Smartsheet Reviews

The primary use is for keeping track of work and ensuring that everyone on the team is aware of what tasks are being worked on and the progress of client-related processes.

It operates as an enhanced and versatile version of Excel, offering a wide range of capabilities that allow you to accomplish various tasks and operations.

It would be beneficial to enhance user-friendliness and make it less complex while maintaining its overall excellence as a product. Another area that could benefit from enhancements, is scalability features, particularly in managing the growing complexity that comes with more users.

There have been occasional minor issues, like freezing or reports not running as efficiently as desired. I would rate it seven out of ten.

There's definitely room for improvement when it comes to scalability. As the user count increases, it can become challenging to effectively track multiple tasks with numerous users simultaneously using the platform. I would rate it eight out of ten.

I would recommend it as a suitable product for beginners. After the user base expands significantly, you might want to consider a different solution like QuickBase. But for those starting out with a limited number of users, it's a good choice. I would rate it eight out of ten.

This solution provides easy collaboration and allows non-building users to use the system without requiring a license. 

Only licensed users who can create sheets and collaborative spaces are charged for their usage.

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

However, since we don't use those add-ons, this is not an issue for us.

I have been working with Smartsheet for three years.

Since it's a software as a service, we are always working on the latest version of the platform.

I would rate the stability of Smartsheet a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten.

Currently, we have around 15 to 20 users who have a valid license, but we plan to increase that number substantially. It's hard to determine the exact number of non-licensed users, but I would estimate it to be at least a few dozen, around 30 to 40 users.

We did not have many occasions where we had to contact technical support.

I was indeed involved in the initial setup, and let's say that for standard use, it's a very interesting tool. It's not that difficult.

But for more complex use cases, there is a higher learning curve.

The application is hosted on the cloud, but I wouldn't describe it as completely public since users have their own private space. Access to the system requires a user account that is created by an administrator within our company.

The deployment process took one or two months to complete.

I believe a licensed user costs between 300 to 400 euros.

This solution does not have any additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.

It's important to do thorough research and analysis to determine if the application fits your needs, as with any software. While we are satisfied with its use cases in some areas, we might have needed to do more research to determine if it would also meet our needs in other areas.

I would rate Smartsheet a seven out of ten.

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. From my experience, most people don't like using Microsoft Project if they need to create any kind of custom column. I was never unable to create the functionality I needed.

It has got a really nice workflow engine. It is helpful if you want to let people know based on a date or criteria. Anytime a new project was submitted to the project intake table, I would get an email. You can also send the email to Slack or a whole host of different types of targets. If a task was due next week, I could have the system send an email that says, "Hey, you've got a task coming up next week," and then, if it was late, I could have it send an email or a Slack message to somebody. That was very helpful.

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.

It probably also doesn’t allow you to level resources in a project plan. So, if I assign five tasks to you and they all occur on the same day, in Microsoft Project, I can level them. Because you can only do one thing in a day, it would spread those out over five days, instead of all piled up on a single day, but I don't think Smartsheet had that.

I started with it back in 2019. In less than a year, I was a power user. I was doing presentations to the broader user group about all the different solutions we were building in our division. So, I'm considered fairly proficient at this tool.

It is stable. I've never had any issues.

It is scalable. I never reached any data limits. I used to know what the data limits were. My suspicion is that if you're looking to have a massive data warehouse, you're probably not going to use Smartsheet, but if you're building some processes and supporting some processes that are fairly light with basic notification and things like that, it can handle enough data. It can handle a corporate PMO and all the tasks in a fairly easy manner. So, it seems scalable,  but I don't know the upper limits. We never ran into any data constraints.

It is good. I did have some issues from time to time. They weren't so significant, but they managed those in a professional and timely manner.

