Collaborative Work Management: Opportunism Guides Adoption

The Magic Quadrant for collaborative work management tools shows a trend toward “tactical” deployments. Which suppliers stand out? Collaborative work management tools, often deployed opportunistically? Gartner notes this in its Magic Quadrant dedicated to this market. Freemium models encourage the trend towards “uncoordinated efforts” to use the terms of the American cabinet. 

The introduction of these tools is the work of small teams or even end users without an overall strategy. This has implications in terms of governance (quality control, data management, maintenance, etc.). There is also the question of the sustainability of the offers. In a segment where the large platform providers have generally not yet played their cards, “small” players are evolving, tending to favor market share over profitability. 

To be included in the Quadrant, it was necessary to offer an autonomous product, covering at least the aspects of planning, collaboration, workflows and automation, reporting and analytics, along with “use case accelerators”. Among other thresholds that had to be respected (for the year 2022):

1. – $50M in revenue or 300 FTEs dedicated to the offering
2. – 300 new customers or 30,000 new end users (excluding free offers)
3. – 100 customers with more than $100,000 or 100 customers with more than 1000 end users

Ten Suppliers, Five “Leaders”

Positioning within the Quadrant results from an evaluation on two axes. One is prospective (“vision”), which is focused on strategies (sectoral, geographical, commercial, marketing, product, etc.). The other focused on the ability to respond to demand effectively (“execution”: customer experience, pre-sales performance, quality of products/services, etc.).

Airtable: Geographic Coverage To Be Improved

Airtable stands out for its understanding of the market, mainly through the no-code approach. The customer experience also earns it a good point, particularly on automation, security and integrations. Gartner could be more optimistic about Airtable’s geographic presence. Whether at the data center level, the partner network or language support. On the product side, the American firm identifies weaknesses in content creation, dynamic reporting and support for use cases.

Asana: An Approach That Lacks Verticality

Asana also makes a good point on customer experience in the name of overall UX. Gartner also praises the extent of its geographic coverage and the awareness of its brand. Product weaknesses include calendar support, content creation, reporting widgets, and complex workflow management. Asana also needs programs focused on professions and industry sectors.

Pricing, A Black Point At Monday.Com…

Brand awareness is also a strong point of monday.com. Just like the customer experience (on the functional core and support for use cases ) and certain functionalities of its product (creation of forms, visual automation, elasticity in support of a specific database). Gartner is more reserved about the reliability of the company itself, given its ambitions beyond this market. He also regrets pricing that is less flexible and tends to be higher than other suppliers classified in the Quadrant. There is also room for improvement in workflow management, dynamic reporting and data retrieval.

…And At Smartsheet

Another good student of customer experience and brand awareness is Smartsheet. Gartner also highlights its history in this market: it was one of the first to add features for data integration, DataViz, centralized reporting and multiplatform workflow deployments. Apart from the functional core, the offer remains limited to visual collaboration, document creation and universal search. The customization of interfaces could be improved, adds Gartner, which also points out the delicate handling for new users. Vigilance is also on pricing, which is less transparent than with competitors (integration, optional modules).

Wrike: The Weight Of The Citrix Era

Like Asana, Wrike gets a good point for overall UX. Gartner credits him with another for his understanding of the market. On the product side, the American firm appreciates the no code brick, templates and “use case accelerators”. Wrike claims a smaller customer base than its main competitors. Its partnerships are also limited outside the USA and Europe (where its two data centers are located ). It also needs to recover the momentum lost during the Citrix period, both in terms of market share and notoriety.

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