When you read a review of a new camera or laptop, the writer doesn’t need to explain what a camera or laptop is. That’s often not the case with software, and it’s certainly not the case with Smartsheet. Smartsheet is an online app with the bones of a spreadsheet application that people use to manage and track collaborative work. Depending on how you use it, it could be a project management platform, complete with Gantt charts and resource management tools, or it could be a task-tracking app. You can also use it to collect and import information from a web form, automate parts of a workflow—heck, you can even use it as a CRM app. Smartsheet is versatile and highly customizable, but it takes a while to figure out how you can use it, much less how you should use it. If you’ve been looking for a collaboration tool that you can bend to your needs, Smartsheet might be it. We also like Asana for those same reasons, although Smartsheet can do a few things Asana can’t.
If you’re in the market for a more traditional project management app, we have three Editors’ Choices. Zoho Projects is our pick for a low-cost option. Teamwork (formerly known as Teamwork Projects) is our mid-range pick. LiquidPlanner, which is quite expensive, is best for huge teams who work on hundreds of projects at a time.
How Much Does Smartsheet Cost?
Smartsheet offers four tiers of service, as well as a 30-day free trial. It does not have a free tier of service, however.
First, there are two plan types that you can buy directly from the website: Standard Individual and Standard Business. The Individual plan costs $19 per person per month or $168 per person year. Standard Business costs $32 per person per month or $300 per person per year. All things considered, the Business account is the better option for all but the smallest organizations. More on how they differ in a moment.
Then, there are two enterprise-grade plans, Enterprise and Premier. You need to contact the company for a custom price quote. These plans are designed for large organizations that need extensive administrator and security controls.
To get a free trial with Smartsheet, you need a business email address, meaning one that isn’t an obvious free email account. You don’t need a credit card, however. The free trial has some limitations. For example, you can have only 50 sheets at a time. Plus, you can’t publish Smartsheet forms, although you can create them to get a sense of how they work. Smartsheet forms are web forms that let you collect information that is then imported into your Smartsheet account.
So what’s the difference between the Standard Individual and Standard Business account? It comes down to limitations on some features and which admin tools are included. Standard Individual accounts are limited to one licensed user and can have 10 collaborators per item, 10 sheets total, five reports, and one dashboard. It also comes with 50GB of storage space. Standard Business accounts get unlimited collaborators, reports, and dashboards, and they can have 100 sheets per licensed user. Business accounts also get 100GB of storage space per licensed users; controls for managing users, groups, and resources; and access to activity logs.
How Do Smartsheet’s Prices Compare?
How do Smartsheet’s prices, plans, and value compare with other apps’? It’s hard to say because it depends on what you use it for and as a result, which apps you would be comparing it to.
If you use Smartsheet for traditional project management, then the price is comparable to mid-range apps in that category, which run anywhere from about $15 to $35 per person per month. Some examples are Teamwork, EasyProjects, Celoxis, and Microsoft Project.
Or you could compare Smartsheet to a work-management system, such as Airtable or Asana, which both cost in the range of $12 to $25 per person per month. The starting rate for these services is lower, and they both have a fairly generous free tier of service, so you can try them out for a long time before deciding to upgrade to a paid plan. They don’t have nearly as many built-in features as Smartsheet has, however. If you were adept at building automations, you might be able to replicate some of the more interesting features found in Smartsheet, but not all of them.
Getting Started With Smartsheet
If you’re willing to put in some work, Smartsheet can do a lot for you. We recommend watching some of the company’s many videos to get oriented. There’s a good one on Smartsheet’s website, although you have to fill out a contact form to access it, which is a hindrance. You’re better off hitting up the Smartsheet YouTube channel instead.
Smartsheet is built on spreadsheets. Nearly anything you can do in a spreadsheet, you can do in Smartsheet. Every project or batch of work you want to organize in the app starts with a sheet. If you have experience working with more traditional project management apps, the initial setup might feel slightly different. For example, instead of creating sets of tasks within a task list, you create a task on one of the rows of your sheet and then create additional tasks below it, which you can then indent to create the same relationship.
While Smartsheet is highly capable, there are a few things it doesn’t do out of the box. Time-tracking, budgeting, and advanced resource management tools aren’t included, although you can get them if you pay to add a compatible software product called 10,000ft, which is owned by the same company. Other project management apps already have these tools included. Paymo, for example, is known for its excellent time-tracking and invoicing tools. ProofHub doesn’t have any accounting tools, but it does have timers for keeping track of time spent on tasks. Teamwork has time-tracking as well.
