Wrike vs Excel for Project Management: We Compared Them Across 12 Italian SMEs
- Roberto Benanti
- Mar 9
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 21
Every time we propose Wrike to a client, the first reaction is almost always the same: "But we already use Excel, and it works just fine."
It's an understandable response. Excel is everywhere, everyone knows how to use it, and for many things it genuinely works. The issue isn't Excel itself: it's using Excel to do things it was never designed for.
Over the past two years, we've worked alongside 12 Italian SMEs through the transition from Excel to Wrike for project management. What follows isn't a sales brochure: it's a field report, with real numbers, a few surprises, and the honest admission that Wrike isn't always the right answer.
The Hidden Costs of Excel That Nobody Talks About
Before starting any transition, we conducted an internal audit with each company. We asked project managers to track, for one week, how much time they spent on activities that weren't directly productive: updating spreadsheets, sending status emails, answering questions like "where did that file go?" or "what's the latest version?"
The average result across the 12 companies: 4.5 hours per week, per project manager.
That's over 200 hours a year, per person, spent maintaining the management system itself instead of actually managing projects.
Other issues that emerged consistently across the companies:
• Version proliferation: "final", "final_v2", "final_USETHISONE". Every team had experienced this.
• No real-time visibility: to know where a project stood, you had to ask someone, which meant interrupting their work.
• Invisible dependencies: if a task slipped, the cascade effect on other tasks was discovered only when it was already too late.
Results After the Switch: The Numbers
We measured results at 3 months and 6 months after going live with Wrike. Here's what we found across the 12 companies:
• -65% in project status update requests (managers could simply check directly in Wrike)
• +40% in on-time delivery rates for milestones
• -3.2 hours/week per PM recovered from administrative overhead
• Significant reduction in internal email volume for project coordination
"The first thing that changed wasn't the numbers: it was the team meetings. We stopped spending 20 minutes at the start of every meeting just to align on where things stood. We already knew. So we spent those 20 minutes actually making decisions." Operations Director, manufacturing SME, 45 employees
When Excel Is Still the Right Choice
We said this is an honest comparison, so here it is: Wrike isn't always the answer. Excel remains the better choice when:
• You're managing a single, one-off project with no ongoing coordination needs
• Your team has 2–3 people and everyone already knows the status of everything
• The main use case is data analysis or financial modelling, not task and timeline management
• Your organisation isn't yet ready for a structured change management process
Wrike makes the real difference when you have multiple simultaneous projects, a team of more than 4–5 people, and a growing need for visibility, from both management and clients.
The Surprise: It Wasn't Just About Efficiency
We expected the efficiency gains. What we didn't expect was the qualitative shift in how teams talked about their work.
When everyone has shared visibility into the same source of truth, conversations stop being about "where are we?" and start being about "where do we want to go?". Meetings became shorter and more strategic. Accountability shifted from being imposed top-down to being naturally assumed by the team.
That wasn't in any ROI spreadsheet. But it was consistently the thing managers mentioned first when we asked them what had changed the most.
Would You Like to Understand If Wrike Is Right for Your Team?
We don't start from the tool. We start from your situation: how many projects, how many people, where the friction really is. Only then do we understand whether Wrike is the right fit, and how to set it up so your team actually adopts it.
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