Smartsheet Reviews

We use the tool as the default software for managing all client projects. Our team of six uses it to create project plans and reporting dashboards for our clients.

The tool creates shareable dashboards. These dashboards allow us to display project deliverables' status, their position in the queue, expected delivery timelines, and more. The best part is that these dashboards can be shared with our clients without a license.

Asana has a modern look and feel, particularly its agile project management interface featuring movable cards between columns.

I have been working with the product for six years. 

I haven't had issues with the tool's stability. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

My company has eight users for the solution. 

The tool's support is responsive. They are easy to work. 

I rate the tool's ease of deployment a ten out of ten. It was instant, and there was no real deployment. The solution doesn't require any maintenance. 

I did the deployment myself. 

The tool's monthly fee is 25 dollars, which is within the range of most cloud-based project management tools. I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten.

The tool is a good product; I am glad we have it. The main pros of Smartsheet include its familiar interface, especially for those accustomed to Excel, making the transition smoother for teams used to managing projects in spreadsheets. I recommend the tool to others since it is scalable and easy to set up. I rate it a ten out of ten. 

The only benefit of the solution is collaboration. When I assign tasks, my team members get an email, and they can click on it and update their tasks. Smartsheet’s reporting capabilities help us with capacity planning.

Smartsheet is a really good tool for collaboration. If I put somebody’s name into an assignment, they get an email. They know what they’re being assigned, and they can access it. I don't have to run around chasing people. The emails help in workflow efficiency. In terms of overall planning, capacity consolidation across plans is quite useful, but it takes a lot of effort to get it to work properly. It's not that intelligent, but it's better than Microsoft Project. From a workflow perspective, it's pretty powerful.

I do not like the solution. From a project management and planning point of view, it's awful. The product must adopt some of the functionalities that are already in Microsoft Project. They must adopt functionalities like auto-scheduling, linking tasks together automatically, and scheduling based on the dependencies.

We have to manually put in every dependency in Smartsheet. It is incredibly annoying. In Microsoft Project, we just highlight the two that we want to link and click the link option, and it makes them dependent.

I have been using the solution for six months.

The tool’s stability is fine.

The tool is very easy to scale. It seems unlimited. It's certainly within our requirements. Five or six people use it within one business unit in our organization. There might be more users in other teams. It is an engineering company. So, we use the product throughout the world.

Microsoft Project is way quicker for actual active planning. We have moved to Smartsheet because we've got a geographically distributed team. Now, I create the project in Microsoft Project and put it into Smartsheet for collaboration. Microsoft Project is way more functionally rich, so things are quicker. The ROI on Microsoft Project would be higher than on Smartsheet.

There is no deployment needed. We just create Smartsheet and share. It does not require maintenance.

The solution is too expensive. For what I use it for, it's too expensive. I wouldn't pay for it myself. I would prefer to buy Microsoft Project or use Zoho Projects.

I am currently evaluating Zoho Projects for my own use.

Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.

We use the solution to manage and track operational tasks. We can create dashboards for services, design and distribute survey forms, and keep a check on project status using it.

The solution's most valuable feature is the ability to create dashboards for services. It helps in keeping a tab on multiple projects at once.

They should improve the solution's integration with API. It has certain limitations. The solution would work best integrated with multiple tools.

Also, they should add free templates compatible with multiple domains. It will be convenient for us to pick up the templates without worrying about the back-end process.

We have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable. We have come across downtime issues only once or twice. I rate its stability as a nine.

The solution has good scalability. We have purchased around 500 licenses. I rate its scalability as an eight.

I have contacted the solution's tech support team for some issues. They resolve the problems immediately. 

Positive

The solution's initial setup has medium complexity. I rate the setup as an eight, as its license is expensive. The deployment process takes around seven business days. Initially, we request a quotation from the vendor for the number of licenses we want to purchase. Then, we procure the PO after receiving the quote. Upon the release of the PO, they issue the software licenses.

I rate the solution's pricing as a six. It is expensive, but there are no additional costs involved.

I advise others to use Smartsheet for its in-built automation features. It helps create dashboards and maintain the data in one place. Also, we can put a message with a heading and description, attach snapshots, and track running issues as well, unlike Excel. I rate the solution as a nine.

We use the solution to track the progress of the project. We have created a bank chart or a milestone chart and follow the events on that Smartsheet point.