I also work with Domo. Achilles heel for me is that Smartsheet's dashboards are missing a key piece of functionality, which is the whole reason I have to use Domo. When you put components on the Smartsheet dashboard, they are not aware of each other. That's the beauty of Domo where every component that you have on your dashboard is listening, and if it knows how to, it'll change the data it is displaying based on how you interact with the other components on the dashboard on that page, whereas Smartsheet doesn't do that. For example, in Domo, you can pick a project ID and go filter down the entire dashboard just to show data about a given project. In Smartsheet, I'd have to create a whole separate dashboard. If you want to show a report for a bunch of different regions or a bunch of different departments, you might have to create 5 to 10 separate different dashboards to support the company. If you are asked to add a new pie chart there that shows the number of tasks, or the tasks broken down by red, yellow, or green status, you would have to add that in 5 to 10 different places. Instead of just adding it once on one dashboard and having it work and filter for every single project, like in Domo, you'd have to go and update 5 to 10 different dashboards.

They do have a piece of software called Control Center that helps manage that. It is an automation engine. If you have built your solution using their Control Center automation tool, and you change a dashboard there, it can automatically go and update the existing dashboards that are out there, but I haven't used that. It is an expensive component. In one of my companies where we had this, I was the very first person outside of the company trained in the Smartsheet Control Center. It is quite nice. It is relatively new. It has been around only for less than four or five years, but it is a little more complicated to work with. Generally, you hire a Smartsheet consultant to configure your Control Center and create solutions using that automation tool, but I was able to do it for my company. They had bought all of the components. So, I was able to use that along with a bunch of other components. They had some upsell components, such as DataMesh, Data Uploader, and Control Center, but in my last company, they hadn't paid for those things. So, using its dashboards to support the entire business required a lot of maintenance. Typically, I don't have a lot of people in my department. So, I wasn't willing to try and use that because it would've taken a lot more maintenance. I was able to convince the organization to pay for Domo because I could finish the solution by myself and be able to maintain it because I only needed a single dashboard and not a whole bunch of different dashboards.

Power BI, in my opinion, is very competitive as a tool. Microsoft is pretty good at making things reasonably usable. It works well with Excel, and it has an Excel-type metaphor. It has similar functionality to Domo where components on the page know about each other, as long as your data model is set up properly. My instinct is that if they're not careful, Smartsheet could lose a lot of business to Power BI without a stronger dashboard solution.

I didn't set it up. There was a whole separate group for that. Both companies that I came to already had people using it. In both cases, I managed and administered the licenses just because it was really pretty straightforward. Buying new licenses, getting those into the system, managing the deployment of those licenses, and other things like that were pretty straightforward and pretty light work. I wasn't really a true administrator, but we did the single sign-on setup. That was all fairly straightforward. When you buy a software-as-a-service tool, generally, you can start using things pretty quickly. So, we were able to get started right away while we continued to configure and manage the licenses and configure the system.

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.

My advice would be to not be intimidated by this tool. If you know Excel, you know 80% of how to work with Smartsheet. It is quite flexible. The main difference is you can more strongly type the columns, which is a good thing because you're ensuring that the data records that you are producing and managing contain the data that they should. It is good data validation. You end up with cleaner and stronger data that's easier to work with. So, you shouldn't be intimidated by that. It is so similar to Excel, but you get the additional workflow.

From a project perspective, the only thing you couldn't do is be able to level resources in a project plan, but it has got all the other project features. It has got a really simple workflow engine to notify people and communicate. So, it has a lot of power, and people should not be intimidated by it. It is pretty straightforward, and they should feel like they can get up to speed quickly in it. If you're used to working with Excel and other tools like that, you can get into Smartsheet and be productive very quickly.

I'd give it a 9 out of 10. It is a great tool for the things that I use it for. It would be a 10 or an 11 if the dashboard components were more aware of each other. If it had the same capabilities as Domo, it would be a top-tier tool.

The solution is primarily used for project management. I've coordinated a large educational program that has multiple contributors and multiple organizers. It's a weekly program and we use it to outline our curriculum and keep track of the steps in the curriculum. I've used it for my own research projects as well in more of a traditional project management kind of way with tax, people, contingencies, et cetera.

The ability to update in real-time before meetings is great. 

