’s forecasting is more robust. It helps anticipate and resolve roadblocks on large-scale projects (as well as smaller ones):

You can learn more about how 4Site Interactive Studios improve its profitability with Productive.

Therefore, if you need comprehensive resource management capabilities, look no further than Productive. If you’re interested in hearing more about agency metrics, check out our agency utilization article.

In comparison to Productive, Trello doesn’t offer specialized resource scheduling and management features. It supports workload allocation by providing easy visibility into tasks through custom cards, as well as reporting dashboards that enable you to visualize assignments per team member and due dates for improved project scheduling.

However, this support is relatively lightweight compared to the best resource management tools on the market.

Compared to Trello, Wrike offers more advanced support for resource planning. With resource bookings, Wrike enables project managers to request resources from team leads, allowing them to assess the demand for specific types of skills or job roles.

This also supports easier workload visualization and balancing. You can also check out our list of the best workforce planning software.

According to data from the PM World Journal, one in six IT projects has a 200% cost overrun. Projects often surpass their scope and budget for different reasons, so having an integrated financial management solution is a no-brainer.

Below, we’ll assess how well Trello, Wrike, and Productive handle project (and company) finances.

Trello has no financial capabilities at all, its users cannot track budgets, costs, or profitability. It requires separate tools for any financial management. This eliminates Trello as a good choice for budgeting and profitability metrics.

Wrike has essential support for budgeting and the creation of real-time reports. However, it may come at a higher price than comparable tools that are more financially oriented.

Productive supports advanced financial management by taking a budget-first approach to projects:

Productive’s Budgeting also supports retainer projects with the recurring budget feature, which lets you set dates and occurrences for budgets to generate automatically. For complex projects, you can also break down your budgeting into phases to achieve simpler money management.

This also means that your members will track their hours directly across budgets, immediately generating key data such as billable versus non-billable hours.

Productive’s budgeting also includes support for Invoicing. Pull the remaining amounts directly from your budgets on the platform and generate brand-friendly bills that you can send directly from the platform.

If you’re working on an hourly-priced project, you can even attach your timesheets directly to the invoice to speed up the approval process, improving your cashflow in the long term.

Users of Productive report that:

Additionally, Productive’s Reporting provides managers with a library of more than 50 agency-focused project templates. With custom fields, your reports can be additionally populated with parameters that are not tracked by the platform.

Reports can be easily turned into visualizations, arranged on a private or shared dashboard, or even synced up with your team’s or external emails so that updated data is delivered on a regular basis. 

Trello doesn’t support integrated project budgeting or invoicing. There are some board templates that support the manual entry and calculation of data. Additionally, there’s an expense-tracking integration that can export your data to Excel. However, these processes can be liable to human error, whereas project management systems can deliver these calculations at a lower time cost, and with a higher degree of accuracy.

When it comes to reporting, on its own, Trello offers some basic project-specific data and visualizations that can be useful for lightweight projects, but lack the deeper insights that are necessary for mid-sized and larger agencies.

As mentioned, Trello doesn’t have advanced reporting or comprehensive analytics features, so we’ll exclude it from this section. Wrike, on the other hand, provides essential project budget management, allowing you to track your billable and non-billable hours, manage hourly rates on the platform, and generate invoices. Wrike also comes packed with reporting templates.

Source: Capterra

Productive approaches financial reporting in a different way. The cloud-based project management tool comes with:

Productive’s detailed reporting provides managers with a library of more than 50 agency-focused project templates. With custom fields, your reports can be additionally populated with parameters that are not tracked by the platform.

These custom reports can be easily turned into visualizations, arranged on a private or shared dashboard, or even synced up with your team’s or external emails so that updated data is delivered on a regular basis. 

Trello doesn’t support integrated project budgeting or invoicing. However, some board templates support the manual entry and calculation of data. Additionally, there’s an expense-tracking integration that can export your data to Excel.
 
However, these processes are prone to human error, whereas PM systems can perform these calculations at a lower time cost and with a higher degree of accuracy.

In comparison with Trello, Wrike is one step higher when it comes to the financial elements of project management. Is Wrike a good solution for financial management and reporting – yes, but Productive is better.

If you’re considering Wrike as a budgeting solution, keep in mind that this feature is currently only available for the most expensive, premium plans.

In Productive, budgeting is a basic functionality with its most affordable business plan.

There’s no clear answer to a question like “Is Tool X better than Tool Y?”, because all PM tools are built for a particular purpose. Therefore, Trello, Wrike, and Productive can all be a good pick depending on your company’s needs.

In comparison to the previous two tools, it’s the only unified project and agency management software solution.

If you’re looking for comprehensive support for your daily processes, or you want to dig deeper into the financial side of your business, you should book a demo with Productive today.

It depends on your needs. Trello is simpler and great for visual task tracking, while Wrike offers more advanced features like resource management and budgeting. If you need deeper financial insights and an all-in-one solution, a tool like Productive may be a better fit.

There are a couple of possible Trello competitors, depending on the features you consider as the most important. For example, a similarly simple tool with Kanban-style task management and agile methodology support is Asana.

If we’re looking for an option that expands upon Trello’s workflow and collaboration features, some popular competitors are Wrike and Productive. There’s also a detailed Wrike vs Asana review article you might want to check out.

There are a couple of possible Trello competitors, depending on the features you consider as the most important. For example, a similarly simple tool with Kanban-style task management and agile methodology support is Asana. If we’re looking for an option that expands upon Trello’s workflow and collaboration features, some popular competitors are Wrike and Productive.

Related: Wrike vs Asana vs Productive

Yes, project managers can use Trello to manage their team’s assignments by adding deadlines and tracking status updates, connecting them with subtasks, and viewing all assigned cards to balance workloads. With templates, agencies that work in a fast-paced environment, such as digital marketing agencies, can easily start organizing their next projects.