Planview AdaptiveWork vs Smartsheet comparison

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Planview AdaptiveWork

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Planview AdaptiveWork and Smartsheet are both contenders in the project management software category. Planview AdaptiveWork takes the lead for organizations needing detailed customization, whereas Smartsheet appeals with its familiar spreadsheet-like interface ideal for users looking for ease of use and integration capabilities.

Features: Planview AdaptiveWork offers features such as customizable project tracking, resource management tools, and advanced reporting capabilities, aligning with the needs of complex projects. Smartsheet includes features focused on collaboration and automation, with an intuitive interface, integration with other major tools, and ability to design workflows that enhance team tasks. Its easy integration and collaborative nature make it ideal for dynamic team environments.

Room for Improvement: Planview AdaptiveWork could enhance user support for its extensive customization options and streamline its initial configuration process to reduce deployment time. There is room to expand its integration capabilities with more platforms. Smartsheet could improve its batch processing capabilities and enhance data visualization tools. Adding more robust offline capabilities would also be beneficial, allowing users to work seamlessly without internet connectivity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Smartsheet's deployment is notably user-friendly due to its familiar layout, requiring minimal setup time. Its customer support offers a wide range of self-help resources, aiding in quick problem resolution. Planview AdaptiveWork, while straightforward, may demand more time for configuration but offers a highly responsive customer service team with comprehensive support resources to assist users.

Pricing and ROI: Planview AdaptiveWork generally involves higher costs upfront due to its customization needs, but it offers substantial ROI for organizations that can leverage its full capabilities. Smartsheet provides predictable pricing plans with flexibility, which supports its scalable collaboration approach. Its cost-effectiveness for team-oriented tasks can be a significant advantage, especially for those prioritizing quick, collaborative, solution deployment.

To learn more, read our detailed Planview AdaptiveWork vs. Smartsheet Report (Updated: December 2025).

Planview AdaptiveWork vs. Smartsheet

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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

Planview AdaptiveWork

Ranking in Project Management Software

19th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Smartsheet

Ranking in Project Management Software

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Project Portfolio Management (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Project Management Software category, the mindshare of Planview AdaptiveWork is 1.0%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Smartsheet is 2.2%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Project Management Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Smartsheet	2.2%
Planview AdaptiveWork	1.0%
Other	96.8%

Project Management Software

Featured Reviews

reviewer2383668

Product Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Helps to organize projects across multiple teams and automates manual tasks

Integration with other tools can sometimes be a hiccup, but this isn't necessarily a limitation of Planview AdaptiveWork. It's more often a result of company policies regarding integration with other systems and tools. From what I've gathered from discussions on various platforms, it appears that AdaptiveWork does integrate well with other tools. However, our experience is limited due to company policy restrictions. Some teams use it in agile settings. We follow the waterfall approach. I would recommend it, but users should ensure they strategically build out their workflows and logic. I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

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DonatasSinkevicius

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The feature that has improved our project planning the most is the ability to create custom workflows, which allows us to automate manual tasks that project managers need to perform. The collaboration feature enhances our team's productivity by allowing individuals to see the impact of their decisions on projects owned and managed by other teams."

"I like the project management solution. It's really nice."

"Clarizen Slide Publisher has helped increase transparency and communication with project stakeholders for us."

"Clarizen's strength is reporting. Aside from reporting, I also like the ability to create customized workflow and custom actions. The workflow rules are handy. For example, you can create custom fields and dependent picklists."

"I like the dashboarding feature best, as it lets me assemble a workspace with source sheets, dashboards, and reports simultaneously. The standard reports and worksheets are most useful for team collaboration. People look at dashboards during presentations, but they go to the sheets to update projects, add comments, or make notifications. It's automated, so changes come to me or whoever needs to see them. I can send notifications from specific line items."

"Smartsheet saves time for both me and my team; compared to Microsoft Project, which is more expensive, we save costs using Smartsheet."

"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."

"Their support is awesome. We are on an enterprise plan and there is a customer success at Smartsheet and anyone from our licensed users can just send an email to them and they respond as soon as possible."

"As I am in the corporate legal department, I have to deal with a number of contracts and sometimes it's hard to keep up with email transactions. Having the tracker sheet and being able to build dashboards and workflow has been quite valuable."

"It's very user friendly."

"The most valuable feature of Smartsheet is it can be highly customized."

"The most valuable features of Smartsheet are its collaboration tools, the ability to centralize and prioritize projects, and robust reporting capabilities."

More Smartsheet pros

Cons

"If I start customizing too many things, Clarizen tends to get really slow in our environment and especially if I'm tunneled in an environment, like if I'm connected to my VPN."

"One specific area for improvement could be implementing a development environment to test workflows with live production data."

"I felt like the slide publisher isn't that user-friendly. I think it wasn't that easy to use or to figure out because of formatting constraints, or maybe we need to get better at understanding some of its limitations."

