Modern organizations often grapple with coordination challenges that stem from scattered goals, fragmented progress tracking, and a lack of transparency. These issues can derail transformations, delay decision‑making, and undermine accountability across teams.
To help with these issues, companies can make use of project management solutions. Two examples of these are Wave and Zoho.
Wave, developed by McKinsey, blends a strong program‑management platform with expert consulting services. With this software, organizations can execute large‑scale transformations with measurable impact.
On the other hand, Zoho Projects is a versatile project‑management tool that empowers teams to plan, track, and collaborate on day‑to‑day operations. It supports detailed task structuring, milestone tracking, Gantt charts, issue logging, and workflow automation—all with an emphasis on cross‑team collaboration and timeline visibility.
In this article, readers will find a structured comparison of both solutions—examining their respective features, benefits, and suitability for project management purposes.
Wave Vs Zoho: At A Glance
Features
Wave
Zoho
Centralized Visibility
Provides a single source of truth for managing all initiatives in a transformation
Showcases project‑level visibility through its dashboards and widgets.
Task Management
Allows organizations to link top‑down goals with bottom‑up contributions from each initiative
Relies on task dependencies and multiple project views (Kanban, Calendar view, etc.)
Progress Tracking
Manages and track progress across many initiatives with the help of milestones and projections
Utilizes Gantt Charts, Timesheets and Workload Reports to track and monitor project progress
Reporting
Aggregates all business information to deliver financial reports
Offers task reports, issue reports, timesheet reports, etc.
What Is Wave?
Wave is a sophisticated program-management solution created by McKinsey & Company to support large-scale transformation initiatives. It integrates a web-based platform with expert consulting services to ensure organizations deliver sustainable impact and align their strategic goals with execution.
The software also serves as a single source of truth, enabling teams to track each initiative and related KPIs in real time. It also allows companies to benchmark any progress against peer transformations.
Leveraging McKinsey’s deep transformation expertise, Wave helps organizations establish and staff PMOs (Project Management Offices) and design change programs built for long-term effectiveness.
Unique Features Of Wave
Automated Aggregation Across Initiatives: Aggregates data across a very large number of initiatives, often thousands, automatically
Transformation-Scale Initiative Management: Wave is built for enterprise-scale change and transformation programs, managing a broad portfolio of initiatives and tracking organizational disruption
Wave Pros And Cons
Pros
According to users, it provides a solid foundation to define initiatives and create various milestones
Provides a great deal of accountability and transparency in regards to initiative owners
Allows executives to see varying levels of scope and aggregation
Cons
Does not link to budgets
It’s internal financing engine lacks some features
What Is Zoho?
Zoho offers a project management platform called Zoho Projects—a cloud-based project management solution designed to help teams plan, track, and collaborate effectively. It caters to dynamic teams handling day-to-day project operations through an intuitive online platform.
The platform also provides useful project management features such as task automation, time tracking, reporting, etc. It also makes use of integrations to connect with other Zoho adjacent products (like Zoho Invoices) or other third-party applications.
Finally, the software is also secure by design. In fact, it’s been awarded the ISO 27001 certificate, meaning that they are compliant with all the latest security standards.
Unique Features Of Zoho
Gantt Charts: Zoho includes an advanced built-in Gantt chart tool, enabling project managers to visualize timelines, define task dependencies (including various types), and spot critical tasks.
Multiple Task Views: Provides flexible visualization via different task views: Kanban boards, classic tables, plain lists, and calendars.
Zoho Pros And Cons
Pros:
Integrates with the Zoho ecosystem
Offers a variety of features not just for project management, but also for collaboration and issue tracking
Can automate project tasks with the help of workflow automation
Cons:
No offline access
Menu navigation can be complex for new users
Wave Vs Zoho – Features Comparison
Centralized Visibility
Wave is designed for large-scale transformations and restructurings, where alignment, accountability, and visibility are essential. Essentially, it provides a single source of truth for managing all initiatives in a transformation, enabling users to see how each sub-initiative links to top-down goals and to the organization’s financial performance.
It allows tracking of progress toward timeline milestones and projections, and highlights value creation rather than just task completion. This visibility enables executives and program management offices to spot delays or gaps, assign responsibility, and direct corrective actions promptly.
Zoho provides project-level and portfolio-level visibility through its dashboards and widgets. Within each project, the Project Dashboard shows key performance indicators (KPIs), graphs, and statistics to help project managers and stakeholders quickly assess status.
It also offers widgets such as task status, issue status, phase status, team performance metrics (e. g. “Top Go-getters”, “Issue Fixers”) and visuals for planned vs actual work, overdue items, etc. Finally, the dashboards are also configurable: users can reposition widgets, change chart types, and filter based on permissions for modules.
