Last week, ETR introduced its most recent product, the ETR Observatory. Backed by industry-leading survey data from our ETR Community, the ETR Observatory positions enterprise technology vendors in relation to their subsector peers. Our first ETR Observatory looks at the crowded project management tools space. Productivity tools rapidly gained adoption due to the pandemic and ensuing remote work paradigm shift, and spending in this sector remains healthy as organizations support a hybrid workforce and increasingly shift workloads to the cloud. Amidst budget pressures, productivity, and workflow management become increasingly critical with distributed workers and a heightened focus on operational efficiency across departments and roles. See the full Observatory report.
The suite of applications bundled into hosted platform providers like Google Workspace and Microsoft Office grab a large slice of the overall productivity pie, but when it comes to project management tools specifically, the market is segmented, and neither of those two cloud players has an exclusive grip. In fact, Google Workspace doesn’t include a specific project management tool, and Microsoft Project fairs relatively poorly in our data, particularly as compared to other embedded Microsoft offerings. Atlassian is a formidable competitor noted for multiple offerings and robust features long favored among more technical roles, although concerns exist around the vendor’s pricing model and resources needed to stand the solution up. Meanwhile, lighter-weight, niche alternatives have popped up, like Smartsheet, Monday.com, and Airtable, albeit sometimes entering an organization through the side door. With smaller citation bases, data on these vendors exhibit volatility but some are beginning to prove themselves in the enterprise, while others, like Wrike and ClickUp, struggle to gain traction within our ITDM community.
ETR data shows that organizations will continue to put productivity dollars towards full enterprise suites like Microsoft and Google, even as the market slows, but they won’t be leaning on Workspace and Project, at least not exclusively, for project and workflow management tools. While Microsoft Project is somewhat entrenched, the data shows that organizations are not increasing spend or indicating net-new adoptions of the tool. Atlassian, Smartsheet, and Monday.com are increasingly prevalent in the shared accounts of both major players. Data on Atlassian remains incredibly robust as it is being utilized more. Although pricing concerns exist, it is not enough to dampen the market’s spend on the tool or keep the explosive utilization at bay. The future continues to look strong for Atlassian.
Airtable’s data set is still relatively nascent, and citations remain low. Smartsheet has shown itself to be a strong contender, though its recent data set faltered, along with Asana’s data set, which continues to struggle. Monday.com continues to show signs of strength in the enterprise. Data on ClickUp’s has yet to impress, but the vendor is making strides in both of ETR's core surveys, in tandem with positive commentary from technology decision makers. The Observatory report also briefly reviews ETR data on emerging players like Coda, Procore, Productboard, SafetyCulture, Shortcut, and others, considering how teams and users continue to adopt smaller providers as workers adapt to distributed working in environments with high productivity expectations. Overall, the project and workflow management space has a lot of runway ahead and will continue to mature as these tools become increasingly critical in managing daily work. The market is large, dynamic, and full of fragmented competitors. Strategic investments will continue, coinciding with improvements to the hybrid workspace and overall digital experience.
Read the full Observatory report to see all of the underlying data and learn what decision makers are saying about the leading project management tools.
Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) is a technology market research firm that leverages proprietary data from our targeted IT decision maker (ITDM) community to provide actionable insights about spending intentions and industry trends. Since 2010, we have worked diligently at achieving one goal: eliminating the need for opinions in enterprise research, which are often formed from incomplete, biased, and statistically insignificant data. Our community of ITDMs represents $1+ trillion in annual IT spend and is positioned to provide best-in-class customer/evaluator perspectives. ETR’s proprietary data and insights from this community empower institutional investors, technology companies, and ITDMs to navigate the complex enterprise technology landscape amid an expanding marketplace. Discover what ETR can do for you at www.etr.ai