What is our primary use case?
Smartsheet is used for secure team collaboration, whether with global or with cross-functional teams. It's a good solution for a PMO, even for marketing strategies, IT tech dashboards for ticketing, etc.
My scope was mostly learning Smartsheet for the first few months, which was the hardest part because it's a huge learning curve. There's not a lot of documentation, and their training was extremely general because it's your solution you're building. It was not like Excel where if somebody runs into a problem or has hit an error or has had an issue, they could quickly look it up and find some community support. The Smartsheet community is very good, but they're also still new, so trying to find advanced solutions to have to work around within Smartsheet was the hardest part. It became, instead of an eight-hour job, more like between sixteen to twenty hours of work to get the full solution done.
The thing about the emerging technology team that I worked with at Verizon using Smartsheet was that the team thought it was like Excel on steroids. That's the idea that everybody keeps thinking, that it's an out-of-the-box experience and that it's going to be the solution that they need. You have to apply full rules and functionality the way that you need to from the very beginning, you need to know what you want, have everything set up the way that you want it to be set up, and designed the way you want it to be designed, and customized before you ever produce. Because once you get started in Smartsheet, people just don't stop, so making sure you add that baseline of everything that you want it to be and understand its capacity, scalability, and true functionality, it's an extreme sport, I can tell you that for sure.
What is most valuable?
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.
Smartsheet tries to enforce people to use their Control Center which costs $20,000, but what's good about that module is that it allows you to also create some cool solutions that even the Smartsheet team didn't know. In the end, I had a check done by Smartsheet on our system and they said, "You recreated Control Center, and we don't know how you did this, but it's insane." They were extremely shocked. They could only offer a dynamic view, which I think is what they wanted to try and push, but that would entail sleepless nights.
Smartsheet pushes out weekly updates because it's still new, and its team is trying to make it a nice product even for people that want to use it out-of-the-box for their enterprise solution, and this could be another pro in the solution.
I haven't seen anything like Smartsheet before. It is great and it is an amazing solution. It allows cross-functional global communications with offshore teams, and this means those teams can do the work, put in all that's needed and what's been done, have scrum meetings, and have all the data and documentation attached to row-level. If the teams do use AI, the data can be corrected, updated, and sent back. You can pull the data out, put it into a Data Lake or Hadoop, or any kind of SQL, or Oracle, or whatever data system that you have, and you can streamline it out of the system just like you can with Excel.
Smartsheet is a great product if you know how to use it right. The free version allows you to use the basic Smartsheet abilities, then for the enterprise edition, there's a lot more you can work on and do with it.
Smartsheet is very secure. It's really impressive if you can use it right and you can train your team.
What needs improvement?
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 created about a hundred training videos for Verizon, particularly on how to use Smartsheet, and I was told that Verizon's still using the videos and that Verizon still loves them.
Smartsheet also puts a lot of updates out quite often, so there was a time when I had a form that was capturing ten to fifteen entries every hour, and one of the things is that new addition or an enhancement was put into the form, and it skewed the form. In this case, Smartsheet doing a lot of implementations and enhancements quickly became a con.
What also needs to be improved in Smartsheet is allowing columns to be changed, not to have to roll over, and one thing about it is row-level. There's a reason for that: it's how you can send out secure update requests. I have to pull in data from another sheet, which includes all of the data from the columns, and used a formula that was such an advanced formula, which I had to check using Smartsheet's restrictions: at thirty characters, a space, and a colon, and add all that to a column onto the other sheet, then pull that data in using a function. Smartsheet should have a functionality that would automatically pull in all the data for you and update your dropdown menu via a summary sheet, so that was what my team couldn't do without using the Control Center, and in the end, I was able to do without using the Control Center. I don't think the Smartsheet team even knew that the solution had that ability.
You should not have to pull in columns that you don't need if you need to move data, because you may not want somebody seeing the baseline column, you may just want the person to be able to look at specific columns and it brings the whole row in, so it can become really slow if you're hiding columns. You'd like to avoid that at all costs.
Another thing I would change in Smartsheet is its backup ability: it's terrible. I've heard other people lose data, and that some formulas don't work as they were supposed to, particularly some Excel-type formulas, though I never really had any struggle with that because I always found some workaround.
In the next release of Smartsheet, I'd also like the forms to be improved. If you wanted to ask a person a question, you had to create a field. Smartsheet created an environment where you can ask a question, but you can't add any conditions to it. There are conditional rules, for example, you don't want to show somebody a form that has a hundred questions if you don't need to ask them a hundred questions, but you would need to create a hundred fields to ask those questions if you wanted them to conditionally show up or not, so I'd like that changed and have Smartsheet create a better environment for asking questions via the forms.
How are customer service and support?
