Collaborative Work Management Tools

To be evaluated in this category, a vendor now needs at least $150 million in annual revenue from its collaborative work management product alone.

That threshold is worth pausing on, because almost every tool in this market entered organisations through a corporate card. A team lead wanted somewhere to track work, signed up for a free tier, invited eight colleagues, and never told IT. Multiply that by forty teams and the tool was load-bearing before anyone in procurement had heard of it.

The category grew from the bottom of organisations upward, and it is now being evaluated on whether it can meet requirements written at the top. That tension explains most of what is interesting here.

What these tools do

Collaborative work management sits in the gap between two older categories that both failed a large population of users.

Project portfolio management was built for professional project managers running formal methodologies with defined phases, dependencies, and governance. Powerful, and considerably more apparatus than a marketing team planning a campaign needs.

Task and list applications were built for individuals. Fine for personal work, useless once six people need shared visibility.

CWM took the middle. Shared workspaces, tasks with owners and dates, multiple views of the same underlying data as a board, list, timeline, or calendar, plus automation, forms, dashboards, and enough flexibility that a team can shape it to how they actually work rather than adopting a methodology.

Forrester's own framing captures why that mattered. Unencumbered by rigid methodologies or content that forced project management oversight where it was not necessary, users could actually execute rather than merely identify activities.

The market's growth has come from users continuously finding new use cases, which is a polite way of saying that people keep discovering that anything with a list of things and a set of people can be run in these tools.

The limit Forrester states plainly

One line in the current research deserves more attention than any tier placement, because it contradicts how these products are increasingly sold.

CWM is evolving toward enterprise work management but is not yet a replacement for project portfolio management.

Every serious vendor in this category is moving upmarket, adding portfolio views, resource management, financial tracking, and strategic alignment features, and pitching the platform as the place where work connects to strategy. Forrester's assessment is that the direction is right and the destination has not been reached.

That matters practically. An organisation running a genuine PPM function, with capital allocation across a portfolio, resource capacity modelling, benefits realisation tracking, and stage gates, will find gaps if it replaces that with a CWM tool because the CWM tool was easier to adopt.

The reverse mistake is also common and less discussed. Organisations that impose PPM rigour on teams that only needed shared visibility drive those teams back to spreadsheets and shadow tools, which is where this whole category came from.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Collaborative Work Management Tools, Q2 2025

Published on 3 June 2025 and authored by Margo Visitacion, the evaluation scored providers on current offering, strategy, and customer feedback.

Asana placed as a Leader with the highest score in the strategy category, taking the maximum score in nine criteria including innovation, roadmap, and enterprise work management. Its stated positioning is around human-agent teams, with a roadmap centred on tailored workflows and continued development of its underlying work graph.

Adobe placed as a Leader with Workfront, characterised by Forrester as having among the strongest capabilities in the market, with end-to-end support from strategic planning through campaign delivery and marketing operations, and positioned for large organisations with cross-functional planning needs. Agentic AI features in its assessment specifically around augmenting and automating collaboration.

Forrester identified three things shaping how buyers should evaluate this market: enterprise value comes from integration, data quality is essential for getting value from AI, and enterprises must confirm that vendors can meet and scale to complex data requirements for portfolio management.

Note that only one of those three is about features.

The inclusion criteria describe a consolidated market

To qualify for the evaluation a vendor needed a comprehensive set of CWM capabilities delivered natively, a demonstrated track record with medium to large enterprises, at least $150 million in annual product revenue over the trailing four quarters, and mindshare among Forrester's enterprise clients, meaning the product comes up regularly in client inquiries and gets named as a competitor by other vendors.

The revenue bar is the one that shapes the list. A capable product with a devoted user base and $40 million in revenue is excluded regardless of quality, which means this evaluation answers which of the large platforms rather than which tool is best.

The mindshare criterion is the subtler one. It measures whether Forrester's enterprise clients are actually considering the product, which is a reasonable proxy for enterprise credibility and a structural disadvantage for anything with bottom-up adoption that has not yet reached the people who take analyst calls.

