Project and collaboration technology has come a long way, and now allows teams to track progress, simplify processes, communicate clearly, and easily collaborate from one central platform. No matter what your business does or how teams work, there’s a solution tailored to your needs.

But with so many apps and systems to choose from, they quickly blur together when you start to compare project management software, such as Asana and Wrike.

These are two of the most well-loved project management programs, and we’ve placed them head-to-head to assess their strengths and limitations.

Wrike vs. Asana

How Are Wrike and Asana Similar?

Asana and Wrike are both strong players in the task and project management space. Since each vendor is focused on collaboration, they offer similar functionality like project management features and app integrations.

Project management

Projects lie at the heart of both systems (though Wrike uses the term “folder hierarchies” to organize projects). Inside projects of either system, you can create, assign, and schedule tasks, as well as organize them with color codes. Depending on your preference, you can view projects based on status, tasks, due dates, or percentage complete. You can also see the status of each project on the right panel of both systems.

In Wrike, you view statistics with the folder snapshot:

And in Asana, you get a project overview with the progress metrics:

Both platforms also make it easy to comment and discuss projects using @ tags to mention people, which helps eliminate siloed information by looping everyone into the conversation:

Asana:

Wrike: 

To wipe out pesky status emails, both platforms allow you to create custom workflows. For example, not every task is simply complete or incomplete—there are often multiple stages attached to each. Instead of wondering if a task is finished or forgotten, both systems allow for additional transparency.

In Wrike, you can create statuses to match the actual stages your tasks follow in the work process:

With Asana, you can set up “sections” to represent each phase of a unique project:

One of the most helpful features of both systems is the ability to relate one task to multiple projects—without duplication. This is useful when a task is relevant to concurrent goals or when due dates are applicable to multiple projects.

Lastly, both systems help keep you out of your inbox by offering integrations with popular email providers. Asana allows you to turn emails into tasks, and Wrike lets you transform an email with one click:

Asana: 

Wrike: 

Asana provides a dedicated project inbox:

Wrike’s activity stream records about all updates happening in your workspace:

Apps and integrations

Beyond functionality, both Wrike and Asana offer Android and iOS apps to keep you productive on the go. They also have a wide variety of app integrations, which helps connect the tools you use frequently with their platform. Current integrations include:

• WordPress
• Google Drive
• Dropbox
• Box
• Calendars
• Wufoo
• Okta
• Hipchat
• Slack
• Zendesk
• Zapier

User-friendly interfaces

Both Wrike and Asana offer beautiful, easy-to-navigate interfaces to help track progress and understand performance at a glance. You can take a high-level view, or drill down to monitor individual projects.

Asana dashboards:

Wrike dashboards: 

How Are Wrike and Asana Different?

With so much in common, it’s easy to see why people have trouble deciding between them. There are several internal differentiators that aren’t addressed on the surface. Some of these differences include pricing, Gantt charting and different integration abilities.

Pricing

Asana and Wrike both use the same pricing structure: a freemium, tiered model. They both allow unlimited third-party collaboration (“guests” for Asana and “collaborators” for Wrike). This means outside clients, vendors, contractors, freelancers, or other third parties can all access approved projects for free.

Asana is free for 15 users with limited functionality. Once you upgrade to their premium version to access more features, five users costs $21 per month, and 15 users is $63 per month. Wrike is free for five users with limited features. Their professional version is $49 per month, and 15 users is $99 per month.

Both vendors offer additional pricing for larger companies as well. Asana recommends companies over 100 members should contact them, while Wrike offers an enterprise tier for five or more users.

Gantt charts

Wrike provides built-in Gantt charts to help you track project progress, although this feature is not included in free versions:

Asana offers Gantt-style charts called timelines. They let your team assign work, track milestones, and set dependencies.

Integrations

Wrike and Asana both offer over 30 integrations. Though many of them do overlap, there are a few differences of note:

• Time tracking: Wrike offers built-in time tracking, whereas Asana integrates with Everhour and Harvest.

• Marketing automation: Wrike integrates with Hubspot, whereas Asana integrates with MailChimp and Campaign Monitor.

• Sales: Wrike integrates with Salesforce, whereas Asana integrates with Zapier, which offers custom Zoho CRM automation.  