Smartsheet is a cloud-based tool similar to Google Sheets in that multiple stakeholders can work on a document simultaneously. However, unlike Google Sheets, which saves changes in real time, Smartsheet requires users to manually save their changes. Only after saving will the changes be visible to other stakeholders. For example, if two or three people are working on a Smartsheet and one person makes changes, those changes will not be visible to the others until the person saves their work. This contrasts with Google Sheets, where changes are immediately visible to all users in real time.

If any changes are made in Smartsheet, they should be saved automatically and reflected to all stakeholders in real time. Currently, if I make even a small change to a cell, I need to save it manually. This adds a significant amount of effort, as I have to save every small change each time. Automatic saving, as seen in Google Sheets, would greatly enhance efficiency by ensuring all changes are visible to everyone immediately.

I have been using Smartsheet for a month and a half.

Smartsheet is stable, but initially, setting it up was a significant effort. This was a major issue and caused problems. I rate the the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

Five people are using this solution. It is not widely used within the organization. We would resort to another product because Smartsheet is not free, and most of its features are not free of cost. Additionally, from a licensing perspective, our company already uses Microsoft products, including Excel, which offers more features.

Excel and Google Sheets are much more reliable compared to Smartsheet. Even though Smartsheet is a relatively new product, it was not very impressive. Google Sheets stands out as one of the better options compared to Smartsheet. However, nothing currently beats Excel.

I've used Excel more often, and for the projects for which we are using Smartsheet, we are not actually leveraging the AI features of Smartsheet. Instead, we are incorporating it into our process in other ways.

The deployment is very easy. All you need to do is log in.
I rate it a seven out of ten where ten is easiest.

We have using the free version with limited features.

I would recommend Google Sheets or Excel instead of Smartsheet. Smartsheet doesn't offer any smart features. In fact, it took some effort to set up Smartsheet  to track the progress of a project, which was really disappointing. Moreover, Smartsheet doesn't provide any features that its competitors do not offer. Excel is much more efficient and will continue using it.

Overall, I rate the solution a five out of ten.

This solution provides easy collaboration and allows non-building users to use the system without requiring a license. 

Only licensed users who can create sheets and collaborative spaces are charged for their usage.

The system can become more challenging to use in more complex scenarios, requiring additional add-ons that can be quite costly. 

However, since we don't use those add-ons, this is not an issue for us.

I have been working with Smartsheet for three years.

Since it's a software as a service, we are always working on the latest version of the platform.

I would rate the stability of Smartsheet a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten.

Currently, we have around 15 to 20 users who have a valid license, but we plan to increase that number substantially. It's hard to determine the exact number of non-licensed users, but I would estimate it to be at least a few dozen, around 30 to 40 users.

We did not have many occasions where we had to contact technical support.

I was indeed involved in the initial setup, and let's say that for standard use, it's a very interesting tool. It's not that difficult.

But for more complex use cases, there is a higher learning curve.

The application is hosted on the cloud, but I wouldn't describe it as completely public since users have their own private space. Access to the system requires a user account that is created by an administrator within our company.

The deployment process took one or two months to complete.

I believe a licensed user costs between 300 to 400 euros.

This solution does not have any additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.

It's important to do thorough research and analysis to determine if the application fits your needs, as with any software. While we are satisfied with its use cases in some areas, we might have needed to do more research to determine if it would also meet our needs in other areas.

I would rate Smartsheet a seven out of ten.

We're using Smartsheet at the enterprise level throughout the organization. We did a test at the corporate office before moving forward. In the beginning, we were only using Smartsheet to help our corporate users open new facilities and convert warehouse management systems. Also, we used it in implementation at sites with new customers. Eventually, we began using Smartsheet for entire projects. We transitioned from Microsoft Project to Smartsheet for all of our projects.

I'm consulting with a company that uses Microsoft Project, which isn't cloud-based. Smartsheet is cloud-based, so it's more accessible. We need not worry about saving versions of the file when someone makes changes. For example, Microsoft Project locked up while someone was saving a file, and we couldn't access the original file properly. 

Smartsheet offers more than Project because it's similar to a table-based, database-type system. It's like a hybrid between Excel and project software. We were able to enter the formulas and do much of the automation. We added budgets to it and linked them to a vendor page. Smartsheet let us integrate the budget into the project seamlessly. With Project, we needed to open up Excel. 

Smartsheet should continue to expand the spreadsheet-type functionality because it's limited currently. Most business users are familiar with Excel and Office, so Smartsheet should adopt a similar way of navigating the program. 

When you're moving through cells or fields, you can't move with your arrows flipping back between things. If you hit enter, it doesn't do the same thing it does in Excel.

I have been using Smartsheet for about three years.