Winner: Zoho wins this round as it offers a very functional dashboard that provides a lot of options for customization.
Task Management
Wave does not treat tasks simply as items in a to-do list; rather, it focuses on initiatives tied directly to strategic goals. The platform allows organizations to link top-down goals with bottom-up contributions from each initiative, establishing KPIs, responsibilities, and accountability.
Progress across work streams is tracked not only in terms of completion of initiatives but also in value created and forecasted delivery. Wave’s design also supports stage gates and milestones, making it possible to monitor where each initiative stands in a transformation or restructuring process.
Zoho offers a highly detailed and flexible task management system tailored for everyday project execution. It supports a hierarchical structure: milestones, task lists, tasks, subtasks.
Users can set up task dependencies (including different types), recurring tasks, priorities, reminders, and assign users with estimated work hours. They can also use multiple views (Kanban boards, Gantt charts, calendar view) to visualize how tasks relate, where bottlenecks are, and what needs attention.
Winner: Zoho wins this round again due to offering a more comprehensive task management module.
Progress Tracking
Wave is purpose-built to oversee enterprise-scale transformation initiatives with precision. It enables organizations to manage and track progress across many initiatives, monitoring both timeline milestones and projections closely. It also quantifies the impact of these programs on overall financial performance, enabling a clear linkage between project execution and business value.
Zoho provides strong mechanisms for real-time progress tracking at both project and task levels. Its built-in Gantt charts offer an immediate overview of project status by showing how tasks align with timelines, highlighting dependencies, critical tasks, and deviations from the plan. Timesheets and workload reports are also available, giving more options for users that want to fine-tune their entire process and make sure that no stone is unturned.
Winner: While Wave offers a great way to measure impact and track the progress of a project across many initiatives, Zoho wins here due to the sheer number of features it offers.
Reporting
Wave offers powerful reporting capabilities designed for transformation programs at scale. The platform aggregates information across thousands of initiatives and delivers reports that focus on what matters most to the business—such as the financial impacts of each initiative.
Additionally, Wave eliminates the need for manual data consolidation by automatically linking top-down strategic goals with bottom-up initiative results. Because of this, businesses can gain real-time insight into value creation and progress.
Zoho provides an extensive suite of reporting tools through both its native module and advanced integration with Zoho Analytics. Different types of reports, such as task reports, issue reports, timesheet reports, etc. are offered by the software. The dashboard also acts as a reporting tool, showing the status of tasks and issues.
For enhanced insights, Zoho integrates with Zoho Analytics, which allows automatic syncing of data—milestones, task owners, timesheets, issues, users—and offers over 50 ready-made dashboards and reports. These predesigned views visualize delayed tasks and milestones, completion rates, revenue projections, and other KPIs, all with intuitive drag-and-drop customization.
Winner: Once again, Zoho wins this round since it offers more in terms of reporting.
Which One To Choose – Wave Or Zoho?
When it comes to selecting the right project management software, Zoho stands out for its versatility, user-friendly interface, and depth of features tailored to daily project execution. With tools like task automation, Gantt charts, time tracking , and detailed reporting, it offers project managers the visibility and control they need—without the steep learning curve or enterprise overhead.
However, while Zoho may be the preferred choice for most teams, Wave remains a strong fit for large organizations managing complex transformation initiatives. Its focus on strategic alignment, KPI tracking, and value-based reporting is well suited for high-stakes, enterprise-wide programs.
Ultimately, the right platform depends on your operational needs as well as your team size. If you have a small to mid-sized team that needs to handle tasks daily, Zoho has you covered in more ways than one. However, if you’re a large firm that needs to manage organizational change, Wave is a solid option to go for.
Ashar Ahmad is the Content Team Lead for the HR category at Software Finder. With over seven years of experience in content writing, he has gone through the paces to prove himself. As someone who understands the unique perspective the readers are looking for and the pain points of writers trying to craft that well-written piece, he now mentors others to enlighten the readers. Outside of work, you will probably find Ashar playing games, being tormented by his cat, tending to his fruit garden, or building keyboards just so he can write more.
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Ashar Ahmad is the Content Team Lead for the HR category at Software Finder. With over seven years of experience in content writing, he has gone through the paces to prove himself. As someone who understands the unique perspective the readers are looking for and the pain points of writers trying to craft that well-written piece, he now mentors others to enlighten the readers. Outside of work, you will probably find Ashar playing games, being tormented by his cat, tending to his fruit garden, or building keyboards just so he can write more.