The ability to connect documents to builds or whatever that are being worked on or related is helpful.

Multiple people can contribute to it. Instead of the project manager or myself having to collect information from people and then put it in, they can just go in and update their stuff weekly or whatever by themselves.

The initial setup is easy. 

At one point we were trying to use it to organize a curriculum for students to just have the weekly stuff. We kind of ran into trouble doing this. It's not really designed for that. What we were trying to do is give them a real-time syllabus with pre-readings and activities and stuff embedded. It ended up getting really complicated.

They also had access, and while there’s probably a way to not give them access, I didn’t know how to set that. I just wanted to let them download. It got complex. It wasn’t just people updating what they were working on. It was something else and it didn’t work.

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. We use Box to store recordings, for example, of sessions and stuff. We’d like to store it in this solution. We already integrate Smartsheet into Teams for updates and stuff. That works well.

I've used the solution for a while. I've used it over the last 12 months at least.

It's very stable. The only time I've had a problem is when somebody has made a mistake in something.

The solution can scale. 

We're coordinating multiple speakers sometimes and it works for that. 

For us and how we use it, it's also finite. We have eight sessions a week. There's a limitation to how many weeks you do in a year. However, in terms of availability, in terms of people that handle it or multiple people working on it, it would be fine to scale. It's easy to explain that process, whereas Teams is a little bit more difficult. We're always managing more in the past, or on the shared drive and it's geared to that.

I don't know how many people in our organization use the solution since we work in teams. On my team, the Smartsheet that we use for this particular program has probably 12 people dealing with it at any given time. However, there are directors and higher-ups that may look at it just to see where they are. There are likely other people who need to use it as well. 

I used technical support once or twice during the initial setup when we first started using it. We loved it so we moved everything to Smartsheet - all our curriculum development items. There are now multiple threads. It actually worked way better than a shared drive.

However, the setup was about two years ago, and as I recall, I was stuck somewhere in the setup. They were helpful. I never thought beyond that. I don't remember being particularly bad or particularly awesome.

We also use Microsoft Teams. It's harder to set up yet has more items we can leverage. 

The implementation process is really easy. Comparatively, we use Teams for a lot of things and Teams is a lot harder to set up. That said, they have sharing capabilities, different types of files, and other items as well.

The deployment took a couple of weeks. It's continuously being upgraded since we do a curriculum over the year typically. We don't have speakers or topics sometimes for the end or at the beginning of the curriculum. However, how we use it is really just for project management purposes for our program. Therefore, the initial deployment would be a week or two, depending on schedules. Then we have a team meeting to go through where everyone is on the sessions that they're organizing. It's all so continuous. The session organization is ongoing. That said, there are multiple steps, including an initial phone call with the speaker, curriculum development, readings postings (we use Blackboard to manage our LMS), et cetera. 

We organize and it tracks everything from the beginning to the thank you note to the speaker and the evaluation. There are about eight steps and we keep track of them. We have about six people that are involved in organizing the curriculum. They're those product leads and there are maybe six weeks worth of curriculum that is in production at any given time.

We’ve seen an ROI. It’s effective particularly if you have teams that are virtual or located in different places. Just having something web-based, cloud-based, and easily operational, yet looks similar to Excel is useful. It's easier for different levels and understanding that people have of technology. It's not too fancy, however, it has features that give you what you want. When people are not co-located, it's a great solution as everybody can enter their stuff by a certain time in the week. The process is more self-managed so it's not as dependent on the project manager.

I'm sure there's a license involved, however, that's handled through the institution. The institution just pays for their licensees and then they hand it out, and it gets charged to the program. I'm not in finance, and I don't have access to pricing information directly.

I was part of early discussions. We were working virtually. The technology pieces of the program are actually run through a government agency by logging into a VPN. So the team moved to being remote from being 100% on the ground, basically, in the office. We needed a solution that would work for people working for multiple sites or states and not go down. The team was all over the place and they needed something that could be there with them and not go down.