The stability is excellent. 

Smartsheet is scalable. We deployed it in 47 large distribution centers across the United States, and we had six projects running on it. The corporate office could view all of the projects at once because the program management option is terrific.

Smartsheet support is fantastic. It's better than any I've ever dealt with before. They could answer any question I had about the functionality in a given use case. They were serious superusers. It wasn't just like, "Well, let me check." They actually knew the answer. We'd have a resolution in minutes because of how they had it set up for our organization.

Overall, setting up Smartsheet is pretty straightforward, but sometimes the project settings and the Office-style functionality limit people from getting the information as quickly as possible.

I don't know that that's a Smartsheet issue as much as it is a user issue. They have to understand that when somebody requests to open a project, they need to accept it, activate it, and move forward quickly. 

The cost varies based on the number of users and the commitment that we gave them. I think it was reasonable. I can't remember the exact cost, but it's less than Microsoft Project.

I rate Smartsheet nine out of 10. Smartsheet has room for improvement, but they're moving in the right direction. If you're planning to implement Smartsheet, you need to take the time to prepare upfront. Depending on the organization's size, you need to gain experience and train some superusers. 

You need a few people to learn the ins and outs and get in-depth training in the specific features they will utilize. Learn as much as possible about the system and do a lot of hands-on training right out of the gate.

It is my favorite project management tool. The reason for that is that it is very flexible. It is much easier to use than Microsoft Project in terms of creating custom fields. It is very similar to Excel. So, people understand it, which makes it a little bit easier to use for most users. From my experience, most people don't like using Microsoft Project if they need to create any kind of custom column. I was never unable to create the functionality I needed.

It has got a really nice workflow engine. It is helpful if you want to let people know based on a date or criteria. Anytime a new project was submitted to the project intake table, I would get an email. You can also send the email to Slack or a whole host of different types of targets. If a task was due next week, I could have the system send an email that says, "Hey, you've got a task coming up next week," and then, if it was late, I could have it send an email or a Slack message to somebody. That was very helpful.

The main challenge with Smartsheet is that when you start putting components on the Smartsheet dashboard, they don't know about each other. So, if I filter something in one widget, or if I click on a region or a project ID, the other widget or component and the visualization that's on that dashboard don't change. It doesn't know about the other component.

It probably also doesn’t allow you to level resources in a project plan. So, if I assign five tasks to you and they all occur on the same day, in Microsoft Project, I can level them. Because you can only do one thing in a day, it would spread those out over five days, instead of all piled up on a single day, but I don't think Smartsheet had that.

I started with it back in 2019. In less than a year, I was a power user. I was doing presentations to the broader user group about all the different solutions we were building in our division. So, I'm considered fairly proficient at this tool.

It is stable. I've never had any issues.

It is scalable. I never reached any data limits. I used to know what the data limits were. My suspicion is that if you're looking to have a massive data warehouse, you're probably not going to use Smartsheet, but if you're building some processes and supporting some processes that are fairly light with basic notification and things like that, it can handle enough data. It can handle a corporate PMO and all the tasks in a fairly easy manner. So, it seems scalable,  but I don't know the upper limits. We never ran into any data constraints.

It is good. I did have some issues from time to time. They weren't so significant, but they managed those in a professional and timely manner.

I also work with Domo. Achilles heel for me is that Smartsheet's dashboards are missing a key piece of functionality, which is the whole reason I have to use Domo. When you put components on the Smartsheet dashboard, they are not aware of each other. That's the beauty of Domo where every component that you have on your dashboard is listening, and if it knows how to, it'll change the data it is displaying based on how you interact with the other components on the dashboard on that page, whereas Smartsheet doesn't do that. For example, in Domo, you can pick a project ID and go filter down the entire dashboard just to show data about a given project. In Smartsheet, I'd have to create a whole separate dashboard. If you want to show a report for a bunch of different regions or a bunch of different departments, you might have to create 5 to 10 separate different dashboards to support the company. If you are asked to add a new pie chart there that shows the number of tasks, or the tasks broken down by red, yellow, or green status, you would have to add that in 5 to 10 different places. Instead of just adding it once on one dashboard and having it work and filter for every single project, like in Domo, you'd have to go and update 5 to 10 different dashboards.