While it’s worth mentioning that none of these integrations are inherently good, bad, or better than the other, it’s an important factor to consider when weighing both programs. Asana has prioritized integration with many small-business tools, whereas Wrike favors many enterprise-focused integrations. In the end, each company also offers a flexible API, so if you already have your heart set on one, don’t be discouraged— there’s a good chance it can customized to fit your needs.

Support

It’s not healthy to expect the worst, but when things turn sour, you’ll need all the help you can get. Asana provides email support, FAQs, a knowledge base, and videos for troubleshooting. Wrike offers the same mix of electronic help, in addition to phone and live chat support.

Final Thoughts

Asana’s strength lies in its simplicity. It supports team communication and workflows, as well as individual work. It’s easy to get a clear view of priorities and tasks, and collaborate on those tasks that relate to other people.

Asana isn’t trying to be all things to all people; it doesn’t care to create tailored versions for one industry or company size. But if you need additional features or already have apps you love, you can take advantage of integrations and API to support your specific needs.

If you value communication and coordination but want to go beyond traditional task management, then Wrike may be for you. It offers many enterprise-grade features. Its built-in time tracking, for example, could be especially useful for large companies or remote workers.

And while Asana is focused on getting you out of the inbox, Wrike is focused on getting you out of all your apps. For instance, its native document editor lets users edit collaboratively and see changes in real time—all within Wrike.

The post Wrike vs. Asana Review appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Businesses in every industry are under increasing pressure to mine their data — to spot trends, patterns, outliers, and even predict the future — in order to maximize profits and beat competitors. That’s probably why the business intelligence software market is at $22.79 billion in 2017, with an expected annual growth rate of 10.4 percent until 2026.

Business intelligence (BI) tools pull in raw data and turn out actionable insight. They use advanced reporting and powerful visualization to help executives and analysts make better decisions, such as whether or not to launch a new customer experience initiative, give more employee feedback, or drill for oil in a third-world country. This is a crowded marketplace, but TechnologyAdvice can help you find the right business intelligence software. If you’d like free, customized recommendations now, visit our business intelligence software page or click on the image below to get started.

ALSO READ: Domo vs. Tableau: Choosing the Right Business Intelligence Solution

Tableau and Spotfire are two of the biggest names in modern business intelligence. Unlike the usual big-box suspects (SAP, Oracle, IBM), they’re designed to make BI accessible to the non-IT-guru. But if you’re en route to purchasing BI for your business, you need to make a choice. Today we will look at Tableau vs. Spotfire to give you a better understanding of each platform.

Tableau vs. Spotfire: Which is better for your needs?

In this post, we’ll help you answer that question by taking a detailed look at each product and comparing them based on systems and pricing, dashboards, analytics capabilities, and source integrations. First, let’s take a look at each company.

Also read: Power BI vs. Tibco Spotfire

Tableau was founded in Mountain View, California in 2003. After years of consistent improvement and growth, they were recently acquired by Salesforce. Spotfire has been around since the early 90s but didn’t really take off until 2007, when the brand was acquired by TIBCO Software. An exact customer count is unavailable, but at $885 million in revenue, it’s safe to say TIBCO has a large product portfolio and a large market share.

Both products target a wide swath of customers and industries, including:

• Financial services
• Science and agriculture
• Healthcare
• Manufacturing
• HR
• Media
• Consumer goods
• Education
• Retail
• Energy and utilities
• IT
• Telecommunications
• Logistics/transportation
• Public sector
• Nonprofit

Tableau Power Users: SpaceX, Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Dell

Spotfire Power Users: Proctor and Gamble, Cisco, NetApp, Shell

Systems and Pricing

Tableau and Spotfire are available in several different configurations to match the number of users you have and whether you want the software locally installed or hosted online. If you plan to have more than a few users and deploy the solution across your company, you’ll need to request a custom price quote.

Both vendors use a three-tier pricing structure, but they differ on a few points. Tableau’s software comes with three different user types: creator, explorer, and viewer. Every account needs one creator, while a minimum of 5 explorers and 100 viewers are required for each plan. Deploy Tableau on premises, in the public cloud, or fully hosted by Tableau in the Tableau Online software. Editions for individual users and embedded analytics are also available.