What changed since 2022

The predecessor, The Forrester Wave: Collaborative Work Management Tools, Q4 2022, scored thirteen providers against thirty criteria: Adobe, Airtable, Asana, Atlassian, CanopyCloud from Inspired Thinking Group, ClickUp, Microsoft, monday.com, Planview, Quickbase, ServiceNow, Smartsheet, and Wrike.

Forrester's assessment of Smartsheet in that edition is a useful marker of where the market was heading. It described the vendor as having made the enterprise leap through acquisitions that positioned it to compete with project portfolio management and strategic portfolio management vendors as well as in marketing, with a flexible platform and tiered pricing making adoption relatively frictionless.

Two things stand out reading the 2022 and 2025 framings together.

The vendor set spans four different origins. Marketing work management, spreadsheet-like databases, developer tooling, IT service management, and formal PPM are all represented. What each vendor built first still describes where its depth is, and a demonstration will not tell you which lineage you are looking at.

And Forrester's stated audience moved. The 2022 Wave was addressed to collaboration professionals. The current framing is concerned with portfolio data requirements and integration architecture, which is a different conversation with different people in the room.

Where deployments actually struggle

The failure mode in this category is not capability. It is proliferation of the wrong kind.

These tools are easy to adopt, which is their virtue and their problem. A large organisation typically ends up with several instances of the same product configured incompatibly by different teams, plus two or three competing products, plus the original spreadsheets that nobody retired.

Consolidation then runs into a genuine obstacle. The flexibility that made a tool adoptable means every team configured it differently, and migrating a team from its own carefully evolved setup to a standard one destroys work they consider valuable. Rollouts stall on that resistance rather than on technical difficulty.

The second recurring problem is that portfolio reporting requires data discipline that bottom-up adoption never established. Executives want a view across all work. Producing it requires consistent status definitions, consistent project structures, and consistent fields across teams that adopted the tool precisely because it did not impose those things.

This is why Forrester's emphasis on data quality and complex data requirements is the right emphasis. The reporting layer only works if the input layer is disciplined, and the input layer is where the culture of the category runs in the opposite direction.

Agents change the requirement again

Asana's positioning around human-agent teams and Adobe's around agentic collaboration point at the same shift, and it puts pressure on exactly the weakness described above.

A work management tool serving humans tolerates inconsistency because humans interpret it. Someone looking at a board knows that this team's "in review" means something different from that team's, and adjusts. An agent operating across the same data does not adjust. It acts on what the field says.

So the value of agentic features in this category is bounded by the consistency of the underlying data, which is precisely what most deployments lack. A vendor demonstrating an agent that reprioritises work, drafts status updates, or reallocates resources is demonstrating against clean data.

That makes the unglamorous work of standardising fields, statuses, and project structures a prerequisite rather than a nice-to-have, and it is the honest answer to why two organisations get very different value from the same AI features.

What to test

Audit what you already have first. Most organisations evaluating this category already own two or three of these products somewhere. Establishing which teams use what, and why they chose it, tells you more about your requirements than a vendor workshop will.

Test the cross-team reporting with real teams. Not a demonstration workspace. Two or three actual teams with their actual configurations, rolled into one portfolio view. What breaks in that exercise is what will break in production.

Ask specifically about the PPM boundary. If you have a formal portfolio function, get the vendor to walk through capacity modelling, financial tracking, and benefits realisation against your requirements, and hold Forrester's assessment in mind while they do it.

Check integration depth rather than integration count. Every vendor lists hundreds. What matters is whether the two or three systems you actually need are integrated in a way that keeps data current in both directions rather than pushing notifications.

And decide your governance position before rollout. How much configuration freedom teams get is the single decision that determines both adoption and reporting quality, and it pulls in opposite directions. Deciding it deliberately is better than discovering it eighteen months in when the executive dashboard turns out to be unbuildable.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.