Report:

Magic Quadrant for Collaborative Work Management

Top Vendor Products for Collaborative Work Management in 2024

• Airtable
• Asana
• monday.com
• Smartsheet
• Wrike

Collaborative Work Management Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

• Airtable - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product: In addition to its core functionality, Airtable has introduced a new library of customizable apps that rely on centrally managed, shared data with bidirectional syncing across applications. These come with tools for builders and administrators to manage dependencies and usage patterns.
  • Intelligent Assistance: Airtable offers AI-powered app creation with Airtable Cobuilder, with proactive assistance, data analysis, formula creation, automation rules and workflows from user prompts, and allows users to create context-specific assistants for conversational queries.
  • Viability: Unlike many vendors in this market, Airtable is already profitable without compromising its ability to fund further strategic growth.

  Cons:

  • Sales Strategy: Airtable is in the early stages of developing its traditional reseller and distributor programs, although it does support a marketplace and has an active service partner program.
  • Geographic Strategy: Airtable introduced European data residency in 2024, but is still evolving its regional physical, partner and data center presence. It also has gaps in language support of its product, which makes it less suitable for customers in less-well-served regions.
  • Certifications: Despite adding Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance in the last 12 months, Airtable still lacks accreditation and certification in other areas such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, WCAG 2.0 and Section 508, and FedRAMP.


• Asana - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Marketing Strategy: Asana has strong brand recognition within the CWM market, and a substantial and expanding customer base, including numerous clients with over 1,000 users. The company is consistently considered by prospective customers.
  • Ecosystem: Asana has an extensive partner network with a comprehensive certification program. There is also a customer Ambassador program that provides access to additional resources and connects members to each other. The vendor has a reputation for thought leadership and links to academia through the Work Innovation Lab.
  • Geographic Strategy: Asana maintains a significant physical presence in multiple regions, supported by a broad network of local partners, making it a viable option for clients with diverse or global operations.

  Cons:

  • Industry Solutions: Asana is still evolving its sales programs to better target specific vertical industries and business functions.
  • Sales Execution: Although Asana continues to experience consistent customer growth, and a significant reduction in operating losses, the number of employees is static, and the revenue growth rate is declining.
  • Customer Experience: Among generally positive feedback from customers on ease of deployment, some have noted that there is a learning curve for new users.


• monday.com - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Platform: monday.com has made significant platform investments. These include enhanced data life cycle management, and improved performance for large deployments with thousands of projects and millions of tasks. The platform also offers secure workspaces that limit downloads and sharing, and API access to the monday graph for user management and the audit logs.
  • Use Case Support: monday.com showcases and sells its product through productized versions tailored for various use cases, such as marketing, software development operations, CRM and service management. These offerings are beginning to compete with specialized business applications in different markets.
  • Marketing Execution: monday.com has successfully implemented a marketing strategy, including a freemium program, that continues to support its brand recognition. It is commonly shortlisted by customers seeking CWM products.

  Cons:

  • Product Strategy: monday.com is beginning to compete in multiple business application markets via its use case accelerators that are effectively different products, which may stretch its resources and leadership attention.
  • Pricing: Pricing for the core product is simple and transparent, but the separate pricing for use case accelerators may complicate buying monday.com products for multipurpose use cases.
  • Customer Experience: Among generally positive feedback from customers, some expressed concerns about a steep learning curve for more advanced functionality.


• Smartsheet - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Sales Execution: Smartsheet continues to expand its customer base, with many large deployments via direct sales and partner programs, and by growing existing accounts. Smartsheet has built an extensive partner network with programs tailored to different types and tiers of partners.
  • Customer Experience: Smartsheet has a strong customer focus that includes an annual adoption review (Value Realization Snapshot), extensive training and certification programs, and dedicated professional services.
  • Product: Smartsheet's initial set of AI-powered tools has several features. It offers users guided assistance and support, generates charts and reports, tracks metrics, analyzes sentiment, and summarizes work status. It also uses natural language prompts to create working formulas from simple sentences. These tools enhance data analysis and workflow automation.

  Cons:

  • Market Momentum: Smartsheet is in the process of becoming a private company again, which will likely have an impact on visibility into its strategy, roadmap and results.
  • Pricing: Smartsheet introduced a new simplified pricing model in 2024 that included a lower subscription price with provisional licensing that enables end users to use all product capabilities without interruption. However, it also removed the free collaborator option, which may result in higher costs in some cases. Smartsheet enterprise subscriptions include intelligent assistance, data usage and basic resource workload tracking; however, there are additional costs for some integration, reporting, resource management and administrative capabilities.
  • User Experience: Some customers pointed out difficulties with a steep learning curve, and the complexity of integration and formula creation.