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TIBCO Spotfire is available in four editions: Cloud, Platform, Enterprise, and AWS, a turn-key solution hosted on Amazon Web Services servers. The Cloud and AWS versions of the tool are available via subscription models. Similar to Tableau, Spotfire offers different pricing for each admin access level.

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Dashboards

The dashboard is the linchpin of a BI platform. Dashboards give users the ability to organize data sources, reports, and objects in one central location that (ideally) stays updated in real time.

Tableau lets users easily create interactive dashboards using custom filters and drag-and-drop functionality. Dashboards can be shared embedded into wikis, corporate portals, or web pages. Options include executive dashboards, operational dashboards, dashboard applications (e.g., a “home finder” web app), and ad-hoc dashboards. Here’s an example of a Tableau Customer Dashboard:

Spotfire offers a similar dashboard experience: intuitive design and the ability to publish completed dashboards through a zero-footprint web client. For less experienced users, the Spotfire Recommendations wizard can suggest best-practice visualizations based on the data you select (an advantage over Tableau, which doesn’t offer much help with templates or default object placement). With the Spotfire 7 update, users can also apply visual themes and branding to dashboards:

Reporting and Analytics Capabilities

Tableau and Spotfire are both incredibly powerful when it comes to processing raw data and spitting out clear business insight and visualizations. They both use a hybrid model that consists of in-memory and in-database (or “live connect,” as Tableau calls it) analytics architectures. Translation? They adapt to your local processing power and database size and sync data quickly under almost any circumstance.

Tableau

Tableau covers data discovery, data visualization, geocoding, survey analysis, time-series analysis, social analytics, and more. It integrates with the R statistical programming language, and provides mobile BI access with touch-optimized features for tablets.

Unique Feature:

• Data Preparation: Let’s you connect to “messy” spreadsheets and fix/configure data while you sync. Pivots cross-tab data back into normalized columns, removes extraneous titles, text, and images, and reconciles metadata fields.

Spotfire

Spotfire’s analytics capabilities include interactive data visualization, diagnostic analytics, data augmentation, predictive/prescriptive analytics, content analytics, real-time event analytics, location-based analytics, and other areas.

Unique Feature:

• • Content analytics: Decipher unstructured, text-based data from any source (e.g., CRM case notes, support tickets, weblogs, social media feeds, emails); mix unstructured content with other data to understand root cause and identify new opportunities.

Data Connectors

Business intelligence applications are built on the idea of aggregating and interpreting data from outside sources, so they’re only useful insomuch as they integrate with data sources and other business systems (like CRM or marketing automation), servers, and databases.

Each vendor provides a set of native data connectors, which means it can seamlessly pull data from those sources without custom configuration or coding. These include nearly 200 connectors to business tools like GitHub, Jira, Amazon Glacier, and even Facebook.

Both solutions provide a good mix of big data, relational database, and cloud integrations. Any databases or applications not listed would presumably require API integration and/or middleware to sync.

Here’s a list of native integrations available through Tableau:

Tableau does offer a handful of native connectors that Spotfire does not: DataStax, EXASOL, Firebird, Google Analytics and BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, and SAP Sybase.

* * *

In discovering what Tableau vs. Spotfire can offer, they both give businesses in any industry the ability to mine their databases for insight, visualize information, and make better strategic decisions. Both are scalable, widely-integrated, and available on-premise or in the cloud. Your decision will mostly depend on what databases and cloud applications support your business, and what kind of deployment is best for your team.

But don’t forget to consider other business intelligence solutions. Tell TechnologyAdvice about your industry, goals, and desired features, and we’ll show you a list of custom recommendations. Click the image below to get started.

Top Business Intelligence Software Recommendations

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The dashboard is simple for a reason: you don’t have time to decipher complicated information or overwhelming indicators when making critical decisions. The same is true for a business dashboard. Businesses and organizations need dashboards to improve the decision-making process in a short time. The biggest challenge in creating business dashboards may be to approach them with the same kind of on-a-need-to-know-basis set of gauges.

That said, assuming you have some idea of what data to show, the implementation of a dashboard is not rocket science.

In this tutorial, I will share with you some tips to build an effective dashboard regarding the final use of the dashboard.

Let’s get started

1.Separate background from the charts

I will start with this basic common sense tip, even though it may seem obvious and superficial. First impressions matter: If the background is not visually different from the charts, users could be easily confused, spending the first few seconds to figure out the charts’ borders and content before trying to understand the purpose of the dashboard.

