Trello, Asana, ClickUp or Wrike? What Changes When Your Marketing Team Grows Beyond 5 People
- Roberto Benanti
- Apr 3
- 4 min read
Trello, Asana, ClickUp and Wrike are the four project management tools most discussed in Italian marketing and PMO teams. They all work. They all have free or trial versions. And they all look similar while the team stays small.
The problem emerges when you scale: more people, more projects, more dependencies, more stakeholders. What was enough at 3-4 people stops being enough at 8-10. This article isn't a generic review. It covers what changes specifically for a marketing or PMO team in an Italian SME growing beyond 5 people.
Trello: great for getting started, limited when work gets complex
Trello is the simplest of the four. The Kanban model with boards, lists and cards is intuitive and requires no training. For a team of 2-4 people with a linear workflow it's often more than enough.
Limitations surface with growth. Trello has no native task dependency model, no native Gantt view, and managing multiple parallel projects requires Power-Ups that complicate the tool without really solving the problem. When a marketing team has 8 active campaigns with interdependent deadlines, Trello starts showing its structural limits.
Best fit: small teams with simple workflows, linear projects without complex dependencies, fast onboarding without training.
Shows limits when: there are more than 5-6 active parallel projects, task dependencies matter, or the team exceeds 5-6 people with different workloads.
Asana: more structured than Trello, but with a scalability ceiling
Asana covers more ground than Trello. It has multiple views (list, board, calendar, timeline), supports task dependencies, and offers portfolio features on higher plans. For a mid-size marketing team it's often the natural step up from Trello.
Where Asana starts showing limits is in customising approval workflows, in advanced portfolio reporting, and in bidirectional integrations with other business tools. Automations exist but are less powerful in complex workflow scenarios.
Best fit: growing teams up to 15-20 people, workflows with moderate dependencies, organisations that want fast adoption without complex configuration.
Shows limits when: approval workflows are complex and multi-step, portfolio reporting needs to be granular, or integrations with business systems require bidirectional data.
ClickUp: all-in-one, but watch out for complexity
ClickUp is probably the tool with the highest feature count of the four. Tasks, docs, goals, dashboards, time tracking, whiteboards: it's designed to be the team's single work platform. That ambition is also its main critical point.
In the marketing and PMO teams we've seen adopt ClickUp, the recurring pattern is this: initial enthusiasm for the flexibility, then progressive configuration paralysis. ClickUp offers so many options that without clear guidance on how to structure it, every team ends up building a different system. The result is that after a few months the team is still working inconsistently, on a platform that's now more complex to maintain.
ClickUp is a valid choice for teams with a solid process culture who can invest time in the initial setup. For Italian SMEs approaching structured project management for the first time, the risk of dispersion is real.
Best fit: teams with high process maturity seeking a single platform for all work, tech-savvy organisations comfortable configuring digital tools, contexts where maximum flexibility is a higher priority than predefined structure.
Shows limits when: the team lacks time or skills to configure it correctly, fast adoption with industry-specific templates is needed, or enterprise integrations with established business systems are required.
Wrike: built for high-volume work and complex processes
Wrike has a steeper learning curve than Trello and Asana. It's not the right tool for anyone who wants something operational in an afternoon. What it offers in return is a level of configurability and power specifically oriented toward structured business processes, with more robust access and approval management than the other three.
The features that make the difference for mid-size marketing and PMO teams: customisable intake forms that automatically create tasks, workflows with custom statuses and automations triggered by status changes, granularly configurable portfolio dashboards, and access management for external collaborators.
Unlike ClickUp, Wrike's flexibility is more oriented toward business process compliance than interface personalisation. This makes it better suited to contexts where there are defined processes to follow, and less suited to teams seeking a borderless all-in-one tool.
Best fit: marketing teams with high volumes of campaigns and creative revisions, PMOs with a portfolio of projects to monitor in parallel, organisations coordinating external collaborators, companies needing advanced process automations.
Not the right choice if: the team is small (under 5 people), processes are simple and linear, or you need a tool to go live independently without implementation support.
The real turning point: what changes beyond 5 people
When a team exceeds 5 people, three things change that all four tools handle differently: individual workload visibility, the complexity of approval workflows, and coordination with people outside the team.
On these three points, in the context of the teams we support, Wrike offers the most structured answer for business processes. ClickUp offers more flexibility but requires more configuration work. Asana covers the middle ground well. Trello remains the simplest tool, but also the one that scales least effectively.
The right question is not "which tool is the best overall?". It's "which tool fits the way my team works today, and how it will need to work in 12 months?".
Are you evaluating which PM tool to adopt for your team?
At SBK Solutions we support marketing and PMO teams in choosing and implementing the PM tool that best fits their reality. As a certified Wrike Partner, we offer a structured evaluation process that starts from your real workflows and leads to an informed choice.
Or read all articles in the Wrike & Project Management category.