As you get started, something to note is the app doesn’t update in real time as you and your colleagues make changes to your projects. You do get notifications in near real time, but you have to manually refresh the page to actually see changes that your colleagues have implemented.
One setting worth checking when you first create a Smartsheet account is how often the app saves your work. Most cloud apps save everything all the time automatically. In Smartsheet, however, you must select an interval for how often you want the app to save. Go to Personal Settings, be sure to select these two options: Auto-save after 1 minute of inactivity and Auto-save my changes when I leave a sheet, report, or dashboard. The current solution isn’t ideal. We’d like to see Smartsheet auto-save by default with every keystroke.
Templates and Use Cases
When you start out with Smartsheet, which runs in the cloud (via a web app) and on iOS and Android, you create either a blank sheet or choose a template. Even the blank sheets have some amount of formatting, however, such as Project, Cards, Form, Task List, Report, and so forth.
The templates are arranged by category, which includes Clients & Customers, Finance & Accounting, General Management, Human Resources, IT, Marketing, Product Development, and Sales. To give you an idea of the range, you can find templates for the most general uses, such as Customer Feedback Form and Annual Calendar by Day, as well as more targeted uses, such as Rental Property Maintenance, Expense Report, Sales Pipeline by Rep, and Event Plan and Budget. There are also templates specifically for projects, including:
- Project Budget
- Agile Project with Gantt
- Construction Schedule with Gantt
- Project Launch Plan
- Project with Gantt & Dependencies
- Project with Gantt Timeline
- Project with Resource Management
- Project with Hard Deadline and Gantt
There are sets of templates for highly specific use cases, such as Higher Ed Return-to-Campus Planning (in light of COVID-19) and Antibody Testing & Tracking.
Navigating the Smartsheet App
No matter how you dive into Smartsheet, overlays appear on screen to explain all the salient features. A tool-tip and link to documentation and training videos are always within reach, and you’ll need them at some point. Even if you’re an Excel whiz, Smartsheet may still end up stumping you at times. Not all the formulas are identical across the two apps.
Smartsheet is tidy. The spreadsheet occupies the middle of the screen. A Microsoft-like toolbar at the top has formatting buttons plus options for changing the view. When a Gantt chart is included with your sheet, you can choose to view it to the right of the cells. Sliders let you change the width of the windows to better customize your view.
A collapsible left side panel lets you see all the sheets you’ve created or that people have shared with you. You use it to move among your sheets quickly.
On the right side of the interface are several icons that let you see any conversations that have taken place on this sheet, attachments, and comments related to proofing requests. Depending on your access level and account type, you might also see update requests, an activity log, a publish button that makes the sheet visible on a public URL, and a summary of the sheet.
Features and Use
Smartsheet makes spreadsheet data more dynamic for people who aren’t experts in Excel. Each row or column can contain a drop-down menu of custom values, a contact list, a date, a checkbox, a symbol, or several other entities.
To create a simple task list, for example, you could have one column contain checkboxes and the next column over could be called Task Name. A third column could contain your Contacts List, letting you choose an Assignee for each task. Smartsheet supports the ability to assign multiple people to a task, too, as long as you choose to allow multiple contacts per cell.
That’s not to suggest anyone should pay for Smartsheet if the only thing they planned to do with it is assign and track the status of tasks. But it’s one example of a sheet you could make. A collaborative to-do list app, such as Todoist, would be a better tool for basic task-tracking among a team. Trello is another population option for tracking tasks among teammates. Trello is a kanban board app, meaning the tasks look like little cards arranged neatly on a board with columns. Asana and Smartsheet also have board views. The difference is in Trello, the board is the primary way to view your data, and if you want additional views, such as a calendar or Gantt chart, you need to add them. In Asana and Smartsheet, the board is just one of several included options.
Speaking of Trello, if you’ve used that tool in the past and are looking to upgrade to Smartsheet, you can easily transfer the data from Trello into Smartsheet with a built-in import tool.
What Makes Smartsheet Unique?
Let’s get into what makes Smartsheet unique. The app excels at adding the kind of tools you wish standard spreadsheets provided in a more user-friendly way.
For example, its conditional formatting tool lets you define parameters fill-in-the-blank style. It only takes a few clicks to set up a sheet that automatically highlights any row that has values you want to emphasize. The same is true for its report-generating system, which spits out new sheets based on your specified criteria.
