When your project management setup includes a client portal where you can share discussions, resources, and success metrics with your clients, you remove roadblocks and keep everyone in the loop.
A well-crafted client portal will:
- Streamline communications by giving you a central hub where you can share updates and feedback
- Break down information silos by creating a clear process for sharing project files
- Save time with at-a-glance dashboards where clients can view the latest project information whenever they want to
- Protect your company’s sensitive data by keeping clear boundaries between projects, and between your client portal and your internal management space
When your client portal ticks all these boxes, you can deliver a better customer experience and a more successful collaboration.
I usually see companies looking for combined project management and client portal software once their projects start to outgrow the entry-level apps they started with. Others have had such a bad experience with an internally focused management tool that a client portal becomes non-negotiable when they’re ready to upgrade their stack.
If that sounds familiar, let me introduce you to Wrike: the best management software for both sides of your next big project.
Wrike: The best project management software with a client portal
Wrike is an all-in-one work management platform designed to simplify and streamline the project experience for everyone involved.
When you set up your projects in Wrike and adjust permissions for your team and your clients, you get a shared project and client management workspace that supports a more collaborative way of working.
Wrike includes cutting-edge features to support everything from project scheduling to resource sharing to approvals, so our software is a game-changer when it comes to delivering client projects. Even better, Wrike can streamline and customize the way you approach your projects while building guardrails around the data you don’t want your clients to see.
Let me show you how it works.
With Wrike, your client portal is completely integrated into your workspace.
Imagine your ideal project management software, tailored to include your timelines, due dates, task-tracking, team calendar, KPI dashboards, and separate overviews for every client project or subteam you manage.
You not only have total control over the elements in your project space — Wrike lets you customize the permissions around them. You can adjust access for your team members and clients at any time to find the perfect visibility balance for each new project.
Wrike includes four levels of customizable permissions, which we call access roles, for your space.
- Full
- Editor
- Limited
- Read only
Setting them up is simple, too.
To add new users to Wrike and create your client portal, all you have to do is:
- Click + Invite in your workspace toolbar
- Enter your client’s email address
- Choose the access role they should have
- Set a matching permission level for welcome work items — like a project folder, a dashboard overview, or a deliverable for review — for them to view when they log in
You can even include a personalized welcome message for your client when they open your Wrike invitation.
Think of Wrike’s client portal system as the central knowledge base at the heart of your projects. Instead of delays, communication gaps, and a mosaic of different project management tools, you have a single, shared platform. Information flows smoothly between your team and your clients in both directions, and for every aspect of your work.
Detailed project overviews to keep your clients in the loop
There are dozens of benefits to a client portal system, but time-saving is one of the biggest. When you share a project overview with your client in Wrike, you give them the ability to check project progress at a glance, whenever they need to. This gives them the transparency they want, and it saves you time you’d otherwise spend answering email requests, creating written reports, or scheduling meetings to update them face to face.
For example, your client’s Wrike workspace can include:
- Real-time, automated Kanban boards to track the project tasks through your workflow
- Detailed, responsive Gantt charts to show the project timeline as it evolves
- A custom Table view of the project, showing the vital statistics and milestones for your tasks
- Regular project reports on metrics like the budget and percentage completion
- Automated notifications (including integrations with tools like Slack) whenever there’s a new item for their attention
Enterprise-level security features
Visibility is key to delivering a great client experience, but your client portal also needs to safeguard the information you don’t want to share.
There will always be times when you want more control over the way your clients access your project space. You might want to discuss your brief in private. Agencies might need to keep their client list under wraps. And you’ll want to make sure your clients can’t access sensitive information like your company’s finances or your team’s capacity.
Whatever safeguards you’re looking for, Wrike’s access role system puts enterprise-grade security around your client portal.
And when it comes to data security more generally, we’re dedicated to making Wrike the most secure and reliable collaborative work management platform on the market.
Read more about how we’re striving to exceed industry standards here.
Project folders for unbeatable organization
When you work with clients on different projects, organizing your project documents can be a real challenge. Whether it’s locating the original images your client sent or keeping track of the most recent versions when you send your deliverables for review, you need a robust system that calls up the right file as soon as you need it.
With Wrike, you can tailor your client portal with a clear and organized folder structure where you choose the folders your customers can view or amend. And within this secure file-sharing system, you can use cross-tagging to put documents in front of your clients without creating multiple versions of your project files.
When you adjust your client’s permissions for their project folder and the files within it, they’ll even be able to edit files directly within Wrike, using tools like collaborative editing and integrations with third-party software like Adobe Creative Cloud.
Compared to managing your project files without a central hub, Wrike’s client portal features eliminate the bottlenecks in your process, setting you up for smoother client collaboration.
Request forms for effortless kickoff
One goal when working with a range of clients is to encourage repeat collaboration. Request forms make this easy and efficient, allowing you to kick off new projects without leaving the client portal. 
This part of your client portal streamlines the laborious first stages of a project, especially when you and your clients have already found your rhythm. Instead of sitting in repetitive meetings or filling out extensive forms to schedule a project, you can kick off a familiar task management workflow in seconds and automatically assign the tasks, while still making sure that you cover your bases and deliver high-quality work.
Effortless onboarding for new clients
Since ease-of-use is a key aspect of your client’s experience, we’ve built Wrike with a user-friendly interface and effortless client onboarding.
