Recently, Gartner released its magic quadrant report highlighting the leading collaborative work management service providers of 2023. As the workplace evolves, so do the considerations business leaders must include when managing workers and the digital tools that they use.
Many firms are racing to stay ahead of the pack and remain competitive; due to the nature of this marketplace, the range of collaborative work management tools represents a wealth of different approaches from a wide array of firms. Some standard product capabilities also include automation functionalities to enhance the completion of repetitive activities.
Moreover, to support end-users at all stages of their journey, workplace management tools leverage deep reporting, analytics, and dashboard features to optimize workflows. Alongside aggregating system data, including behaviour and other metadata, the tools provide a uniform database with query, search, and filter functions.
Workplace management solutions can also come with use-case accelerators and prebuilt templates for specific work procedures, such as case management operations, team objectives, and professional services automation.
What are the Leading Collaborative Work Management Tools?
According to Gartner, workplace management tools provide hubs for supporting decision-makers in creating plans, coordinating teams, and automating tasks. Collaborative work management tools allow enterprise end-users to plan their work activities by breaking them down into smaller tasks, establishing dependencies between them, and specifying timelines.
Work management suites also must consider user accessibility and navigation to enable easy use of a wide range of features that may include work planning, in-context collaboration, content creation, workflow and automation, reporting, and analytics –depending on a chosen service.
For its magic quadrant report, Gartner highlighted ten leading solution providers, including:
Adobe
Adobe has been hailed as a leading digital service provider for years, from workplace tools to digital content creation applications and emerging products available via its cloud service. Gartner’s recent report highlighted Adobeo Workfront, a product for marketing, creative production, campaign management and program management workflows in leading the market.
The products also leverage a no-code development suite, which provides leading accessibility for business leaders looking to develop a bespoke management platform for targetted use cases.
Moreover, the service now leverages emerging genAI technologies to ensure quality control and links workflows between its broader portfolio. According to Gartner, through years of application development, Adobe Workfront is strengthened by its viability, customer experience, and product experiences.
Airtable
Airtable is a US and UK firm delivering best-in-class workplace management solutions. The firm’s product portfolio provides task/work management capabilities while also democratizing content creation across various levels of a company,
The democratized approach allows Airtable to build workflows for specific enterprise use cases such as creative production, product operations, and marketing.
The firm plans to upgrade its product, including improving Airtable support for resource management, notifications, content creation, and data exploration.
Gartner notes that the firm’s leading considerations include market understanding, marketing execution, and customer experience. Meanwhile, Gartner states that Airtable’s geographic strategy may hold it back due to its evolving regional presence.
Asana
Asana, a leading US work management solutions provider, is working to bring a competitive edge to the marketplace. Its products for clients and partners in the US, Canada, Europe, and APAC regions provide complex solutions for retail, consumer product goods, technology, professional services, and media end users.
The firm works closely with its clients to leverage feedback and optimize its product further, providing a growing solution that matches emerging demands. Moreover, the firm’s roadmap sees Asana hop in the genAI train, leveraging the tech to optimize operations on the management service.
With its tight nit and proactive market strategy, Gartner notes that Asana can provide high-quality targetted solutions. Moreover, with its geographic considerations, Asana has the ability to understand customer needs and how this changes based on regional differences.
Atlassian
Atlassian’s product portfolio is helping technical and business teams in North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific regions overhaul their workflows and reach new productivity levels.
The firm offers Atlassian Together, a single cloud subscription service that gives clients access to the firm’s management products, which includes Trello, Confluence, Atlas and Jira. The products align stakeholders with their workplace goals, assisting them with tracking and streamlining processes.
Gartner notes that the service is extensively accessible thanks to its low price point and platform ecosystem, which brings together thousands of partners ready for end users to access via its integrated marketplace.
ClickUp
The US service provider Clickup – also available for European and Australian clients – offers buyers a digital suite for streamlining work processes and team productivity.
Soon, via a profound roadmap of updates, ClickUp will soon add updates that improve features such as workspace governance, chart management, scheduling, GenAI assistance, workflow approvals, and flexible notifications.
According to Gartner, ClickUp provides a unique lineup of CWM capabilities, which gives the firm a competitive edge, each with features such as document authoring, whiteboards, and universal search.
monday.com
Leading the workplace management space is monday.com, an international organization with offices in Europe, North America, Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne and Sao Paulo, providing its services to companies worldwide.
Many clients in marketing and sales, general operations, and program management leverage the popular platform; soon, the service’s clients will gain additional features, including GenAI, version control, and integrated third-party applications.
According to Gartner, monday.com’s high pricing model may put some clients off; however, Gartner notes that the service’s long-standing market presence and understanding help the firm justify the price point for the leading service.
Notion
Many engineering, product management and marketing clients are leveraging Notion’s leading workplace management solution. Notion’s product reinvents collaborative content creation with tools, allowing businesses to embed interactive and dynamic components to enhance work planning and tracking procedures.
Notion will soon include considerations for improved reporting with time-tracking, new integration connectors, and a new desktop app. As the firm works towards its roadmap, Gartner notes that Notion’s innovation helps bring new use cases to the service.
Quickbase
Gartner notes that Qucikbase is a “niche” player in the market. Despite a smaller presence, Quickbase is a serious player in the workplace management solutions market.
The Quickbase platform mainly targets operations leaders, line-of-business leaders, and IT professionals across use cases such as construction, real estate, public sectors, infrastructure, and industrial equipment management.
The platform’s upcoming product roadmap will improve interactive project planning, in-field data collection, content creation, and the inclusion of a broader range of prebuilt use-case modules.
Smartsheets
Smartsheet takes a unique approach to workplace management tools based on spreadsheet models – like Microsoft Excel. The firm targets clients in program management, operations, strategic transformation and marketing, providing real-time collaboration and productivity.
The firm is also adding genAI into its product and focusing on expanding its ability for users to scale product deployments. To reach its goals, Gartner notes that sales execution will assist the firm in gaining a dominant place in the busy market.
On the other hand, Gartner explains that its complex pricing model could slow down Smartsheet’s business-wide adoption journey.
Wrike
Finally, US workplace management service provider Wrike is building its product portfolio for customers in Europe, Japan and Australia.
The firm is deploying its service across clients in marketing, IT, PMO and professional services, allowing them to emphasize satisfaction based on an ever-evolving user experience model.
Collaborative Work Management Tools in 2024
The Gartner Magic Quadrant report paints a positive picture for the marketplace going into 2024.
Clients have many service providers to choose from, and in 2024, each of those companies will be increasing their product offerings and building new features for new clients.
Additionally, 2023’s big tech topic, genAI, will advance each firm’s offerings, and 2024 will be an exciting time to reach the mentioned companies.
