San Francisco-based Wrike, a social project management platform, announced today that it has released Android and iOS apps in addition to a native HTML5 web app to keep up with the rising trend of individuals working remotely on their mobile phones. The company’s mobile apps follow a study the company conducted earlier in the year that found 83 percent of respondents spend a minimum of three hours each week working outside of the office. Founded in 2006, the company has over 2,500 paying customers including Adobe and Salesforce, and has seen its customer base grow 200-400 percent every year.
Wrike is led by CEO Andrew Filev, who started his first software company at the age of 18. Though the company had an iOS app previously, Filev said these new apps take a mobile-first approach to project management. “Over the years we have put a lot of attention on being where our users are and trying to fit into existing workflows. In that sense mobile is definitely important to us, we’ve been on mobile for quite a while but we rewrote everything, so we had an iOS app, but this new app is a completely different app, I don’t think there’s a single line of code shared between the two apps,” said Filev in an interview.
Wrike’s native mobile apps aim to bridge the gap between personal productivity, project management, and social collaboration to provide a comprehensive platform for mobile workers. It allows workers to access their tasks and projects, oversee project progress to date in a newsfeed format, and collaborate with coworkers and edit documents in real-time. “It obviously does task management, but on top of that you have real-time messaging and collaboration, so you and I can work on a project and get push notifications, if you change anything I can instantly see it,” Filev added. The SaaS company has several subscription tiers, ranging from $49 for up to five users up to $199 for up to 50 users, and custom pricing for larger enterprises.
There are no shortage of project management and collaboration tools, both established and more recent players. Recently BetaKit covered the launch of Bigtincan’s mobile hub platform that integrates with a company’s servers to allow secure access to confidential documents and comes equipped with collaboration features similar to Wrike. Other competitors like Basecamp have browser-based native web platforms accessible on mobile devices without the need to download apps. Meanwhile Asana, founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, also has an iPhone app and HTML5 mobile site.
Filev said he understands that the biggest obstacle to driving adoption will be the behavior shift in workers to update, post, and view their mobile devices as they would their desktop. He said he sees a big opportunity to engage companies in traditionally offline industries, which are increasingly using online platforms to manage their workforces. With a completely redesigned approach to mobile, Wrike will have to continue to work hard to differentiate itself with other players looking to also provide an all-in-one platform for enterprises and their employees.