I contacted the technical support for Smartsheet just once, because of an issue with the drop sheet. There was an update that was done and a sheet that was put into deleted sheets was moved, and that sheet was the central source of connection for all projects. Projects were connected through it as it was the project consolidation sheet, so all projects that were in work pulled data from this project consolidator. It would implement who the managers are, who the team is, and what the project is about, then it would pull in from those projects, how the project's doing based on functions, how you look at it, and what kind of value you place on the work that's being done, and how you can show it off in your PMO, in your executive boards, etc. If that dropped even one more time, there's no way you could have remade it. It had everything, and it had all of the most complex parts of everything. It was the connector to everything and it was deleted. Thank goodness I made sure that there was a backup after that constantly, so every time something was added or changed, it would delete it: delete the table where it was, and then re-copy itself. It came to you in an Excel file and you had to restructure everything, so I just would copy it. Everything was copied to another file, and it was just like having an additional copy of itself somewhere else, so there was an error.
Buyer's Guide
Smartsheet
May 2025
Learn what your peers think about Smartsheet. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.
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What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I feel like Smartsheet tries to get people to spend a lot of money, particularly because of that $20,000 Control Center where you still have to develop all of your solutions. All it does is control how it's automated, so you won't have to worry about setting up workspaces or security because it can do it for you, but you still have to customize everything. When you have to do these helper sheets, then it adds a lot of functions, and looking at other sheets and trying to drive data without having to move those columns, that's when you'll end up buying the Smartsheet Control Center, so it feels like, at some point, when I wanted to have a nice talk with the makers of Smartsheet, but at the same time, it's a good mechanism to get money and they do a good job of it.
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.
The $200 monthly I paid is a fair price for what the solution does. It's like having a project such as MS project, but you're just paying for what you want from the MS project, because MS project is just such a needle in the haystack that if you want to change, it won't be as easy, and you can't build your solution within projects. You only can use what the solution has and manipulate it the way that you want to, as far as some parts of it. In Smartsheet, projects are fully manipulatable. so they'd be fully customizable and they have a Jira personality to them. This means you can have a dashboard that only purposely changes depending on whoever's looking at it, so your whole team that is free to use it can work within it, and those are your resources. The team doesn't need a license because you can add on as unlicensed users. Anyone can access the sheet, but they just can't edit it or add to it. In this sense, Smartsheet is free for people to play with, but it's not free for you to automate and customize unless you have a license.
In the team, there was a need for three people with a license and that was me. I created the whole system: all four levels of it, then I needed to transfer it all over, and that was a nightmare, but it was okay. It was not that bad, but then the team only needed to have two Smartsheet licenses after I left, so it was whoever took over the ownership and then one administrator as backup, just in case.
What other advice do I have?
Smartsheet itself hasn't been around for that long. They started engaging in bigger firms and contracts in 2018, but before that, they were very much just a startup in Seattle. Basically, what they built was a great solution for collaborating with cross-functional teams and global teams, securely. They're still a little bit behind on some stuff that they could do, but they've brought in just about all of the functionality that you can do in Excel as far as major functions and automation.
My advice to anyone looking into using Smartsheet is if you want to jump into Smartsheet, you need to have a background in Excel, have project management skills, and try to understand rules, processes, and how you want the system to be started, and set up. When you start connecting things and start sending records from one person to another through email or through whatever source you do, if you're not going to use APIs and you're not going to use anything extra, and you're just using an out-of-the-box solution, then you really need Smartsheet to be set up and understand it truly. A lot of Smartsheet training needs to be put into place.
My rating for Smartsheet, even with all its setbacks, is a nine or a ten. I would probably rate it a nine just because of the money scheming part of it. I'm not happy with that, because it doesn't feel so ethical if you're a small business and you're wanting to expand. Otherwise, I don't even like looking at Excel as much as I used to because Smartsheet has so many additional automation features. For example, you can connect it to power BI just like you can Excel, but it does it differently. You can connect it through an API, or you can connect it to Jira.
There are so many connections that you can make to Smartsheet, and you can target the data and move the data out so that you don't get that cap. Otherwise, it's a great solution for opening up communication channels, for helping cross-functional teams work, for example, when one's gone, the other one's there, and the work is accelerated to market. You're saving your company millions of dollars by being able to have this open communication channel that's different from other systems. You won't be needing email or anything else, because you'll just need your team, so I think Smartsheet is a great solution.
It's very robust if you know how to use it, but that's the kicker: you have to learn how to use it. The best training that they offer is the advanced university training, and that requires a license, and then you have to pay an additional $199 for that, but you do get your PUs, and you get additional ones you can use for your PMI certification, particularly for the next certification and to keep your certification valid.
There are a lot of good things about Smartsheet, but the idea of it is amazing. If they get it together, it can be the best solution. They really wouldn't need the $20,000 control center if they just made it a robust solution and provided it, and then just charged everybody the nominal fee to use it, for example, to Microsoft as a different model of charging people. I think that would be better because then they could focus their efforts more on those enhancements that are needed. Otherwise, Smartsheet is a really good concept. It's a really good idea.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.