They do have a piece of software called Control Center that helps manage that. It is an automation engine. If you have built your solution using their Control Center automation tool, and you change a dashboard there, it can automatically go and update the existing dashboards that are out there, but I haven't used that. It is an expensive component. In one of my companies where we had this, I was the very first person outside of the company trained in the Smartsheet Control Center. It is quite nice. It is relatively new. It has been around only for less than four or five years, but it is a little more complicated to work with. Generally, you hire a Smartsheet consultant to configure your Control Center and create solutions using that automation tool, but I was able to do it for my company. They had bought all of the components. So, I was able to use that along with a bunch of other components. They had some upsell components, such as DataMesh, Data Uploader, and Control Center, but in my last company, they hadn't paid for those things. So, using its dashboards to support the entire business required a lot of maintenance. Typically, I don't have a lot of people in my department. So, I wasn't willing to try and use that because it would've taken a lot more maintenance. I was able to convince the organization to pay for Domo because I could finish the solution by myself and be able to maintain it because I only needed a single dashboard and not a whole bunch of different dashboards.

Power BI, in my opinion, is very competitive as a tool. Microsoft is pretty good at making things reasonably usable. It works well with Excel, and it has an Excel-type metaphor. It has similar functionality to Domo where components on the page know about each other, as long as your data model is set up properly. My instinct is that if they're not careful, Smartsheet could lose a lot of business to Power BI without a stronger dashboard solution.

I didn't set it up. There was a whole separate group for that. Both companies that I came to already had people using it. In both cases, I managed and administered the licenses just because it was really pretty straightforward. Buying new licenses, getting those into the system, managing the deployment of those licenses, and other things like that were pretty straightforward and pretty light work. I wasn't really a true administrator, but we did the single sign-on setup. That was all fairly straightforward. When you buy a software-as-a-service tool, generally, you can start using things pretty quickly. So, we were able to get started right away while we continued to configure and manage the licenses and configure the system.

If I'm not mistaken, it was pretty manageable. It was about 200 bucks a seed. The business really felt a strong need for it. So, it was viewed as a safer and more straightforward cost that we were willing to pay as compared to Domo, which took some convincing.

My advice would be to not be intimidated by this tool. If you know Excel, you know 80% of how to work with Smartsheet. It is quite flexible. The main difference is you can more strongly type the columns, which is a good thing because you're ensuring that the data records that you are producing and managing contain the data that they should. It is good data validation. You end up with cleaner and stronger data that's easier to work with. So, you shouldn't be intimidated by that. It is so similar to Excel, but you get the additional workflow.

From a project perspective, the only thing you couldn't do is be able to level resources in a project plan, but it has got all the other project features. It has got a really simple workflow engine to notify people and communicate. So, it has a lot of power, and people should not be intimidated by it. It is pretty straightforward, and they should feel like they can get up to speed quickly in it. If you're used to working with Excel and other tools like that, you can get into Smartsheet and be productive very quickly.

I'd give it a 9 out of 10. It is a great tool for the things that I use it for. It would be a 10 or an 11 if the dashboard components were more aware of each other. If it had the same capabilities as Domo, it would be a top-tier tool.

The solution is primarily used for project management. I've coordinated a large educational program that has multiple contributors and multiple organizers. It's a weekly program and we use it to outline our curriculum and keep track of the steps in the curriculum. I've used it for my own research projects as well in more of a traditional project management kind of way with tax, people, contingencies, et cetera.

The ability to update in real-time before meetings is great. 

The ability to connect documents to builds or whatever that are being worked on or related is helpful.

Multiple people can contribute to it. Instead of the project manager or myself having to collect information from people and then put it in, they can just go in and update their stuff weekly or whatever by themselves.

The initial setup is easy. 

At one point we were trying to use it to organize a curriculum for students to just have the weekly stuff. We kind of ran into trouble doing this. It's not really designed for that. What we were trying to do is give them a real-time syllabus with pre-readings and activities and stuff embedded. It ended up getting really complicated.

They also had access, and while there’s probably a way to not give them access, I didn’t know how to set that. I just wanted to let them download. It got complex. It wasn’t just people updating what they were working on. It was something else and it didn’t work.

If there was some way to store more complex files in the system, or if there was a back-end structure where you could store files, that would be ideal. We use Box to store recordings, for example, of sessions and stuff. We’d like to store it in this solution. We already integrate Smartsheet into Teams for updates and stuff. That works well.

I've used the solution for a while. I've used it over the last 12 months at least.

It's very stable. The only time I've had a problem is when somebody has made a mistake in something.

The solution can scale. 

We're coordinating multiple speakers sometimes and it works for that. 

