JIRA Portfolio vs Smartsheet comparison

Jira Portfolio is an agile roadmapping tool designed to help teams build plans, envision the big picture, track progress, and share the process with stakeholders.

Jira Portfolio is planned based. A plan in Portfolio is a complete view of the tasks, teams, and release dates for your Jira projects.

Once you start to create a plan, there are three main factors you need to define: 

• Scope: A list of tasks that need to be carried out in order to complete the plan.

• Teams: Who will be implementing the work? With the correct data in place, Portfolio can estimate how long it will take for the team to complete their tasks.

• Releases: Your scheduled release date.

With Jira Portfolio, you can create a visual timeline to gain visibility across each of your teams and projects in a single place from a granular level and review cross-team and cross-project dependencies to prevent bottlenecks. This visibility can help you plan realistic release dates and manage your team’s capacity. The solution allows you to try out different scenarios with your roadmap and resources to help guide your decision making. Once you have a solid plan, you can easily integrate with Jira Software and commit your changes.

Jira Portfolio allows managers to easily add team members. The tool’s powerful scheduling algorithm assigns tasks to teams while taking priorities and dependencies into account so it can create a realistic forecast for project completion. 

Jira Portfolio Benefits

Some of the top benefits of using Jira Portfolio include:

• Roadmaps and roadmaps dependencies: Roadmaps list details about the tasks that need to be executed in order to complete a project, as well as predictions for when they will be completed, which teams are in charge of the task, and a list of resources they require. By setting dependencies on your team’s roadmaps, unnecessary bottlenecks are avoided.  

• Integration with Jira: Jira Portfolio is dynamically integrated with your Jira Software project data and constantly pulls your latest data from Jira Software, allowing you to plan your projects with updated information.

• Envision scenarios: Create what-if scenarios and save them to Jira if you decide to adopt them.

• Reporting: Share capacity reports and more to allow team members and stakeholders to gain visibility and insights into the process.

• Task completion estimation methods: Estimate how long a specific task will take and compare these estimations with the actual time to completion to help assess team performance and efficiency and improve the accuracy of estimation calculations over time. 

Reviews from Real Users

Jira Portfolio stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its roadmap creation tools and its flexibility.

Meeta L., a lead product manager at a tech vendor, says, “The valuable features of the JIRA Portfolio are the customization it provides which is very useful and the Agile project management capability.”

Juan P., a senior IT project manager at Avantica, writes, “Portfolio helps us increase the visibility of projects' status and management with remote workers who make up most of the company.”

Smartsheet is a dynamic platform with features like real-time data sharing, Gantt charts, and integration with Jira and Microsoft Teams, offering valuable tools for efficient task management.

Smartsheet combines Excel-like functionality with cloud accessibility, making it efficient for tracking, reporting, and workflow management. Users benefit from its scalability and robust security, making it ideal for enterprise-level projects. However, improvements in data visibility, real-time collaboration, and user-friendliness can enhance its utility. Customizable dashboards, project management features, and seamless integrations offer great flexibility, though there is a demand for better automation, API enhancements, and new templates.

• Real-time Data Sharing: Facilitates seamless collaboration between users.
• Project Management Tools: Includes Gantt charts and task prioritization for efficient project tracking.
• Integration: Works with major platforms like Jira and Microsoft Teams for comprehensive data flow.
• Automation Capabilities: Reduces manual work with robust automation functionalities.
• Customizable Dashboards: Allows users to tailor dashboards to meet specific needs.

• Efficiency: Streamlines workflows with tools that enhance project tracking and collaboration.
• Scalability: Supports growing enterprise demands with its scalable architecture.
• Security: Provides robust, secure environments for data management.
• Adaptability: Offers flexibility to customize workflows for improved resource management.

Smartsheet is utilized by organizations in industries like engineering, education, and IT for project management, task tracking, and data integration. It enables planning, scheduling, and team collaboration, facilitating dashboard creation and automation of processes. Its flexibility in customizing workflows is appealing to those managing projects and programs.