Wrike vs Teamwork vs Resource Guru: which project management software is for you?

wrike vs teamwork vs resource guru

Wrike and Teamwork are both formidable products for helping you manage your work and both have done a great job for different kinds of customer.

But as you’re pitching Wrike vs Teamwork and deciding which is right for you, we also want to show you how Resource Guru can help you manage your team’s workload, rather than just being a simple project management tool.

Resource Guru is an easy to use resource management tool that helps your team stay productive and stops them from burning out.

Wrike vs Teamwork vs Resource Guru

Both Teamwork and Wrike are great project management tools. Wrike is made for enterprise businesses that can invest a lot of resources in managing a system for task management. Teamwork is good for agencies who want to manage client projects and relationships at agencies.

On the other hand, Resource Guru is focused on helping teams manage resources so that project deadlines are met and no one gets overloaded – that means happy clients and happy teams!

Let’s compare Wrike, Teamwork, and Resource Guru to see what each is good at and where there could be a better fit for you.

Top 4 reasons project managers choose Resource Guru over Wrike or Teamwork

We’ve already said how good Teamwork and Wrike are as project management tools.

But as one of our customers recently said, “Project management is easy, it’s resource management that’s the difficult part.”

1. Get a tool made for resource management, not task management

There’s a lot of differences when you compare Wrike vs Teamwork. But at their core, they’re just for different kinds of business.

Wrike helps in-house teams in large or enterprise businesses looking to manage complicated projects with ‘issues’ in a way that’s not dissimilar to a ticketing tool like Jira.

You can visualize projects as a Gantt chart or Kanban board. Wrike has all the features that you would expect from a feature-rich project management tool.

wrike gantt chart

A Gantt chart view of a project in Wrike

It helps in-house teams assign tasks, generate custom reports with add-ons to manage marketing campaigns, creative teams, and get access to advanced integrations.

On the other hand, Teamwork is a much better choice when the goal is to help agencies improve collaboration and delivery for clients. While they started as a task management tool, they’re moving towards a much more integrated, all-in-one model.

For example, they recently added additional products to their platform to add CRM, Chat, and Client Billing functionality – at an extra cost, obviously.

In many ways, Teamwork is no longer a task management or project management tool but really a client management tool – they even have a time tracker app for contractors to keep their billable time up to date.

teamwork time chat

Time tracking and team chat in Teamwork

Unlike both Teamwork and Wrike, Resource Guru is designed for teams who want to focus on resource management as opposed to task management.

Project management tools typically view projects as standalone things, isolated from all the other projects in the organization.

But Resource Guru allows you to take a calm, strategic look at your team’s progress on projects. This means you can see your team’s capacity and know when there are going to be conflicts.

With Resource Guru you’re able to shift resources so you avoid the tyranny of multiple due dates all falling at the same time.

You can get real-time reports of how your team is doing and also get daily emails for everyone on your team explaining what time blocks and meetings they have coming up.

At the end of the day, the question is: do you want a tool that manages clients (Teamwork), tasks (Wrike), or project resources (Resource Guru)?

resource guru booking clash

Resource Guru manages conflicting bookings in real-time

2. People-focused management: the modern way of planning projects

“What gets measured, gets managed”, goes the old Peter Drucker quote.

And it was super useful: this quote is one of the driving philosophies of project management at companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple.

But over time, we’ve all realized: staying on task is important, but managing people’s energy is the best driver of productivity available to businesses.

Both Wrike and Teamwork focus on task sequencing – they want you to think about the order that everything should get done in and stick to it with deadlines, calendar syncing, and other features that try to address productivity failures in teams.

teamwork tasks

Task lists in Teamwork

However, neither of these products manage what matters: resources.

For example, let’s say you want to know how much time a team member has available for a task, factoring in their upcoming time off and any commitments in their calendar that aren’t related to the current project.

Neither Teamwork nor Wrike give you visibility of a person’s time in this way – and let’s face it, it’s definitely not atypical that people have multiple projects, additional time commitments, and also time off to plan around.

And what about when there are non-human resources like rooms, equipment or vehicles to plan around? That’s also not unusual – particularly if you’re running a client services business like many Resource Guru customers are.

Only Resource Guru manages non-human resources like rooms or equipment on projects.

resource guru rooms equipment

Resource Guru’s smart filters help you find the people, rooms, and equipment you need for every project

So the question is: do you want to manage your projects in a static way with the standard task model?

