What’s the best project management software for startups?

Essential project management features for startups

If you’ve been running a startup for a while, you might have already run into issues with project management software that’s designed for larger, more established companies. 

Startup teams are often frustrated by the rigidity, steep learning curves, and expensive paid plans of these platforms. They want to harness the energy of startup culture and drive their ideas forward, but the software tries to fit them into the same box as an enterprise with procedures that are already deeply entrenched. 

The best project management software for startups matches your energy, while giving you the clear but flexible frameworks you need if you’re going to keep up that momentum over time. Essentially, you’re looking for tools that strike a delicate balance, so your team can thrive in the inherent tension of the startup world. 

Flexibility and structure 

Startups break new ground, and they’re not afraid to pivot. This means customization is crucial to any startup project management tool. 

Even if you feel resistant to the rigid project management methodologies used by established companies, you need a workspace and workflows that support your team — and software that helps you update and streamline them as you progress. Wrike’s features help you build and share the frameworks that keep your projects moving forward, clarifying roles and expectations without stifling your creativity.

Teamwork and individual accountability

The team-first, flat hierarchy startup model has clear benefits, but it can cause problems as your startup’s workload mounts. With a rising number of subtasks and team members involved in many ongoing projects, it’s easy to lose track of who’s ultimately responsible for delivering your projects on time and to brief. 

Wrike’s task management and communication features add accountability to each stage of your process. Plus, Wrike records all the vital information about the way your tasks move through shared and individual workflows as you complete them, so you can implement feedback and reflect more effectively. 

Value and scalability

Startups also face tension between tight software budgets and the need to choose tools powerful enough to continue serving the company as it grows. 

Many free project management tools lack the key features you need to do this well. They might have a reduced number of seats, a very narrow project view, or limited automation functionality.  The alternative — cobbling together a mix of different apps like Trello, Slack, and Notion to handle the load — can compromise your visibility even more. 

Software as powerful as Wrike is never going to be rock-bottom cheap like some of the weaker options on the market. But the benefits of adopting a pro-level platform make the modest investment worth it. For example, with Wrike, you can:

• Close the gaps in your processes from the very beginning, rather than papering over the cracks when they’ve already started to trip up your team 
• Build a wealth of data on your team’s performance, so you can track your project progress metrics over time and make decisions based on evidence, not gut feeling
• Scale a system you’re already familiar with and add more features, seats, or integrations as your company grows, which leads to a much smoother experience in the long run 

Wrike is a fully customizable, flexible, scalable solution that grows with your startup and informs the fast-paced decisions you make every day. Our tools can be tailored to your team as you develop your process, your product, and your relationships with your clients. 

So now, let’s take a look at Wrike’s project management tools — and their specific benefits for startups — in more depth. 

3 reasons to manage your startup’s projects in Wrike

Wrike’s project management features can benefit any team in any industry. But unlike many other big-name project management tools, Wrike is built to offer the mix of structure and spontaneity that startups rely on. 

1. Centralize your project management, even as you grow

Every startup reaches the point where ad-hoc communication is no longer enough. When that happens, Wrike is the ideal place to centralize your projects. 

Wrike moves your communication out of messaging apps, email, and shared docs and into a central hub where any member of your team can bring themselves up to speed fast — and then jump straight into their tasks. 

Imagine Wrike as a shared workspace powering real-time collaboration. It makes your project management more effective on three distinct levels: 

• On the level of task management, Wrike keeps your process crystal clear from planning to project delivery and beyond. When you add new tasks and delegate them in Wrike, you’ll see a complete profile of the job — with its essential documents, comments, workflows, and owners available at a glance.
  • Even if the task is passed between team members with different skill sets and responsibilities during the workflow, you can track the card in detail until the very end. This clarifies your process and your expectations, and makes it effortless to assign tasks and resources to your team.
• With project folders, your teams have secure file sharing that dismantles information silos and reduces issues with version control. You can set up a separate folder for every project, iteration, Scrum cycle, or client, and share it with your team to make the files, design assets, and drafts easily accessible to the people who need them. In comparison to tracking down files in Google Drive or sharing new versions across internal email, this approach is streamlined, standardized, and makes for easy onboarding when you add new members to your team. 
• With shared team dashboards, you can generate user-friendly visualizations of all the tasks in your projects — from the overarching steps toward your goals to the work assigned to an upcoming sprint. 
  • By switching between Kanban boards and Gantt chart roadmaps, you can highlight bottlenecks and task dependencies in your planning, and you can check key metrics like project burndown, planned vs. actual spend, and task progress at a glance in a range of different graphs. Tools like this show your startup team how their work fits together, and keep them in the loop even when the plan changes. 