I’ve already explained how easy it is to invite a client to their portal by email with Wrike. If you’re planning to give your clients more access and insight into your project planning, you can also manage the learning curve with an onboarding workflow. This helps you start on the same page as your client and sets your collaboration up for success.
To complete the client experience, you can even customize your Wrike workspace and request forms with your company logo. This helps you build a cohesive identity across your communications with your client and make a great impression at every stage of the project.
Success stories from real Wrike customers
I’m convinced that Wrike offers the best client management and client portal functionality on the market. Every day, we see over 2.4 million customers in 140 countries manage their most collaborative project work on our platform.
Check out these success stories, and see how real companies have customized their client portal with Wrike:
Trifermed increases visibility for its clients
Trifermed is a professional services company based in Spain. It provides business development and innovation management services to its clients in the health sector. In recent years, the team has made changes, so the company is now set up completely on Wrike — including internal management processes, finances, invoicing, and all their customer projects.
When a new project begins, the Trifermed team now invites its customers to Wrike workspaces where they can engage as collaborators. This means the crucial project information is always available when the team needs it, and the clients are always up to date on how the projects are progressing.
Prof. Dr. Sergi Trilla, the Founder, President, and CEO, told me about how Wrike’s client portal works in the company:
Each Space contains projects that include contact information, communications updates, shared documents, etc. We record it all in Wrike. In this way, the whole Trifermed team is up to date with what’s happening in each project, including the customers themselves.
Prof. Dr. Sergi Trilla, Founder, President, and CEO
What’s more, Trifermed has eliminated 100% of its internal and external emails, as all its client communications are situated in Wrike.
BigCommerce scales its professional services
BigCommerce is a publicly traded technology company offering a SaaS eCommerce platform. Based in Austin, Texas, the company turned to Wrike to help seamlessly scale its business and work with household names without compromising on customer support.
Patrick O’Connor, Manager of Professional Services on the Data Migration team, told me about the system they left behind:
Managing projects in Google Drive doesn’t scale. It was really hard to keep track of dates or the current status of our projects. When you’re doing everything disjointly, managers have no way to align their processes or report on what’s going on. You just can’t have an Excel sheet, a Google Doc, and a Trello board talk to each other.
Patrick O’Connor, Manager of Professional Services
In the e-commerce world, you work with a lot of design agencies. We find that some design agencies prefer Waterfall, and some prefer Agile, so we need to be flexible and be able to accommodate that as we’re onboarding customers on our platform.
Patrick O’Connor, Manager of Professional Services
Since adopting Wrike as their secure client portal, BigCommerce has seen:
- Improved time to value
- 50% less time spent on reporting
- 102% increase in adoption rates in one year
- Improved customer satisfaction
Marketing Architects tailors their portal to their clients
Marketing Architects is a TV ad agency based in Minneapolis. The company has used Wrike to customize its workflows and cater to its clients, with a level of customization that would previously have needed programmers to achieve.
Eric Pilhofer, Senior Vice President of Creative, told me more about how Marketing Architects uses Wrike:
We have set up an architecture under each advertiser where we have approval tasks and folders for radio spots, TV spots, presentations, creative briefs, storyboards, etc. We have created templates in each of those folders and customized project flows for each advertiser because each advertiser’s flow is slightly different.
Eric Pilhofer, Senior Vice President of Creative
With Wrike, Marketing Architects now see:
- 40% more efficiency
- 25% increase in the speed at which they can deliver campaigns
- 20-minute response time (reduced from one day)
Wrike has allowed us to have greater visibility and greater synchronicity. It gives us a lot of confidence because there’s no confusion any longer, and it takes a bit of that human error out.
Eric Pilhofer, Senior Vice President of Creative
5 more project management features for teams
I’ve explained the features of Wrike’s client portal system and touched on some of the real-world benefits our users enjoy. But the real beauty of Wrike is the way that it supports both sides of the project team.
Wrike’s project management software is much more than just a client portal. It also includes unbeatable features to help the internal teams that plan, schedule, and complete your client work. With just one tool, Wrike gives you:
- Workspace templates, so you can tailor your project space to a range of project management styles and use cases. Our template library includes all the building blocks to set up your ideal workspace (and perfect client portal) fast.
- Customizable, automated workflows for all your repeatable internal tasks. Our powerful workflow automation software takes the manual aspect out of tracking your tasks and helps you complete every essential step of your process, every time.
- Time tracking, team calendars, and intelligent capacity tracking to inform your resource management. With the latest automation tools, we’ll gather data on your tasks as you complete them and translate this into an intelligent overview of everything your team has on their plates.
- Personalized dashboards to help every team member and stakeholder manage their tasks. With customizable widgets to create to-do lists and break down tasks, and automated alerts and reminders, you can keep your team on schedule and effectively prioritize your project work.
- Cutting-edge AI tools to increase efficiency across your projects. Wrike’s Work Intelligence system puts generative AI and AI summaries at your fingertips so you can work more efficiently, and suggests new ways to automate your work based on historic patterns and your favorite tools.
For effortless client management and true collaboration, try Wrike
When you have an effective client portal in place, you improve the project experience for your customers and your team. With effortless task management and client management in one powerful tool, Wrike lays the groundwork for great collaboration.
Learn more about how to embed your client portal in your workspace and how Wrike can transform your approach to client projects.
