If you're in search of a flexible and dynamic work management platform for your teams, you have plenty of options available from both established brands and emerging service providers.
Two such options are Lark and Wrike. While Wrike focuses on providing a versatile project management experience for desk-bound teams, Lark takes into consideration the collaboration needs of various teams and allow them to manage tasks and communication around them in one place using either desktop or mobile devices.
In this blog, we'll dive deeper into what the two products are, their pricing and plans, as well as the teams they are suitable for.
What is Lark?
Lark is a collaboration platform designed for companies seeking to improve team efficiency and operational excellence both in the office and in the field.
Providing the tech stack in one app that knowledge workers can use to handle their work without toggling apps, Lark also provides tailored solutions to industries such as retail, food and beverage, and manufacturing, where frontline teams need to take care of their daily tasks in a more efficient way on mobile.
What is Lark used for?
Lark can be used in all formats of collaboration for distributed teams: communication between office and field teams, field operations across locations, inventory tracking, cross-timezone work, project management, and more.
Lark offers a range of functions to make such solutions possible, including but not limited to:
Use Project management with automated workflows to streamline daily tasks, such as inventory tracking, food defect reporting, and revenue reporting, using the Form view.
Utilize 1:1 and group chats for work communication across teams and companies, as well as project notifications, instead of waiting for lagged email alerts.
Take advantage of video conferencing & minutes with auto-translation to enable both real-time and async collaboration across time zones and locations.
Use live documents to co-create projects, guidelines, or operational standards, and provide teams with unified, up-to-date knowledge on company policies, product development, creative design, or best practices.
In addition, an email service is available to facilitate easy communication with external stakeholders who prefer formal communication than text messages.
Lark Base provides the equivalent project management solutions that you can get in Wrike, in addition to free project views and automation capabilities that are only available on Wrike’s paid plans, making it a better Wrike alternative.
In addition, Lark provides a more useful mobile application that allow frontline teams to perform daily tasks especially when they don’t work at a desk, such as facility inspections, inventory tracking, and reporting defects using their phones. Colleagues in the office can view real-time updates on a larger screen.
What is Wrike?
Wrike is a versatile project management tool that helps different teams manage projects, organize work and resources, and enhance collaboration throughout the process. With Wrike, project management teams can collect, prioritize, and process requests in an organized way, with timelines, resources, and progress visualized.
What is Wrike used for?
Wrike is mainly used for lightweight project management, and is especially friendly if the project team is taking a hybrid approach (aka somewhere in between waterfall and agile). Wrike offers a range of overlapping features with Lark, including:
Task management
Project resource planning
Automation
@ mentions
Live editing of project tables
Project request collection
Various project views, such as Gantt, Calendar, and Kanban
The Wrike app, like Lark, is available in both desktop and mobile versions. However, its mobile application is primarily designed for teams to quickly react to tasks, such as checking the status of individual tasks and approving quick requests on the go, rather than for actually completing the tasks from a mobile phone. In fact, these solutions are also available on Lark's mobile app, in addition to the mobile-first solutions that Lark can provide to frontline teams.
How to use Wrike vs. How to use Lark, in a nutshell
To make things easier, here is a simple formula you can follow when thinking about how to use both platforms:
Wrike pricing vs. Lark pricing: pay less to get more on Lark
Both Lark and Wrike offer multiple plan options to meet different team needs, and can start with a free version. However, the value that businesses are able to get from the products differ significantly.
Lark plans: Lark offers Starter (free), Pro, and Enterprise plans for teams to choose from based on their team size, need for customization, and collaboration preferences. The free plan is suitable for smaller teams of up to 50 members, and it consolidates chat, docs, project management, meeting, calendar, and more in one place. With the free version, Lark provides users with the essential project management kit via Lark Base, where dynamic project views, automated workflows (5,000 runs/month), and task assignment are all available for teams to start organizing their work efficiently on the spot.
Wrike plans: Wrike offers Free, Team, Business, Enterprise, and Pinnacle plans based on factors like user count, storage requirements, and project management features. While the free plan allows for an unlimited number of users, some essential project management tools are disabled for free users, such as custom workflows and dynamic views, including the Calendar, Gantt Chart, and Dashboard.
As your business grows beyond 50 employees, it is important to have a tech stack that can scale well with your growth. Both Lark and Wrike offer scalable pricing, but Lark allows your business to procure fewer tools for work while still catering to different teams' needs across offices and job sites.
In contrast, Wrike may require a multi-tool, desk-bound tech stack to use effectively because the platform does not provide commonly used communication channels. This means that additional integrations, such as Slack, Gmail, and others, might be necessary. However, this can add to the team's already busy schedule, requiring them to juggle even more tasks.
Using a multi-tool stack with Wrike can cost up to 310.8% more than if you use Lark as your main work management platform.
Suitable teams: choose Lark for growing, distributed teams
Wrike provides solution solutions for desk-bound teams that need to collaborate on projects, such as product, professional services, project management, design, IT, and business operations. With a paid plan, these teams are able to use Wrike to
Allocate resources
Proofing
Request collection
Kanban and Gantt to keep projects on track
Cross-tagging (in Lark Base: two-way links) to build visibility across project streams
As mentioned earlier, Lark offers equivalent solutions for above teams. Additionally, Lark takes into consideration the needs of those who need to work without a laptop, such as facility teams in a factory, store teams at a restaurant, and more.
Starting with Lark Starter (free), businesses can already see how they can improve efficiency and build operational excellence:
Brick-and-mortar businesses can use Lark to efficiently manage store operations. Tasks such as inventory tracking, staff surveys, sales analysis, and more can be easily completed on a phone.
With Lark Base, teams can collect daily updates through the Form view and consolidate all the information onto one table. Auto-updated dashboards provide further insights for teams.
Distributed teams, located across different time zones and/or locations, can use Lark to connect with in-office counterparts or onsite colleagues in real-time through chats and meetings. This allows for issues to be resolved on the spot. Alternatively, they can align on project progress asynchronously through Docs, Minutes, and more.
Lark also provides useful features such as scheduled messages, time zone hints, task assignments, and automated reminders to keep teams on track for upcoming deadlines.
Conclusion
While Lark and Wrike both offer work management solutions, Wrike is better suited for typical project management work streams for desk-bound teams. In contrast, Lark focuses on collaboration around projects, caters to various team types, and offers a more competitive price, making it a more cost-efficient and scalable solution for distributed teams.
If you're interested in exploring how Lark can replace Wrike or your current work management platform, contact our team today for a free consultation ↓
