Magic Quadrant for Collaborative Work Management

Collaborative Work Management Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

Key features and pros and cons of top Collaborative Work Management products:

Airtable - Leader

Pros:

Market understanding: Airtable has a strong vision of work management that emphasizes autonomy through no-code development, as well as productivity and usability.
Marketing execution: Airtable is successfully attracting new customers, including a sizable proportion undertaking deployments with large numbers of users.
Customer experience: Customers rated their experience with Airtable highly, especially with respect to workflow automation, security, integration and performance. Airtable customers are also very likely to recommend it to others.

Cons:

Geographic strategy: Airtable is still evolving its regional physical, partner and data center presence, and has gaps in language support in its product, which makes it less suitable for customers in less-well-served regions.
Product: Airtable has weaknesses in content creation, dynamic reporting, compliance certifications and the depth of its use-case support.
Sales strategy: Airtable is still evolving its reseller and distributor partner program, which makes it more difficult to reach prospects in different industries, functions and geographies.

Asana - Leader

Pros:

Marketing strategy: Asana has high brand recognition in the CWM market, and a large and growing customer base that includes 100s of customers with more than 1,000 users. Asana almost always appears on prospective customers' shortlists.
Customer experience: Asana customers expressed high levels of satisfaction with the product, especially with respect to the overall user experience, and are likely to recommend it to others.
Geographic strategy: Asana has a physical presence in multiple geographic regions that includes an extensive local partner ecosystem, which is relevant to prospective clients in different regions or those with operations in multiple regions.

Cons:

Product: With respect to product capabilities, Asana still has weaknesses in calendar support, content creation, reporting widgets, and building and managing complex workflows.
Sales execution: Asana lacks sales programs that target specific vertical industries or business functions.
Viability: Asana's focus on growing its customer base during the early stages of the development of the CWM market needs to rebalance to handle this growth and achieve profitability as the market matures.

monday.com - Leader

Pros:

Marketing execution: Monday.com is executing a successful marketing strategy with high levels of brand awareness, resulting in a larger customer base and growth than other vendors in this market. monday.com almost always appears on customer shortlists for CWM products.
Product: Beyond comprehensive support for core CWM capabilities, monday.com offers additional functionality in form builders, visual workflow automation, granular permissions, use-case support and platform scalability through its custom database.
Customer experience: Customers commented favorably on monday.com's core capabilities and support for different use cases, singling out their satisfaction with usability.

Cons:

Pricing: Although monday.com's pricing is inclusive of functionality that is often an optional extra in other products (e.g., integration connectors), it is less flexible, and pricing can be higher than other vendors in this market.
Viability: As a fast-growing company, close to GAAP profitability, with a diverse customer base and ambitions beyond the CWM market, monday.com needs to maintain and enhance its ability to handle growth.
Functionality: monday.com is working to enhance workflow management (e.g., with version control), dynamic report generation, searching data and content in connected applications, and in achieving accessibility certifications.

Smartsheet - Leader

Pros:

Sales execution: Smartsheet has been successful in growing its customer base. This includes a sizable proportion of large deployments both directly and through partner programs, despite relying less than other vendors on generating demand from its freemium program. Smartsheet has high name recognition, and prospective buyers almost always include Smartsheet on their product shortlists.
Product: Smartsheet was one of the first vendors in this market to provide additional support for scaling large deployments through cross-platform workflows (Bridge), data integration (Data Shuttle), data visualization and collaboration (DataTable), and centralized, consistent plan management and reporting (via Blueprints and Control Center).
Customer experience: Customers expressed high satisfaction rates with product capabilities and support for different use cases. Smartsheet customers are very likely to recommend Smartsheet.