If you’re nodding your head, no judgment: you should use Teamwork or Wrike.

Or do you want to use resource management software that takes into account the way that your team is living and working so that you can plan more effectively and hit those project deadlines?

If so, Resource Guru is a better choice for you.

M&C Saatchi
Steffani Sabatinni

“Resource Guru is simple to use. It allows us to optimize our resources and keeps an eye on every project.”

Stefania Sabbatini
Digital Production Director


3. Steep learning curve for Wrike, Teamwork users say the same

When you buy a business-critical tool like Wrike, Teamwork or Resource Guru, you need to know that it’s going to be easy for your team to adopt.

But Wrike is notoriously difficult to use. And the reviewers of Teamwork on the popular software review site G2 constantly cite ‘Ease of Use’ as an area they’re particularly dissatisfied with.

Wrike provides a lot of project templates, workflow templates, and interactive training in an attempt to make it easier to get set up – but let’s face it. Even with all of that, it’s more than ‘just a few clicks’ to get your teams managed effectively.

Complexity isn’t necessarily bad, but it does tend to add busywork to the day.

If you have time, energy, budget, and resource to devote to having a consultant or someone from your team set up Wrike for you, it’s likely that you also manage projects that have high complexity levels.

In that respect, maybe Wrike is a good choice for you. With advanced workflows and deep integrations to other projects, it’s possible for your internal team to work mostly in Wrike.

wrike integrations

Wrike has a deep directory of apps you can integrate with

Teamwork has a different kind of complexity.

As they move away from being just a shared task management tool, we’re seeing them add a lot of functionality designed for helping teams collaborate and chat. They’re also offering Teamwork CRM which lets professional services teams manage client relationships and deals.

While you can use just one of their tools, the theme is: move more of your business to Teamwork. But if you’re already set up with a whole range of tools that do the same things as Teamwork does – do you really want to switch everything over to them?

On the other hand, Resource Guru is easy to use – and that’s backed up by almost every reviewer on G2.

For example, here’s what our customer Logan said about Resource Guru:

I like the ease of managing several people’s schedules in one view. It’s easy to know exactly who’s needed where in a quick glance and flexible enough for frequent changes.

It really is a seamless change for your teams to start using Resource Guru.

4. Wrike’s price point is high and complex, Teamwork pricing is simple but high

When considering the price of a software product, there are lots of factors to consider.

In this case, because Wrike, Teamwork, and Resource Guru are all business-critical products, we can compare on two things: actual price and complexity of pricing.

Wrike is trying to become the silverback of team and project management. So it makes sense that they’re priced high.

While it might not feel like a huge commitment to pay $9.80 per user per month for Wrike’s Professional plan, when you think about how many users you’re going to need to add to administer the custom workflows and different projects with dependencies on each other, it quickly becomes pretty dizzying.

And they also add a whole lot of complexity into their pricing with lots of extra add-on features, such as integrations with your existing platforms, tools for managing marketing campaigns, and data security capabilities.

wrike pricing

Teamwork and Resource Guru, on the other hand, both price on a per user basis.

  • A team of 70 on the Resource Guru’s Blackbelt plan would cost $291.20 per month.
  • A team of 70 on the Teamwork’s Grow plan would cost $1711.50 per month.

You can see that there’s a significant price difference there. Why is that?

Put simply, Teamwork offers a much bigger set of features because it’s for a really specific purpose – helping client services teams manage their projects. That’s why they’ve included features like integrated team chat, intake forms, and a Hubspot integration.

But Resource Guru is made for managing resources on projects. We do a very specific task extremely well – and by this point, we hope you’re convinced!

We’re not trying to be Teamwork. We’re definitely not trying to be Wrike. We’re trying to help teams who appreciate the value of their people and resources to manage projects in a flexible, modern way.

So while you can compare Wrike vs Teamwork (we just did!), there’s only one way to find out if Resource Guru is the better solution for you – try it for yourself for 30 days!

Manage project resources, not tasks. Get happy clients and happy team members.

  • Resource management, not task management
  • Manage your team’s time and energy, flexibly
  • Simple to set up, configure and use
  • Simple pricing, no lock-in

Start a free, 30-day trial of Resource Guru