This fit the bill. It's worked really well. If people are out of town, they can update stuff. It's more easily accessible. I don't know if we would've moved to it in the pandemic. We were using a shared drive in Teams and we moved to Teams too during a pandemic. 

The web-based piece of it, or the cloud-based piece of it, was a good feature. And then it was just simple. You can set up the sheet and it's dummy-proof in terms of putting stuff in. In contrast, if 12 people put something on an Excel sheet it got messy. I used to spend half a day just cleaning up the sheet and making sure the dates were right.

It did make my life a whole lot easier. You can select and limit how the cells look in Smartsheets. For example, you don't get numbers where you want letters, letters where you want numbers, et cetera. It just made things easier and offered less likelihood of wrong information getting entered. That's why we adopted it.

I cannot say which version of the solution we’re using. I’m not sure. 

How I can access the solution depends on which organization I’m working with. I can access it through a VPN or I can access it through web mail.

Compared to even when I use Microsoft Project, for example, which I would probably use for a curriculum thing if you were collecting updates as a project manager, so people would email them, you're going to be chasing them around. Plus, you're entering all the data before you can really do anything with it. This solution is really great in that sense, as everybody has access to it once you set it up and can start entering information themselves. And it's easy to set up, so it's not hard.

For project management, it's just a good solution that's fairly simple to implement. It doesn't require a lot of like upgrades or maintenance from the project manager. For large programs where there are multiple contributors, or multiple people working on different tasks, it's a good solution. It actually makes your work as a project manager a lot easier.

I’d rate the solution nine out of ten. It’s simple to use, easy to set up, and really works for non-co-located environments. In academia you often have people running off to conferences and stuff, even if you are in the office. The ability to have multiple users on the sheet at the same time so they can enter their own information is great.

I’m a customer and end-user.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am using the core Smartsheet product right now and one of their premium add-ons called Resource Management. It was previously called 10,000ft, but they rebranded it. We're launching various programs at this university, and each project has a lot of steps. We need to highlight the essential metrics that executives want to monitor and talk about at their meetings when they discuss the program launch status.

We built a dashboard in Smartsheet that pulls data from 50 different projects and highlights things like program launch dates, marketing launch dates, past-due items, at-risk items, etc. I have a module for revisions to existing programs. This dashboard feature sold us on the core product, and it's where we get the most value

Smartsheet has help us scale our organization past Excel sheets. We were manually updating cells upon cells of information in Excel and no one had a clear picture of what was happening with projects in real time. Smartsheet changed that.

Information for projects was fluid and the automations and alerts were able to keep key stakeholders aware of pertinent information at the click of a button. With Smartsheet, we are able to focus on the "why" behind our project data. We are able look at our dashboards and see the big picture.

We like Smartsheet's workflows, automation, and low-code capabilities. I don't know of any other project management tool with low-code functionality designed for project managers. 

For example, you can build a workflow to alert your marketing director when assets have been approved. I can't think of another tool that has the same low-code functionality.

The capabilities of connecting your project portfolio together helps remove administrative work. That's Smartsheet's selling point, removing the manual work from your day-to-day with automation, alerts, and workflows so you can focus on managing the project itself.

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. 

I'm a pretty smart guy, but I could not figure out how to get the formulas to work in tandem across a couple of different sheets so I could pull in the necessary information. They could make the formulas more intuitive or provide more training. That's probably my biggest complaint.

I also don't like having to save when I update a sheet or a report. Autosave is standard in most solutions these days. They have autosave, but it's not as quick as I'd like it to be. When I update a sheet, I want it to save instantly, so I can go to the next one. If you make a quick update and want to move on, you have to hit Ctrl-S and remember to save. It'll give you a pop-up window that reminds you to save. Most competitors, like Asana, have a quick autosave feature. 

In the next release, I'd like to see improvements to the dashboards. The dashboards are a critical feature, and I love building them for our executives here. They look fine, but they're simple lines of text and blocks. I think they could look a bit prettier.