For us and how we use it, it's also finite. We have eight sessions a week. There's a limitation to how many weeks you do in a year. However, in terms of availability, in terms of people that handle it or multiple people working on it, it would be fine to scale. It's easy to explain that process, whereas Teams is a little bit more difficult. We're always managing more in the past, or on the shared drive and it's geared to that.

I don't know how many people in our organization use the solution since we work in teams. On my team, the Smartsheet that we use for this particular program has probably 12 people dealing with it at any given time. However, there are directors and higher-ups that may look at it just to see where they are. There are likely other people who need to use it as well. 

I used technical support once or twice during the initial setup when we first started using it. We loved it so we moved everything to Smartsheet - all our curriculum development items. There are now multiple threads. It actually worked way better than a shared drive.

However, the setup was about two years ago, and as I recall, I was stuck somewhere in the setup. They were helpful. I never thought beyond that. I don't remember being particularly bad or particularly awesome.

We also use Microsoft Teams. It's harder to set up yet has more items we can leverage. 

The implementation process is really easy. Comparatively, we use Teams for a lot of things and Teams is a lot harder to set up. That said, they have sharing capabilities, different types of files, and other items as well.

The deployment took a couple of weeks. It's continuously being upgraded since we do a curriculum over the year typically. We don't have speakers or topics sometimes for the end or at the beginning of the curriculum. However, how we use it is really just for project management purposes for our program. Therefore, the initial deployment would be a week or two, depending on schedules. Then we have a team meeting to go through where everyone is on the sessions that they're organizing. It's all so continuous. The session organization is ongoing. That said, there are multiple steps, including an initial phone call with the speaker, curriculum development, readings postings (we use Blackboard to manage our LMS), et cetera. 

We organize and it tracks everything from the beginning to the thank you note to the speaker and the evaluation. There are about eight steps and we keep track of them. We have about six people that are involved in organizing the curriculum. They're those product leads and there are maybe six weeks worth of curriculum that is in production at any given time.

We’ve seen an ROI. It’s effective particularly if you have teams that are virtual or located in different places. Just having something web-based, cloud-based, and easily operational, yet looks similar to Excel is useful. It's easier for different levels and understanding that people have of technology. It's not too fancy, however, it has features that give you what you want. When people are not co-located, it's a great solution as everybody can enter their stuff by a certain time in the week. The process is more self-managed so it's not as dependent on the project manager.

I'm sure there's a license involved, however, that's handled through the institution. The institution just pays for their licensees and then they hand it out, and it gets charged to the program. I'm not in finance, and I don't have access to pricing information directly.

I was part of early discussions. We were working virtually. The technology pieces of the program are actually run through a government agency by logging into a VPN. So the team moved to being remote from being 100% on the ground, basically, in the office. We needed a solution that would work for people working for multiple sites or states and not go down. The team was all over the place and they needed something that could be there with them and not go down.

This fit the bill. It's worked really well. If people are out of town, they can update stuff. It's more easily accessible. I don't know if we would've moved to it in the pandemic. We were using a shared drive in Teams and we moved to Teams too during a pandemic. 

The web-based piece of it, or the cloud-based piece of it, was a good feature. And then it was just simple. You can set up the sheet and it's dummy-proof in terms of putting stuff in. In contrast, if 12 people put something on an Excel sheet it got messy. I used to spend half a day just cleaning up the sheet and making sure the dates were right.

It did make my life a whole lot easier. You can select and limit how the cells look in Smartsheets. For example, you don't get numbers where you want letters, letters where you want numbers, et cetera. It just made things easier and offered less likelihood of wrong information getting entered. That's why we adopted it.

I cannot say which version of the solution we’re using. I’m not sure. 

How I can access the solution depends on which organization I’m working with. I can access it through a VPN or I can access it through web mail.

Compared to even when I use Microsoft Project, for example, which I would probably use for a curriculum thing if you were collecting updates as a project manager, so people would email them, you're going to be chasing them around. Plus, you're entering all the data before you can really do anything with it. This solution is really great in that sense, as everybody has access to it once you set it up and can start entering information themselves. And it's easy to set up, so it's not hard.

For project management, it's just a good solution that's fairly simple to implement. It doesn't require a lot of like upgrades or maintenance from the project manager. For large programs where there are multiple contributors, or multiple people working on different tasks, it's a good solution. It actually makes your work as a project manager a lot easier.

I’d rate the solution nine out of ten. It’s simple to use, easy to set up, and really works for non-co-located environments. In academia you often have people running off to conferences and stuff, even if you are in the office. The ability to have multiple users on the sheet at the same time so they can enter their own information is great.

I’m a customer and end-user.