Wrike’s entire project management system is built on this detailed task tracking and folder system. This means, at any point, you can jump from the headlines to the granular detail of your project tasks. 

Say you’re part of a software development startup, and you notice a task has stalled in your bug-tracking workflow toward the end of a sprint. In Wrike, you can click straight from the statistics you use to track progress in the dashboard to the task card to find out more about the team member accountable for the task, any dependencies holding back their work, the discussions they’ve had, and their current capacity. 

Rather than combing through internal messages to see what’s going on, you can find the answers quickly and message the team member within Wrike to offer support or talk about reassigning the work before it misses the sprint deadline. 

These tools are important for any company, but startups in particular depend on the quality of their project overview to make the most efficient use of the resources they have available. 

With Wrike’s tools, you can build a space to communicate your project plan even as it evolves from day to day. Your workspace makes your project resources available — immediately and securely — to the people who need them. Most importantly, Wrike stays flexible, so you can build an effective foundation for your team while keeping the culture at your startup quick, collaborative, and responsive to change. 

To make it easier to set up a centralized workspace for your startup team, Wrike includes customizable project management templates to help you get started. 

Try our: 

• Adaptive Project Management Template, built with collaboration features to take you through the different iterations of your product
• Software Development Template, with a comprehensive framework for developers and programmers
• Product Launch Template to break a complex timeline into phases, assign due dates to every aspect of your to-do list, and present detailed project tracking data in intuitive interfaces
• Sprint Planning Template to clarify your objectives and structure your iteration cycles

2. Detailed project monitoring to help you meet your goals

Wrike has features for goal setting and project monitoring, both of which have a crucial role to play in driving results for startups. 

Before your company grows to the point where you can draw up long-term strategic goals, project monitoring shows whether you’re on track to achieve what you set out to do with each new project. It shows you the areas where you can celebrate success while also keeping your team informed of progress and making your communications more effective. 

I already touched on the ways Wrike’s task tracking features gather detailed data on your project tasks, like: 

• The number of days the task is spent at each stage of a custom workflow
• Time tracking information logged by your team  
• The capacity of the team members assigned to the tasks
• The complexity of the task itself and your team’s historical performance on similar work items 

As well as displaying this information in live project dashboards that benefit your whole team, Wrike filters the data to create regular reports and snapshots of your project progress.Wrike’s reports are customizable, focused, and actionable. They can also be scheduled, so you can update yourself on your project status at the start of a new week, before a team standup, or ahead of a regular check-in meeting with your client. 

For example, if your goal is to help your tech team work more efficiently, you can use reports to compare the number of hours they spend on high-value creative tasks to repetitive tasks like logging bug reports and customer support emails into a tracking system. This insight can inform the way you prioritize your tasks, and show you the areas where you most need to explore time-saving measures like workflow automation. 

Alongside regular reports, Wrike also includes risk management tools, which are essential for startups that want to act strategically. These automated risk alerts, powered by Wrike’s AI-led Work Intelligence, show you the tasks at medium or high risk of missing their targets, so you can step in while there’s still time to adjust course and avoid a major delay. For startups, these tools are essential if you’re going to make informed decisions about the risks to take as you develop your product. They help you identify the places where you should take a calculated risk, while highlighting the risks that could be mitigated with better project planning and oversight. 

​​3. Smooth communication, even with outside organizations

At every level of your Wrike workspace, your team members will automatically receive a notification when their tasks change status or when they’re pinged with an @mention. I’ve also touched on several of Wrike’s core collaboration tools, which help make communications in your project feel informative, descriptive, and immediately actionable. 