Smartsheet has invested time into thinking about how they display information on the dashboards, but they could do better. While I don't think there's anything wrong with their current dashboard visualizations, I would love to see a more modern look. Right now, the interface looks a bit dated.

I've used Smartsheet for three years.

I've only had to scale up Smartsheet to about 500 users. I've never been in the thousands, but I haven't had problems. Smartsheet is the most affordable project management tool because you can invite users into your system, and they don't have to have a license. That's one of the most significant benefits. 

The only people who need licenses in our Smartsheet environment are the ones building sheets, reports, and dashboards. We only need to pay for the managers of the system that I have to pay for, which is highly affordable. Everyone else has shared access. They have a link that gets them into a sheet to see what's happening.

On the other hand, if you're not saving and refreshing your sheets all the time, people with shared access might be looking at inaccurate data. At the end of the day, it gets the job done. I haven't had issues adding a bunch of people to the sheets.

I've never contacted Smartsheet technical support, but I've reached out to my customer service representative and had them walk me through how they set up a sheet to get their opinion. 

They aren't miracle workers, but they provide a frank answer whenever I have a problem. They'll also take my feedback and put it into their suggestion box. They take requests for features I want that they don't necessarily have. That's more than I can ask for.

Positive

We were using Asana, but we switched to Smartsheet because it offered more features for the price. The primary reason we switched was the functionality. Smartsheet's price was great, but we like the low-code functionality and automation. It ties our entire project management ecosystem together. 

No other tool lets me tie it together so that all the data points talk to one another. The sheets talk to the reports, which take to the dashboard. The intake is integrated into our Outlook environment. It's all connected. That was the main reason we switched. It connects in a manageable way, and I don't need a developer to help me navigate the system. It's simple enough that a project manager can figure out how to build these systems to talk to one another. 

If you're a PMP-certified project manager with a good background in project management, I think Smartsheet's setup is quite intuitive. Smartsheet took the formula that MS Project and made it more accessible. MS Project is a  nightmare to learn. They made it easier for project managers using MS Project to build a project management environment.

The setup is straightforward when you know precisely what sheets, reports, and dashboard information you need. It's intuitive to a person with project management training, but you'll probably struggle if you're a marketing coordinator. Those types of people would probably be more comfortable in Asana, ClickUp, or Teamwork, but it was easy for me because I understand project management fundamentals.

We practically couldn't run our business without it at this point. Sure, we could run the company, but it'd be a lot more cumbersome. I've built so much automation now that kicks out immediate communications in Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. It would all be manual without that, and it would add a massive administrative burden to the way my people do their work here.

We pay for a yearly license, and the price is reasonable compared to Smartsheet's competition. It's one of the cheapest solutions compared to Asana, ClickUp, or other project management solutions. 

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.

My advice for people thinking about implementing Smartsheet is to go ahead and set up whatever project management environment you want. There isn't a better low-cost option than Smartsheet. For around 25 bucks, you can make your own system. You get three licenses and can start playing around with it.

The initial up-front investment will be low, and you have a support community that has the answers to nearly any question about the types of sheets and reports you want to build. If you just Google any question and add the word "Smartsheet," you'll probably find an answer.

I rate Smartsheet 10 out of 10. There's no other project management tool that's even worth my time. I like its low-code functionality and how it integrates the entire project management environment in an evergreen fashion. Once I set up all the automation, I don't have to touch it again. 

It saves you all the administrative hassle you usually face when you work in Excel or Google Sheets, so you can focus on doing the work, managing your projects, and looking at the data. It saves you a lot of work that you normally do when you're working on Excel or even some of these other project management tools that don't offer the same features.

There's tons of information to help you build the environment you want. I recommend going with Smartsheet, engaging with the support community, and using Smartsheet's templates. Smartsheet already has 50 to 100 different templates that you can leverage that are pre-built with automation and alerts to get you started.

You can figure out what parts of the templates you like or don't and customize your system. They offer so many resources. If you engage with them at the start, you can figure out what you like. 

