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Alfabet IT Planning & Portfolio Management vs Smartsheet comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alfabet IT Planning & Portf...
Ranking in Project Portfolio Management
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Smartsheet
Ranking in Project Portfolio Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Project Management Software (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Project Portfolio Management category, the mindshare of Alfabet IT Planning & Portfolio Management is 3.6%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Smartsheet is 5.1%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Project Portfolio Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Smartsheet5.1%
Alfabet IT Planning & Portfolio Management3.6%
Other91.3%
Project Portfolio Management
 

Featured Reviews

MS
Head of Business Agility and Development at Aqarat Real Estate Development Company
Helps us to implement and understand the status of our projects
The initial setup is straightforward. The solution's deployment takes around two months time. We have to set up the solution. We have to put in the data to ensure that the solution is working. We need to fill out our process, our tools, and our data. Two developers were involved in the deployment process. It is a self-maintained solution that requires updates from time to time. I rate the setup an eight out of ten.
DS
Project Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Automation simplifies manual tasks and facilitates team communication
There are many useful features in Smartsheet. One can easily share plans with the entire team, and it functions similarly to Microsoft Project. Creating dependencies across all tasks is smooth, and team members can make adjustments if necessary. Automation helps by simplifying some manual work, saving time and facilitating communication.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"ERP approach to IT (edit architecture elements as data using forms, easier for many people compared to drawing / modeling) Hundreds of predefined reports (not only for analysis but also for displaying profiles for single elements like an application including dynamically generated diagrams based on edited data) Very sophisticated meta model (dozens of man years of experience condensed in it) Enterprise collaboration features Web client for the enterprise, either on-site installation or running in a private cloud."
"I would recommend trying planningIT"
"My personal experience with the product was good, primarily because of the support team's responsiveness."
"The dashboard is the most valuable feature."
"It's very user friendly."
"There are no limitations in Smartsheet, it is highly scalable."
"What I found most valuable in Smartsheet is its project customization feature. It's a great solution because you can add in your own WBS. You can see it in Jira style, Kanban, and you can even do Agile and Waterfall. Another feature that's valuable in the solution is when you have those connections, you have that API, you have a sandbox, and you can make a solution, it's a tremendous product because you can pull data."
"The ability to have users without a license has helped us a lot, allowing stakeholders to access all the resources based only on my license and making it very useful compared to anything else that we had, any other solutions that we had."
"The most valuable feature of Smartsheet is it can be highly customized."
"For doing project plans what was really valuable is the ability to do a predecessor."
"I like that Smartsheet integrates Excel with a cloud-based project management software."
"The solution is scalable."
 

Cons

"Only few predefined integrations with other tools exist, most integrations are implemented via an integration module based on XML typically needing vendor expertise."
"The tool is clearly not very intuitive."
"The user-experience, enhanced performance, and in-hand governance can be improved."
"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."
"You were forced to create a new tab rather than add another sheet."
"It ended up getting really complicated."
"Smartsheet should continue to expand the spreadsheet-type functionality because it's limited currently."
"An area for improvement in Smartsheet is that if you're in the government or you're a regulated customer, you're not allowed to use APIs due to internal restrictions, so there are specific things that you cannot connect to it. Another area for improvement in the solution is that because there's a capacity of how many records you can have, and there's a capacity of how many functions you can apply, Smartsheet has set up their system where they can force people into purchasing a $20,000 additional module that is called Control Center, that will create documents for them on the fly, so they don't use so many functions and automation. Smartsheet also needs to improve on training, because the training that is out there is very little. The solution requires a steeper learning curve. You have to do your own training and you have to work on your own solution."
"The system can become more challenging to use in more complex scenarios, requiring additional add-ons that can be quite costly."
"It would be beneficial to enhance user-friendliness and make it less complex while maintaining its overall excellence as a product."
"There should be an option to minimize the amount of data on the homepage in order to ease access and downloads in areas with slow internet connection."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive. There is a yearly licensing cost. There are no additional costs, only the standard license, and the cloud license."
"There's a license for Smartsheet, and the enterprise plan comes down to about $750. My company also pays an extra $60 monthly apart from the standard licensing fee."
"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."
"Smartsheet only requires licenses for project managers. When we were using Asana, we had to purchase a license for everyone who wanted to access their tasks and use the system. That gets costly fast. It was one of the main reasons we left Asana. As Asana and these other tools scale, they become way more expensive."
"For a normal license, like the one I had: I had my own Smartsheet because I wanted to play with it and I didn't want to mess with what I was doing in Verizon, so I paid $200 monthly, and it gave me all the same functionalities, so I could do whatever I wanted for $200. The problem is if you have anyone else working on it or deploying on it, it's $200 a month for every single person who's deployed on it, that's working on it as an owner or an administrator, so owners and administrators are the only ones who can change, edit, and add data to worksheets and columns. Depending on the size of your organization, Smartsheet can be costly. As for implementing its Control Center, Smartsheet forces you to have three people come in: it's a minimum of three people from Smartsheet for three months who will provide you the solutions for the Control Center side, and that's $150 an hour, so it can become very expensive. For my company, not having the Control Center would save on the setup fees and then the $20,000 a year, because the Control Center of Smartsheet is a yearly subscription of $20,000."
"There would be more extensive usage if the solution were cheaper. It's really expensive right now, and that's why we provide a few licenses for admins. The rest of them are just users without admin privileges."
"Smartsheet has many licensing models. You need to add the package that best suits your requirements. The license is paid per user and it is monthly. The cost was approximately $7 per PC, $15 for professional, and $33 for the enterprise plan."
"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."
"It is less expensive than Microsoft Project for enterprise or Oracle Primavera by an order of magnitude. If you buy a Microsoft Project license, it's probably $300 or so by itself, whereas Smartsheet is probably less than $50 per head."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise22
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Has anyone moved from Microsoft Project to Smartsheet? How has your experience been with Smartsheet?
Hi @Eire Zimmermann, I helped an organization evaluate both MS-Project and Smartsheet when they were conducting their PM tool RFP. The short of it is this, MS Project is not caught up with the mo...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Smartsheet?
Licensing might be cheaper per user. I rate it as seven or eight due to its demanding nature. For personal use, I have a monthly subscription, while the company uses an annual basis.
What needs improvement with Smartsheet?
Currently, I feel that Smartsheet fulfills all my needs. However, I need to investigate more about the product to identify specific areas for improvement.
 

Also Known As

planningIT, alfabet planningIT, Alfabet IT Planning and Portfolio Management
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FUJITSU, Coca Cola, ING, CreditSuisse, CosmosDirekt, GTA, Echo Entertainment Group, Electrolux, Cern
Sony Music, ESPN, Hilton, Unisource, Colliers, Extreme Networks, Groupon, Netflix
Find out what your peers are saying about Alfabet IT Planning & Portfolio Management vs. Smartsheet and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.