"It could be more user-friendly. I think it is too overwhelming, initially, in terms of possibilities and so on."

"It would be beneficial to enhance user-friendliness and make it less complex while maintaining its overall excellence as a product."

"The long-term timelines could be improved, especially the visuals on the projection Gantt chart."

"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."

"I want to improve baselines, predecessor-successor relationships, and the ability to use manual starts and stops while keeping relationships intact. Changing dates and durations can be convoluted, unlike in Microsoft Project. There are many things I'm used to in other software that don't happen in Smartsheet. It's offset by how easy it is to link sheets and pull data at higher levels, but figuring out why I can't change data sometimes can be frustrating."

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

"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."

"More intuitive access without constant logins would be beneficial."

"Initially, there were issues like dropdowns. Those have been overcome."

More Smartsheet cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Smartsheet can be low-priced, with personal subscriptions around eight dollars a month, but I imagine it gets pricier for enterprise systems. Microsoft Project can be 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."

"I would assume there is a licensing fee. I don't think that it is free."

"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."

"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."

"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. I was responsible for negotiating the price with the Smartsheet team, but I don't remember what the price was. Its standard license probably was around 5,000 to 6,000 a year. The enterprise version is significantly more expensive."

"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."

"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."

More Smartsheet pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

15%

Healthcare Company

10%

Government

10%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	22

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Planview AdaptiveWork?

The feature that has improved our project planning the most is the ability to create custom workflows, which allows us to automate manual tasks that project managers need to perform. The collaborat...

What needs improvement with Planview AdaptiveWork?

One specific area for improvement could be implementing a development environment to test workflows with live production data.

What advice do you have for others considering Planview AdaptiveWork?

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 do you like most about Smartsheet?

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 t...

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.

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Product Reports

Planview AdaptiveWork

Download Planview AdaptiveWork product report

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Also Known As

Planview Clarizen

No data available

Overview

AdaptiveWork services the project management software needs of more than 2,500 companies in 76 countries worldwide. They boast a robust client list, including companies such as: Chanel, Cisco, The Walt Disney Company, EA, FedEx, HP, UPS, and VMWare. Founded in 2006, their goal is to change the way collaboration happens within companies of all sizes. AdaptiveWork focuses strongly on the fact that transparency, communication, and idea sharing are key in effective business models.

AdaptiveWork uses the cloud and social communications in their software. This helps AdaptiveWork project management software provide real time updates, maximize efficiency of collaboration, and keep all team members productive and on the same page. AdaptiveWork is fully configurable, and is designed to scale and adapt to different organizational needs. Their task management software is easy to implement, meaning start up will not cost clients time away from their work.

AdaptiveWork offers an enterprise-class project management software solution that fits all businesses' project management needs. With a name created from the words "Clarity" and "Zen", AdaptiveWork's software is designed to help businesses collaborate effectively and create true peace of mind. Project management software doesn't just help get work done; it helps create stronger and more efficient teams. By keeping everyone on the same page, AdaptiveWork task management software helps your team stay focused on the goal of your project.

Planview

Smartsheet offers a comprehensive platform for project management, featuring real-time sharing, cloud accessibility, and a user-friendly interface, which enhance workflow efficiency and project tracking capabilities.

Smartsheet stands out in the realm of project management by integrating robust tools like Gantt chart creation and seamless compatibility with products like Jira and Microsoft Teams. Its dashboards, intuitive design, and flexible customization options support efficient collaboration and centralized management. Enhancements such as real-time change visibility without refreshing, advanced automation capabilities, and improved integration with APIs address user needs. Sectors spanning from strategic initiatives to operational tasks benefit from this customizable, cloud-based platform.

What are the key features of Smartsheet?

Real-Time Sharing: Facilitates immediate collaboration across teams.
Cloud Accessibility: Work from anywhere with cloud-based tools.
User-Friendliness: Simplified project management through an intuitive interface.
Gantt Chart Creation: Offers dynamic timelines for project tracking.
Integrations: Seamless connectivity with Jira, Microsoft Teams, and more.

What benefits or ROI does Smartsheet provide?

Enhanced Efficiency: Streamline workflows for quicker project completion.
Improved Collaboration: Centralized tools support teamwork and communication.
Project Tracking: Real-time updates keep projects on schedule.
Customizable Solutions: Adaptable to meet diverse management needs.

In specific industries, Smartsheet is leveraged for creating project plans, managing tasks, and compiling statistics. Teams use dashboards for data visualization to monitor multiple projects efficiently. The platform supports resource management, approvals, and collaboration, integrating features like automation and data export for comprehensive project oversight.

Sample Customers

Cisco Capital, JLL, Conagra Brands, Cargill, JLL, IBM, IIROC, Siemens Energy

Sony Music, ESPN, Hilton, Unisource, Colliers, Extreme Networks, Groupon, Netflix

Planview AdaptiveWork vs. Smartsheet