I'm working around the project management delivery. Most of the use cases center around project management - planning, action items, decisions, issues, or rate logs, plans, and sometimes forms to collect information, however, not as much.

The ability to have users without a license has helped us a lot. Meaning if I'm working on a project with a certain amount of team members, the next time I'm working on another project with other stakeholders, the ability to have them access all the resources based only on my license was pretty cool and made it easy to use, meaning even creating a template, it allows others use it. In my case, there are not as many creators, just users. It was very useful compared to anything else that we had, any other solutions that we had.

The dashboard feature is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The ability to put a lot of stuff easily into various sheets is something that I'm using particularly often. 

I'm working around project management. Anything that they can emulate from the more specialized solutions, in terms of Microsoft Project or anything else that could bring the project plans to a closer alignment with Microsoft Project, that'd be great in terms of task dependency and automatic adjustments. 

Maybe the solution could be a little bit more flexible. It's a very nice and optimal solution, however, it's not 100% in all directions. Some of the more advanced features of Excel could be there. 

You have certain fields that you conditionally format. On certain occasions, you are not able to override those. You have to go by the formula or eliminate the formula, the conditional formatting thing. That is sometimes in project management - you have to go by the rules, then you have to overrule certain times. It's a little annoying sometimes that you have to remove the conditional formatting in order to impose, for example, the red status, red, amber, or green, according to what you know, not what was calculated. 

Overall, it's something that we use and then we adapt our ways of working around the tools that we have. Altogether, it's a positive experience.

I'm not a heavy user. Once I set up the template, it's just like using it there, however, I would be interested in maybe being connected to the labs, their labs in which they've got beta or gamma versions of proposed features being tested, and I would be willing to test them out. 

I've been using the solution for three or four years.

I've never encountered anything that can qualify as a performance issue or instability. It's stable.

Here's maybe the limitation. Obviously, it's very good for smaller projects. When you try to combine and make it become more of a program or portfolio, then probably it has its limits. I understand there are extensions, however, the extensions are paid and not necessarily used in every single location. Purchasing a module just one or two times, it's probably good for that use case. For other cases, in which it's more scaled use, it's not necessarily from the standpoint of the number of users using it. However, from the features, more advanced features, and collating features from multiple sources, then it becomes a little bit more difficult to manage and/or there are no features to work in that situation.

The solution is not extremely widely used. I have been hesitant on promoting the solution as I don't want to become the point of contact and/or support for it now. Although I'm a self-learner and I created my templates and I've done everything on my own without necessarily professional services support from Smartsheet, promoting it elsewhere might put me in a situation in which I will be called for solving or implementation somewhere else, and this is not necessarily my calling.

I have not directly dealt with technical support. I used their extensive knowledge library, however, I never have actually reached out to technical support.

I was using Microsoft Project as the solution for my project planning activities, however, Microsoft Project had the project plan and the Gantt chart. I was using multiple separate tools, maybe more specialized, however, still in various places, or a few of them in the same place, like the reporting, the project plan, and the rate log in the same place, which made it simpler for the people to access it and for me to use it.

In terms of setup, there's nothing to be set up. It's a SaaS. There's nothing to be set up. It's just onboarding in terms of training yourself, or at most, integrating with your SSOs since it's an enterprise solution.

I am a user and customer.

I'm using the cloud version, therefore, I'm on the latest version of the product. It's a SaaS product.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for tracking tasks and progress. We also use it for issue logging.

The report preparation and dashboard creation are valuable. We can collaborate within the teams easily. The product is easy to use.

The product must include more modules for project management. It should also include more graphics for dashboard creation.

I have been using the solution for six months.

I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten. We have close to 200 users. Currently, we do not have plans to increase the usage.

Previously, we used Microsoft Planner and MS Project. The collaboration between the teams is easier in Smartsheet.

I rate the ease of step an eight out of ten. We can set up the tool within a couple of days. One person is enough for the deployment.

The solution is easy to use and collaborate. Whoever has a basic knowledge of Excel can use Smartsheet. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.