But startup communications often stretch beyond your core team. When you manage your startup projects with Wrike’s advanced features, you can centralize all the communications associated with your project, not just your internal messaging. 

When you’re part of a startup, you’ll often collaborate with outside experts in the short term to get the business up and running. Then, as you start to grow, you’ll need ways of communicating smoothly with your clients to deliver a great experience for everyone involved in the project. Wrike includes a suite of integrated communication tools to make this happen. 

For example, when you need to loop someone new into your workspace, you can: 

• Adapt access roles, toggling between full, editor, limited, and read-only to show your clients the key metrics for their projects while keeping your internal processes and discussions private. These tools can also be used to set up client-facing dashboards for each project, while keeping sensitive data from the rest of your clients under wraps.
• Use dashboards, reports, and snapshots to update stakeholders like investors or collaborators on the current status of your projects. This keeps them up to date with the latest information in a user-friendly interface, without having to prepare reports manually. Plus, when they have this information on hand, the calls and meetings you schedule can be more productive and efficient.
• Email non-Wrike users from within the platform.  Without leaving Wrike, you can email your clients from your task card and view their responses there. Wrike also integrates with email tools like Outlook and Gmail, so you can create tasks and kick off workflows directly from the messages you get from your clients. 
• Create automated request forms with custom fields to gather information and streamline communications around new projects or common work items like user stories and design reviews.

When you’re part of a startup, these tools help you make the most of the resources you have. They centralize your work to give you the visibility you need as your team expands, and they give your company the foundation it needs to grow sustainably in the future. 

More features to use as you scale your startup

The features I’ve discussed so far will power your projects, whether you’re part of a five-person startup in its first year or a small business that’s expanded to a company with hundreds of employees around the globe. 

In the final part of this post, I want to highlight some of the Wrike features you can take advantage of as your teams increase in size and your number of active projects grows.

• End-to-end workflow management and automation for all your repeatable processes. Our automation features even include suggestions to optimize your workflows as Wrike learns more about the way you approach your common tasks.
• Integrations with all your essential project management tools, from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and databases, to accounting and invoicing tools like Salesforce, to the powerful CRM systems you’ll need as your customer base grows. 
• Enterprise and Pinnacle pricing plans that are scalable to unlimited users. As you start to use Wrike in more areas of your company, you can also use cross-tagging to share tasks and project files to streamline complex cross-departmental projects.
• Enterprise-grade security features, compliant with CCPA, GDPR, and HIPAA. 

Over the years, Wrike has helped hundreds of companies make the leap from startup to established brand. Our customer stories are full of companies that began life as startups and scaled to national brands with Wrike’s project management software. 

For Wag Hotels, Wrike fostered a culture of transparency and visibility within the event management team. The team uses Wrike’s planning and analysis to monitor event coordination from the first stages of planning to the end of the event itself, and to keep their distributed team on the same page effortlessly. 

Fashion innovator Gwynnie Bee started using Wrike for project management when they moved into their new distribution center. Wrike’s tools helped them maintain the quality of their products and customer service even as they scaled, while also reducing the order processing time by 60%. They rely on the drag-and-drop Gantt chart timeline view to keep their projects on track. 

100% of the employees at Chosen Foods bought into the new product development process with workflows managed in Wrike. Wrike standardized the system for assigning work and processing approvals, and aligned the team with their goals for the next phase of the company’s growth. 

And games company Exploding Kittens used Wrike to manage the overwhelming number of requests received by its creative team after their viral popularity and success on Kickstarter. The company used our tools to streamline and automate the intake process, freeing up more time to focus on the creative side of their work. They’ve also integrated the Adobe Illustrator tools they use for their design work to bring more clarity to their processes. 

Calm the startup chaos with Wrike

Project management software is one of the most important investments you can make for your startup. 

With the right tools in place, you can smooth communication, work more collaboratively, and optimize your resource management to make the most of your time and budget. You improve the impression you make on new clients by capturing and implementing feedback more effectively and managing your deadlines with ease. And you can grow your company from a small team to a big-name brand with one sustainable project management solution. 

Get started with a free plan now, or set up a call with our sales team to find out more about tailoring Wrike to your startup.