Cons:

Functionality: Smartsheet has limited noncore functionality for visual collaboration, document authoring or universal search. Its support for dynamic dashboards, dynamic reporting and team hub personalization could be improved. Customers also gave mixed feedback on usability and complexity challenges for new users of the product and on the need for better integration with Smartsheet's adjacent product for resource management.
Pricing: Smartsheet's pricing is aligned with that of its peers, but extra charges for integration connectors and optional modules make pricing less transparent and more complex than other vendors.
Geographic strategy: Smartsheet has a physical presence, customers and partners in most regions. However, more comprehensive language support in the product and more data centers beyond North America and Europe would further support its geographic strategy.

Wrike - Leader

Pros:

Product: Beyond its support for core CWM capabilities, Wrike offers use-case accelerators, including productized versions for marketing and professional services teams. The product has also recently had significant UI improvements and enhancements in template reuse, batch provisioning and no-code automations.
Market understanding: Wrike was one of the early entrants in the CWM market, and its vision, product development and go-to-market strategy align well with this market.
Customer experience: Customers rated Wrike consistently high in terms of capabilities and use cases, emphasizing satisfaction with overall user experience, affordability and its compliance capabilities.

Cons:

Marketing and sales execution: Wrike is recovering momentum lost during the period under Citrix in terms of market presence and brand recognition but has started to reappear on prospective buyer shortlists.
Market momentum: Wrike has a smaller customer base than peers with similar operating capacity. However, this is also due to Wrike's preference for organic growth and prudence with marketing spend, which has brought Wrike closer to profitability than other vendors in this market.
Regional strategy: Wrike has a physical presence, channel partners and customers in most regions. However, it has limited service partners outside the U.S. and Europe where it also hosts its two data centers, which may make Wrike less attractive to large global clients.

Adobe - Challenger

Pros:

Viability: As part of a large organization, Adobe Workfront benefits from the market presence, operational strength, partner ecosystem and synergies with adjacent products in the broader Adobe portfolio.
Customer experience: Adobe workfront customers expressed high levels of satisfaction, particularly with capabilities for work planning, in-context collaboration, workflow automation and support for the marketing operations use cases.
Product: Due in part to Workfront's two decades of preacquisition experience, Adobe understands customer needs and has translated them into a product with a comprehensive set of capabilities supporting project work, collaboration, integration and automation.

Cons:

Sales and marketing strategy: Adobe has opportunities for improving its demand generation strategy for Workfront that relies largely on leveraging interest from existing Adobe customers rather than through freemium options or selling directly to business teams. Adobe Workfront has been successful in supporting marketing operations, and it is considered less often for other work activities among new prospective buyers.
Ecosystem: Although Adobe Workfront can rely on and benefit from the broader Adobe ecosystem, specific partner contributions via the Adobe Exchange marketplace are limited.
Ease of use: Partly because of having comprehensive and deep functionality, especially around work planning and workflow automation, Workfront lags behind in ease of use, especially for novices.

Atlassian - Challenger

Pros:

Marketing execution: Atlassian has a leading presence in adjacent markets and a good reputation in IT organizations, through which it can promote its CWM offering.
Pricing: Atlassian pricing is transparent, and it offers bundle subscriptions and discounts that make large deployments of more than 1,000 users more budget friendly.
Platform ecosystem: Atlassian has 1,000s of platform ecosystem partners that are active in the Atlassian Marketplace, which includes customer-created apps. The Atlassian Marketplace enables customers to discover, try and buy apps and add-ons.

Cons:

Product strategy: Atlassian's CWM offering includes Trello, Confluence, Atlas and Jira. Its overlapping capabilities, naming conventions and different user interfaces can make deployments complex and confusing to users.
Sales and marketing strategy: CWM is only one of three focus markets for Atlassian. It lacks targeted messaging to attract business decision makers who are also not the traditional buyers of Atlassian products. Atlassian is very rarely considered as an alternative to other CWM products.
Product: CWM buyers will find that Atlassian offers less mature functionality in data management, reporting, search and mobile support across the components of its CWM offering, which also lacks depth in supporting different business team use cases.