You can also link cells on one sheet to cells on a different sheet, letting data flow among projects. You can create web forms, such as a client intake form, to gather data that’s automatically added to the appropriate sheet. You can also create automations, something like “when X occurs, do Y.” For example, when new information comes in through a client intake form, alert the team manager and automatically assign the junior team member a task to follow up with the new client within three days. Now, someone who’s savvy with software might be able to make a similar system that collects and imports data from a web form, then automatically assigns tasks appropriately, but it would require knowledge of automation tools and in some cases webhooks. Plus, if the system ever breaks, you’re left investigating multiple tools to identify the problem. It’s simply easier to set up and manage with Smartsheet.
With some finagling, you can add progress bars to Gantt charts. With even more fine-tuning, you can view and manage how much work is assigned to each person in your company, and balance the load accordingly. The service can also import your old spreadsheets, letting you smarten up your existing organizational system.
Another area where Smartsheet is beginning to edge out some competitors is proofing and markup tools. With Smartsheet, you can upload a file to discuss with your colleagues, and everyone can make comments on it using markup tools, such as arrows, circles, and squares. For visual materials, these kinds of markup tools make communication much clearer. While Smartsheet isn’t the only project management and collaboration app to offer proofing and markup tools, very few others do. ProofHub is one of the better project management apps you’ll find for proofing. Its markup tools are similar to those you get with Smartsheet.
There’s a lot more you can do with Smartsheet, particularly if you opt into other tools the company provides, sometimes at an additional cost. The integration with 10,000ft mentioned previously enables time-tracking, budgeting, and resource management, for example. Another in-house product, called Bridge, lets you pull information from different places and make sense of it together, as well as automate actions that you want to happen as a result (such as sending an email). For example, let’s say your business has a system for tracking shipments from suppliers. You could set up automated emails to alert the right people (whose contact information resides in a different database), depending on what happens with the shipments. Although we didn’t test Bridge for this review, it sells itself as a no-code product, meaning you get a simple interface that helps you use it.
Workflow Automations
One standout feature in Smartsheet is the ability to create automations. The feature is called Workflows. If you’re unfamiliar with “workflow automations,” the concept is simpler than the name. It’s nothing more than a formula along the lines of “When X occurs, do Y automatically.” You can add other parameters, too. So for example, you might have an automation that says, “When someone marks a task as blocked, and the task status is ‘in progress’ or ‘for review,’ then alert the person assigned as the manager for that task and request an update.”
The real trick to creating automations is to have an interface where you can clearly see all the “if” and “then” statements that you want to create. Smartsheet’s is pretty good. As you create an automation, it appears as a flow chart. Automations can get complicated fast, and the interface really makes it easier to make sense of them.
Smartsheet has permission levels to control which users can create automations, too.
Integration and Mobile Apps
Out of the box, Smartsheet works with a good number of other apps and services, such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Salesforce, Quip, JIRA, among others. From the Account Administration page, it looks like the only supported team chat apps are Skype for Business and Google Hangouts, although if you go to Smartsheet’s app marketplace, you see more options, including Slack.
If you can’t find what you need, you can use Zapier to connect Smartsheet to other apps or work with Smartsheet’s API.
On the mobile side, Smartsheet has apps for iOS and Android. The mobile app is well optimized in the sense that it isn’t as overwhelming and dizzying as you might imagine for a spreadsheet-type application. It works best for things like catching up on discussions or proofing files, rather than building out project schedules.
Powerful Potential
Smartsheet has the potential to be a powerful project management tool. For project managers and business owners who are comfortable working in an environment that resembles a spreadsheet, it may even be more appealing than other software made to look more user-friendly. No matter what your comfort level, Smartsheet is not intimidating, even though it may take a few tutorial videos to learn your way around the app. It’s relatively easy to use, and with the ability to create automations and import data from web forms, there’s so much you can do with it. For an app with a lot of potential power that’s simultaneously flexible and highly customizable, you’ll have a hard time finding something better than Smartsheet. Just bear in mind that the app doesn’t include time tracking, budgeting, and invoicing or billing tools; you can add them by paying extra for a 10,000ft account, however.
If Smartsheet sounds like more than you need, have a look at our Editors’ Choice picks for project management, instead. We recommend Zoho Projects for small businesses on a budget, Teamwork as a mid-tier option, and LiquidPlanner for larger organizations with more complex needs.
