How to migrate from Wrike to Tallyfy

If you’re looking at the door on Wrike, you’ve probably reached the point where the tool does more than your team needs, and the configuration it takes to keep it useful has started to cost more than it returns. The export itself is the easy part. The work is deciding what’s worth bringing.

Here’s the honest version up front. Migrating from Wrike to Tallyfy is mostly an inventory problem. Wrike lets you build deep structures, Spaces holding folders holding projects holding tasks, plus business-specific custom item types and request forms layered on top. You have to walk that structure and separate the projects that are genuine repeatable processes, the work that comes back the same way every cycle, from the one-off projects that were never templates. That single decision is the migration. It’s the same sorting question underneath most workflow software choices, and it’s closely related to why the speed of first real use predicts whether a new tool ever sticks.

Why teams move off Wrike

Wrike is a capable enterprise tool, and I’ll say that plainly, because a migration guide that pretends the thing you’re leaving is junk helps nobody. Wrike does serious project management: resource planning, Gantt scheduling, request intake, custom workflows by department. For a large org coordinating many projects at once, that depth earns its keep.

The friction shows up somewhere specific. It shows up when the depth outgrows the need.

The two reasons teams start looking both trace back to weight. The first is the configuration tax. Custom item types, custom statuses per workflow, request forms, and folder hierarchies all need setting up and maintaining, and a small team running five recurring processes ends up administering a platform built for fifty.

The second is that flexibility drifts. When every department shapes its own Spaces and item types, the same process exists in three slightly different forms, and nobody can point to the current one. For work that’s supposed to be identical every time, that drift is the actual problem, and another configuration option won’t fix it.

What Wrike’s export actually gives you

Start here, because the export reality sets the whole plan. Wrike lets you export a folder, project, or space to Excel from the three-dot menu, choosing projects and folders with filtered tasks or all tasks. The file carries task statuses, dependencies, assignees, start and due dates, duration, and time-log entries. So a project comes out as a usable spreadsheet of its tasks.

Now read the limits, because they shape what you can realistically move. Wrike’s own help is direct: attachments and comments aren’t exported to Excel, and the export caps at 65,000 rows and 256 columns. You keep the field values and the task list. You don’t keep the conversation or the files in that one spreadsheet.

If you want a complete, structured pull rather than a per-folder spreadsheet, the path is Wrike’s REST API, which is organized the RESTful way with GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE on tasks, folders, projects, and more. For most migrations you don’t script against it at all. You export the projects you care about, keep the old Wrike account read-only as your archive, and rebuild the processes fresh.

How Wrike concepts map to Tallyfy

This is the part people brace for, and it’s more orderly than Wrike’s nesting makes it look, because the Tallyfy team maintains an explicit object mapping. Every Wrike concept has a home.

The biggest mental shift is the hierarchy. Wrike’s strength is structure: Space into folder into project into task into subtask, plus custom item types branching off. Tallyfy is flatter: Organization, category, blueprint, step. So the deep nesting flattens. Spaces and folders become categories and tags, and the project you cared about becomes a single blueprint. You give up some of the filing-cabinet shape, but for a repeatable process that shape was mostly a place for versions to drift apart.

The Wrike-specific pieces are the request forms and the custom item types, and both land well. A request form becomes a kick-off form at the front of the process, so intake stops being a separate object and becomes step one of the run. Each custom item type, the Bug, the Campaign, the Candidate, becomes its own tagged blueprint instead of a configured variant inside one tool.

Make it concrete with a marketing campaign. In Wrike, a new campaign probably starts as a “Campaign” custom item type sitting in a Marketing Space, kicked off by a request form, with custom statuses running from Brief to In Design to In Review to Live, and tasks hanging under it for each deliverable.

Migrate it and that whole arrangement becomes one campaign blueprint. That request form turns into the kick-off form that captures the brief. Custom statuses stop being labels and become the step a run is sitting on. The sign-off before launch becomes a real approval step that blocks until someone approves, instead of a status someone forgets to change. Same campaign, none of the configuration overhead.

A realistic migration timeline

Anyone who promises a one-weekend migration is selling something. A real move for a team with a handful of active processes runs about five to six weeks, and most of that is decisions, not data entry.

Week one is export and audit, and for Wrike the audit has two extra questions: how many custom item types do we actually run, and which request forms feed real recurring work? Pull your projects out and sort them with one test: does this work come back, or did it happen once? Inventory your item types at the same time, because each one you keep becomes its own blueprint, so this is the moment to drop the types nobody really uses.

Week two, rebuild your top three processes as blueprints. Not thirty. Three. Pick the ones that hurt most when they go wrong, and define them properly, with owners, order, and the approvals that matter. Week three is a parallel run: have one or two teams run the new Tallyfy process alongside the old Wrike project, so you catch the gaps while the safety net is still up.

Week four, switch your power users over fully and set the Wrike version read-only. Weeks five and six, bring the rest of the teams across and wind Wrike down to an archive.

Why so deliberate?

Because the point isn’t to recreate Wrike in a new tool. It’s to turn the configured, drifted versions of your processes into clean, flat ones on the way through, and that’s worth doing slowly.

What breaks, and what Tallyfy won’t replace

Let’s be specific about what goes wrong, because every migration hits a few of these. The deep folder and Space hierarchy doesn’t survive intact; you flatten it with categories and tags and accept that some filing structure goes away. Each custom item type needs its own blueprint, which is more setup than a single import. Formula fields go static, with the calculation written into the step instructions rather than computed. And Gantt positions and detailed time logs don’t migrate, because they live in views Tallyfy doesn’t have.

Now the honest part, the section most migration guides skip. There are things Wrike does that Tallyfy does not.

Wrike is a project-management platform, and Tallyfy is a workflow engine. Wrike’s resource management, workload and capacity views, billable-hours and budget tracking, and full Gantt scheduling have no equivalent in a tool built to run one process well, and the object mapping lists those under what cannot migrate. One thing that surprises teams moving off Wrike is how little of that they were really using: the resource dashboards looked reassuring and got opened once a quarter. But if your team genuinely plans capacity and tracks billable hours inside Wrike every day, keep a tool for that and move only the repeatable processes across. Plenty of teams run both, a planning tool for the project financials and Tallyfy for the processes that have to run the same way every time.

Repeatable and automated operations, not an enterprise project platform.

The thing teams expect to lose and don’t is visibility. In Wrike, a process spread across projects with custom statuses takes interpreting before you can say where anything stands. In Tallyfy, those same runs show up in one live status view, each sitting on a named step, so you can see at a glance which two are stuck and where. The flatten you were nervous about is what makes the work easier to see, and rebuilding automations as Tallyfy rules is usually quick once the process itself is clear.

Common questions about migrating from Wrike

If you’re still deciding rather than ready to move, our Wrike alternative comparison covers why teams switch, feature by feature. This guide is the how-to-move companion to it.

When you’re ready to plan the actual move, the fastest first step is a short call where we look at your current Wrike setup and tell you honestly which projects and item types are worth migrating and which should stay where they are.

Book a 30-minute migration walkthrough and bring your two or three busiest Wrike Spaces. That’s the quickest way to see whether this is a fit.