ClickUp - Niche Player

Pros:

Product: ClickUp offers a comprehensive set of core CWM capabilities that are unlike other vendors in this market, and includes document authoring, whiteboards and universal search.
Market understanding: ClickUp's vision, market positioning and product roadmap align well with customer needs and priorities in the CWM market.
Customer experience: Feedback from ClickUp customers is generally positive with respect to product capabilities, support and overall experience. They are also likely to recommend ClickUp to others.

Cons:

Sales execution: Despite healthy growth, ClickUp still lags behind other vendors in this market in terms of the size of its customer base, especially with respect to large deployments.
Sales strategy: ClickUp is still evolving its partner ecosystem and its capacity to target specific industries and business functions, which makes it less likely to attract business buyers directly.
Functionality: ClickUp needs to improve technical capabilities, including forms building, data queries, custom branding of landing pages and language support. ClickUp has less experience than some of its peers with large deployments. Customer feedback still highlights performance concerns, although it is notable that this is a significant area of investment and focus from ClickUp.

Notion - Niche Player

Pros:

Marketing strategy: Notion has been very successful in establishing its product brand, especially among individual enthusiastic users that includes an organically growing ecosystem of social media influencers.
Customer experience: Customers are generally satisfied with the product, especially in terms of intuitiveness and ease of use.
Innovation: Notion is an innovative collaborative content workspace product that combines textual and data-based components in a web of interlinked pages. Its notebook-based way of working provides an alternative and more accessible way to support CWM requirements and use cases.

Cons:

Market fit: Although Notion can be used to support CWM requirements, its primary use as a collaborative content workspace application means that both product development and go-to-market priorities are not completely aligned with those of the CWM market. Notion is rarely considered as an option on the shortlists of prospective buyers looking to support collaborative work management use cases.
Viability: Despite its adoption by many enterprises via individual users, Notion still needs to build its capacity to support enterprise customers on many fronts, including partnerships, regional presence, support and professional services, before it becomes suitable for large enterprise deployments.
Product: Notion's primary focus on content collaboration workspaces has meant that its work planning capabilities are still evolving. Notion also needs to deliver on its plans for forms building, programmable APIs, workflow and automation builders, and, perhaps most significantly, providing a coherent way to manage data across the platform.

Quickbase - Niche Player

Pros:

Viability: Quickbase is one of the very few vendors in this market to have reached profitability. It has a growing customer base and a larger proportion of big deployments among its peers.
Sales strategy: Quickbase has a healthy technology and service partner ecosystem with a vibrant marketplace as well as programs for selling into specific verticals and business functions.
Customer experience: Customer feedback for Quickbase is very positive with respect to core capabilities such as workflow and automation, as well as with the platform and support for specific use cases.

Cons:

Market fit: Quickbase can be used to support CWM requirements, but its primary positioning is as a low-code development environment that accelerates the building of sophisticated work management solutions by fusion teams. This means that both product development and go-to-market priorities are not completely aligned with those of the CWM market.
Product: Quickbase's work planning capabilities are still evolving, and there is less maturity in content creation, collaboration workspaces and "landing page" branding. The focus on low-code application development, while attractive to fusion teams composed of developers and business technologists, makes it less suitable for novice business users.
Geographic strategy: Quickbase has a limited physical regional presence and is still evolving its partner ecosystem, which is currently mostly limited to North America.

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

A: Airtable, Asana, monday.com, Smartsheet, Wrike

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

A: Leaders demonstrate a solid understanding of the key product capabilities and the commitment to customer success that buyers in this market demand. They have a record of strong execution and an ability to influence the market's direction. Leaders continuously expand their capabilities to deliver functionally rich platforms that bring significant value to customers. Leaders have a clear product roadmap to solidify the product's position and to help buyers protect their investments. They support numerous use cases and address new business problems. They have a large network of partners that provide localized support and services to customers across most geographic regions.

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

A: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/magic-quadrants-research

Report:

Top Vendor Products for Collaborative Work Management in 2023

Collaborative Work Management Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

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