Should you choose Wrike or Basecamp as your project management software? Both tools bring useful features. But what exactly are these features and what are the ways in which the platforms differ from each other? Check out our comparison below.

Basecamp

There are a couple of features which put Basecamp at a remove from many other project management services. For example, the tool lets you create custom settings so that clients could track the progress of projects directly. This frees you up from the redundant task of updating the status with the clients frequently. While creating the settings, you could specify which aspects of the project the clients get to see and edit. So that communication with the client could be centralized, you could also share messages and emails from clients to Basecamp.

Another feature that is not common in all project management features which you get in Basecamp is automatic check-in. Using it, you could create questions that your team members should answer on a periodic basis- be it daily, weekly or monthly. You could schedule the questions to be shared with either the whole team or only certain members of the team. You could also comment on the answers if you so choose to.

While team members could answer the questions you share using the automatic check-in feature in their own time, Basecamp also supports real-time communication. In fact, the features for this are so expansive you probably wouldn’t have to use any third-party communication solutions at all.

 Aside from commenting on tasks, you also could make use of group chat and message boards. Group chats are useful for casual communication among team members while message boards are ideal for communicating announcements or progress updates to a large number of teams. Then, there is also the ping feature which is meant for one-to-one communication.

Aside from these, you also get the gamut of basic features without which no project management tool will be complete- including ones that let you create and assign tasks to team members, and make to-do lists.

Wrike

Wrike too boasts features which are not usually seen in workflow management tools. A case in point is the dashboard. While a dashboard in itself is not a rarity in similar platforms, Wrike’s comes with a twist. For it has three different panes which together give you a comprehensive view of the whole workflow. Pane no:1 gives you access to projects and financials. In another word, it’s the pane you use to manage resources. Pane no:2, meanwhile helps you create and assign tasks to team members and also set due dates. The third pane contains all the current tasks and subtasks which you should know about.

For creating and sharing files and tracking projects, Wrike also provides incredible security so that you can be sure that no sensitive information related to a project could be accessed by a third party. Wrike also brings you real-time analytics, meaning that infographics, reports and analytic dashboards get automatically updated every fifteen minutes or so. This ensures that the metrics you are looking at any given point are not outdated.

Among other things, you could see real-time updates of task statuses, team performance, workloads and approvals.

Yet another aspect which makes Wrike a compelling workflow management tool is the fact that it brings you solutions specific to different departments in your organization. Or rather, the solutions that it brings can be easily adapted to suit the purposes of the various departments- be it product development, content generation, operations or sales. In fact, you get different templates that could be used by departments involved in different functions.

Should you choose Basecamp or Wrike?

While Basecamp has certain unique or near-unique features like automatic check-ins which places it above many other workflow management tools, when compared with Wrike, the latter does bring a more expansive list of features. On top of that, the enterprise-level security which Wrike affords is pretty robust. This possibly makes Wrike the better option among the two.

What Wrike and Basecamp lack

Rich as these two tools are with features, they seem to lack in one respect- they don’t have a feature which helps you measure the time someone spends on a task. That’s no minor issue, not if you want to accurately predict when you could deliver the project. But I’m Productive is a project management tool that not only accurately measures the time someone spends working on a task, but also incorporates an AI which helps you predict project delivery time. To do the latter, all you have to do is click on a button! Head to their website to know more.