• Wrike - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product: Wrike has updated its user experience with a more intuitive and flexible design across the platform and introduced AI features for document summarization and subtask creation. Additionally, Wrike recently introduced Datahub, which enables domain-specific data models that can be customized and mixed with data from multiple sources within a hub that provides usage visibility and governance.
  • Viability: Wrike was one of the early entrants in the CWM market, and its continued focus on organic growth and prudent marketing enabled it to conserve cash, bringing it closer to profitability than other vendors.
  • 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:

  • Sales Execution: Wrike is reorganizing its partner program, which could hinder growth. However, Wrike reports that deepening partnerships and launching a more robust marketplace are key initiatives in 2025.
  • Regional Presence: Wrike has a presence in most regions, but the scale of its regional presence is behind that of its leading competitors.
  • Market Momentum: Changes in ownership, leadership and regional operations contributed to low growth in customer numbers and revenue, a reduction in employee numbers, and generally less market visibility in 2023. In 2024, new investments are being made to scale profitable growth.


• Adobe - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Viability: Adobe Workfront benefits from the market presence, operational strength, partner ecosystem and synergies with adjacent products in the broader Adobe portfolio.
  • Product: The product has strong content collaboration capabilities (e.g., proofing, reviews and approvals) along with planning, prioritization, automation, and workload and financial management for work scenarios such as marketing operations or digital experiences management.
  • Geographic Strategy: Adobe Workfront is supported by an extensive network of local offices, staff, partners and data centers, which are distributed across multiple countries and regions.

  Cons:

  • Product Strategy: Adobe's incorporation of Workfront into its product suite primarily targets content-centric use cases such as marketing operations. While this focus on "powering the content supply chain" has successfully capitalized on Adobe's current customer base, it limits its visibility as a CWM solution for those outside the Adobe ecosystem. Adobe Workfront is seen on CWM product shortlists in Gartner customer inquiries much less frequently than the leaders in this market.
  • Ease of Use: Workfront is complex to use, especially for novices. Its scripting and automation capabilities cannot be easily consumed by nontechnical users.
  • Pricing: Adobe does not provide standard pricing; solutions are priced on a case-by-case basis, making pricing less transparent and more complex.


• Atlassian - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Marketing Execution: Atlassian maintains a leading presence in adjacent markets. It is well-regarded within IT organizations, which creates an opportunity to promote Jira for use by business teams.
  • Pricing: Atlassian's pricing strategy for the core product is straightforward and competitive, making large-scale deployments more cost-effective. Also, folding Jira Work Management into the core Jira product has simplified Atlassian's product portfolio.
  • Ecosystem: Atlassian has a comprehensive certification program for all channel partners, data centers outside the U.S. and Europe, and thousands of platform partners active in the Atlassian Marketplace, which includes customer-created apps that can be discovered, tried and purchased.

  Cons:

  • Use Case Support: Jira lacks deep functionality, such as digital asset management, resource allocation and time tracking, that is relevant to marketing operations, case management and product management.
  • Product Strategy: Buyers and users still need to navigate multiple overlapping or complementary Atlassian products such as Trello and Confluence.
  • Sales and Marketing Strategy: Atlassian has yet to fully exploit the opportunity to appeal directly to business decision makers outside of IT. Furthermore, the company's vertical industry sales and marketing efforts remain limited and underdeveloped.


• ClickUp - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Product: ClickUp provides a broad set of noncore CWM capabilities for general team productivity that includes document authoring, dynamic document templates, whiteboards, rich integrated video and audio chat with AI support, and universal search.
  • Pricing: ClickUp has simple, transparent and competitive pricing with no extras for AI assistance, connectors to other applications, admin consoles or data usage.
  • Market Understanding: ClickUp's vision, strategic positioning and product roadmap are well-aligned with the needs and priorities of customers in the CWM market.

  Cons:

  • Ecosystem: ClickUp is still evolving its partner ecosystem and its capacity to target specific industries and business functions.
  • Functionality: ClickUp has weaknesses in workflow and automation, with limited support for complex logic beyond automation rules, no visual workflow canvas, and no versioning or testing/sandbox options.
  • Sales Strategy: ClickUp has no vertical industry sales program, limited language support and limited physical presence outside the U.S., particularly in Asia.


• Quickbase - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product Functionality: Quickbase introduced new functionality to fill gaps in contextual conversations, document generation, an AI Smart Builder for custom applications and the AI-driven recommended reports feature.
  • Platform: The platform capabilities include a scalable in-memory database, sensitive data scanner with pattern matching, the option of a mixed on-premises/cloud deployment, and exporting a complete markup text specification of Quickbase plans or applications for further human or machine processing.
  • Use Case Accelerators: Beyond supporting a growing set of general work use cases (unusually including support for frontline work), Quickbase is also creating a set of rich, customizable vertical industry "Pro Apps" (e.g., for construction or property management). These come with prebuilt data models, workflows, and relevant expertise for both sales and support.

  Cons:

  • Market Alignment: While Quickbase is meeting CWM needs, its strength is as a development platform aimed at speeding up the creation of advanced work management applications by fusion teams. Consequently, the expected technical competency level among target users may be higher than that of the broader CWM market.
  • Market Presence: Given the focus on application building and automation, rather than on general team coordination, Quickbase has a smaller number of users. Also, its sales cycles tend to be longer, and its pricing tends to be higher than the leading competitors in this market.
  • Geographic Strategy: Quickbase has a limited physical regional presence and is still evolving its partner ecosystem, which is currently mostly limited to North America.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Collaborative Work Management, 2 December 2024, ID G00807043

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