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Planview Daptiv 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

Planview Daptiv
Ranking in Project Portfolio Management
16th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Smartsheet
Ranking in Project Portfolio Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Project Management Software (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Project Portfolio Management category, the mindshare of Planview Daptiv is 1.5%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Smartsheet is 8.8%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Project Portfolio Management
 

Featured Reviews

Antonio Lira - PeerSpot reviewer
It allows you to include empty document forms, which must be completed and signed on project execution.
I want to share another Daptiv PPM feature - the usage of templates and management All of us who have managed projects, or simply structured an action plan, have looked back on previous experiences by searching our personal files, either from past work, previous projects, university assignments,…
PaulDiaz - PeerSpot reviewer
Needs to improve baselines and changing dates can be frustrating
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. The worksheet is key for tracking project progress, though we track it at a higher level rather than detailed work breakdown structures. Subject matter experts say when they'll deliver things, and that's what we track.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's difficult to pinpoint just one most valuable feature, as there are many features that can be beneficial. For the specific use case of my client's project management office, they found the project management features of the application to be particularly valuable, such as project boards, reporting, and the ability to customize views. Additionally, task management and project scheduling were also highly utilized. However, capacity planning was not used as much as the others, as there was a lack of support from executives to invest in training and implementing it due to a lack of processes in place. The project planning features, dashboard, and reporting capabilities were considered the most valuable."
"Changepoint gives us a view of the project status and needs very clearly, which are things that we used to miss with MS Project and Excel."
"The timekeeping features are great and very helpful."
"The powerful collaboration is definitely the most valuable and the fact that you can adjust flexibility to almost any methodology, and the easy creation of complete new functionalities without programming code."
"I like the reporting engine, IBM Cognos, especially the analytics. That's a good tool. It's quite strong on the ideation and capacity-planning side, which is a huge plus."
"The most valuable features of Smartsheet are its collaboration tools, the ability to centralize and prioritize projects, and robust reporting capabilities."
"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."
"The fact that you can have different access groups is definitely a pro for Smartsheet. It also has the ability to integrate with a lot of tools."
"I prefer Smartsheet for its flexibility."
"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."
"If you just need a planning tool, it's a low-cost and effective option."
"Smartsheet does a really good job of creating Gantt charts. Export to Excel feature was also very useful."
"The ability to update in real-time before meetings is great."
 

Cons

"I find the solution has an excessive amount of features. Many aren't even kept current. Some aren't useful at all. There's an overall lack of coherence within the solution. It can make the execution difficult. Many features can easily be eliminated and it would help streamline the solution. They should get rid of 80% of the features and then really focus on the leftover 20% to make it a really great product."
"It would also be nice to see some improvements on the IBM Cognos Analytics. There's still work to be done on the analytics side of things, like your condition formality."
"The areas that should be improved in Planview Daptiv are a subject that can be viewed differently depending on who you ask. I feel they should focus on excelling in one specific area rather than providing average capabilities in many areas. For example, their project planning software is satisfactory but not as advanced as Microsoft Projects. The same goes for the capacity planning tool and reporting capabilities, which can be improved upon by using custom Excel spreadsheets or by hiring a business analyst for additional support. In short, the biggest weakness of Daptiv is that it does not excel in any one area and only provides average performance."
"Expense management, simulation scenarios, and budget control could be great and useful features to include."
"This solution needs more standard connectors to other solutions."
"Smartsheet could improve by having seamless integration with Azure Board."
"The solution should include integrations with other platforms or software."
"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."
"I would like if Smartsheet allowed more formulas in its sheets. I don't think working with formulas is as intuitive as it is in Excel. I use Vlookups and index matches in some of my sheets, and I had to find an outside consultant to help me build out those formulas."
"It would be beneficial to enhance user-friendliness and make it less complex while maintaining its overall excellence as a product."
"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."
"Areas for improvement in Smartsheet include better integration capabilities with other technologies through APIs and addressing limitations in reporting functionalities."
"They should improve the solution's integration with API."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a yearly license, but it's not an open license. It's based on users and their roles. So your administrator is priced differently from your timesheet user."
"The licensing is pretty complex. Each kind of user is a different price. It's approximately $300 per year. They charge additional fees for technical support and other additional services."
"I pay $ 120 or $ 128 a month for two to three users."
"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."
"I believe a licensed user costs between 300 to 400 euros."
"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."
"There's a trial version and a free version. Each license costs a decent amount, $25 per month or something."
"The solution is too expensive."
"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 solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Educational Organization
9%
Government
7%
University
5%
Educational Organization
21%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 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?
The pricing is great and reasonable enough that I maintained my copy and bought it for my team independently.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AOS Studley, Austrian Airlines, bpost bank, Employees Provident Fund, Stena Metall, VitalityHealth, Precor
Sony Music, ESPN, Hilton, Unisource, Colliers, Extreme Networks, Groupon, Netflix
Find out what your peers are saying about Planview Daptiv vs. Smartsheet and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.