To help users spot the different charts quickly, make sure each chart has a border (or different background color from the outside canvas.) The picture below visualizes two dashboards, where only one applies this principle. Judge for yourself.

2. Know your audience

Dashboards are meant to help users, and must be customized to your audience needs, interests, level of expertise, and analytical ability.

Also, pay attention to factors such as the audience’s culture and cognitive or physical disabilities that require special considerations.

Let’s look at some examples of how knowing your audience can help you prepare better dashboards:

a. Culture

In the western world, the colors green or blue are used to represent prosperity, whereas the color red is used to show the opposite; while in China red is used to represent success. So pay attention to the use of the right color (or get fancy and vary them by region).

b. The level of expertise

If the audience is senior executives, forget the nitty-gritty details (not because they can’t understand them, they just don’t have the time!) Use simple column, bar, and line charts, as they are easy to understand. But if you are dealing with experts, feel free to add details, and to use advanced charts to provide opportunity for data exploration.

The dashboard below features some simple executive chart examples.

http://jsfiddle.net/mushigh/bt6hf5cq/show

c. Accessibility

According to the color blind awareness organization, color blindness affects up to 8% of men and 0.5 of women. Chances are, part of your audience is color blind. Thus, use patterns instead of just colors whenever appropriate. Below is an excellent example of a dashboard with patterns to visualize the health expenditure and spending in (Oh) Canada(!):

http://jsfiddle.net/mushigh/uvpzmL5k/show

3. Keep the legend close to the charts

A legend is one of the critical elements in a chart since it helps to decipher what the chart tells the users. So always use the right legend’s words to describe your chart. But, this is not the only thing you should care about when you use a legend, you should place the legend as close as possible to its chart and far from other charts to avoid any users’ misinterpretation. For instance, the dashboard below has four charts, and each chart has its legend in the middle left or right position; in this case, there is no room for misinterpretation as it is obvious which legend belong to which chart.

4. Avoid crowded charts

Most people make irrational decisions when presented with too much information at the same time; this phenomenon is referred to as information overload or infobesity. The best way to prevent information overload is by breaking down charts into simple charts.

For instance, the dashboard below visualizes the income and cost for each state in the USA separately. I will let you imagine how messy it would be if all the charts are displayed in one chart, it would be impossible to come up with any decision or conclusion.

https://jsfiddle.net/mushigh/amfxrt7q/

5. Provide tools to explore data

Interacting with dashboards is an excellent way to explore data and come up with a better conclusion and decisions. So provide your audience with interactive features such as zooming and filtering, as they are intuitive and easy to use (see animation below):

6. Think responsive design

It goes without saying that a responsive design, in general, is a must; your dashboards need to be user-friendly on smartphones and tablets, as users use all kind of devices and screen sizes (see animation below):

Summary

Dashboards are a great tool to display multiple charts on one big display. Keep in mind that the goals of dashboards are:

1. To empower the users to explore data and come up with their own ideas/decisions.
2. To share insights using pre-selected data and charts. Be sure to provide an easy to read dashboard to reduce the probability of confusion and to maximize your chances to achieve your goal.

I will be happy to hear about your experience with dashboards, so feel free to share any other tips that help to make a better dashboard.

Mustapha Mekhatria is a community manager at Highsoft located in Norway. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn to find more blogs and demos about data visualization.

Ready to pick out the best BI software for your business? Click on the image below to get fast, free recommendations via email, or visit our business intelligence page to browse reviews, recommendations, and advice on your next BI software.

Top Business Dashboard Software Recommendations

The post 6 Things to Consider Before Putting Charts Into a Dashboard appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

But information alone isn’t knowledge.

Data is nothing more than virtual garbage unless it can be translated into actionable insight and effective business outcomes.

CFOs and The Information Age

CFOs are the financial spokesperson of their organization, historically responsible for financial planning, record-keeping, and reporting. They’re role is to balance risk through budget management, cost benefit analysis, forecasting, and funding knowledge.

As purveyors of finance, these basic duties haven’t changed much.

But as data volume and variety increase, CFOs and financial professionals must leverage these new information streams to identify trends and incorporate analytics into the decision making process. When it comes to seeking out strategic advice, CEOs turn to CFOs 72 percent of the time.

To help shape the strategic direction of the company, CFOs not only have to interpret vast troves of data, but they have to do it faster and more accurately than the competition.

Business Intelligence for CFOs

A Video Guide to Business Intelligence

Companies that adopt a data-driven culture are the most successful. Seventy-six percent of executives from top-performing companies cite data collection as very important or essential, and data-driven companies are three times more likely to rate themselves as substantially ahead of their peers in financial performance.

CFOs have always used valuable information to identify growth opportunities either from existing or new customers, products, and markets. This task has become more complex however due to the amount of sales, operations, employee, website, and customer data that is now being generated across multiple channels.

To bring these disparate silos together and eliminate late nights hunched over reports (that are often out of date by the time they’re analyzed), CFOs need business intelligence and analytics tools. In fact, Gartner research revealed 78 percent of CFOs consider BI and analytics as a top technology initiative for the finance department — beating out even financial management applications.

Though many organizations consider data a priority, they’re still struggling to make progress with BI and analytics. In order to avoid this common problem, let’s examine how business intelligence software helps CFOs harness data and analytics to increase customer engagement and grow profits.

Self-service Insight

Capturing data is important, but using information to propel the business forward is more important. BI software alleviates the headache of collecting and consolidating profit and loss numbers from every department or business unit for comparison and analysis. By integrating various ERP, CRM, marketing, HR, and back-end data sources into a BI platform, all company data is compiled into one central location. This means no more tracking company performance from spreadsheets or waiting on IT to run complex reports.

BI software puts data at your fingertips through the use of dashboards, which present easy to analyze views of selected metrics. Dashboards help improve the BI user experience and make business intelligence approachable. They simplify complex data sets, reveal patterns, and provide you with a way to monitor business performance at a glance, which enables fact-based decision-making.

Head here for a mock CFO dashboard created with Tableau. This particular dashboard is used to view your business composition and monitor changes as they occur. Currently, the segment composition is calculated by net sales. By using the “Select Measure” filter in the top left, you can switch your measure to gross profit, operating income, or net profit. You can also use the rest of the filter panel or drill down by clicking anywhere in the visualization.

By aggregating important data, dashboards and self-service reporting tools help you identify hidden trends or missed opportunities. For example, rather than just a report that shows profits increased, BI lets you pinpoint why profits increased. To gain context, you can “drill down” to see exactly what is causing the spike in revenue. With a real-time financial view across the company, you can discover which efforts are suffering and which are exceeding, then allocate resources accordingly.

Financial Visualizations

End-to-end business intelligence is critical. CFOs are already trained to discern patterns and implications, so visualization tools that save time and simplify processes are important. BI dashboards allow CFOs to build interactive reports that allow them to get fast answers to business questions such as “What’s driving sales growth?” or “Where are we spending resources?”

Business Intelligence and Analytics Software In Action

Data visualizations turn your financial key performance indicators (KPIs) into clear graphics, which help you track performance and assess risk. Visualization also helps quickly compare different pieces of data with auto-generated charts. These typically include: tables, pie charts, bar graphs, heat maps, scatter plots, and gauges. Our minds often respond better to pictures than to rows of numbers: business managers who use visual data discovery tools are 28 percent more likely to find timely information than peers who only use managed reporting and dashboards.

Advanced Analytics

Descriptive analytics is when you use historical data to pinpoint the reason behind a success or failure. Business intelligence software now goes beyond this to help you shift from a historical perspective to a forward-looking perspective.

The Big Data Analytics Landscape, via Ayata

Predictive analytics uses technologies such as forecasting, data mining, and simulations to tell you what is likely to happen. For example, predictive analytics can identify sales fluctuations and product popularity, which can be used to forecast inventory needs at a particular retail store. It can also identify purchase behavior and demographic information about your most valuable clients, which can be used to determine how much money should be invested to gain business from them or similar prospects. Advanced prescriptive analytics goes ever further by recommending the best course of action based on the knowledge you currently have.

_____

Business analytics software uses the data you already have to open up new ways of looking at business and operational information. CFOs can use this technology to scale performance, assess future risk, and hone their financial metrics.

Don’t let your data become virtual garbage.

The right business intelligence tools can help make data your company’s most valuable asset.

Top Business Intelligence Software Recommendations

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