Smartsheet

What differentiates Smartsheet from other similar products?

Smartsheet stands out with its unique blend of spreadsheet-like simplicity and powerful project management features. It offers flexible grid views, automation, and real-time collaboration. Unlike competitors, it excels at handling complex workflows and scalable projects while integrating well with popular apps like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace for seamless collaboration.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Smartsheet’s best feature is its spreadsheet-style interface combined with powerful project management tools. It seamlessly integrates automation, Gantt charts, and real-time collaboration, making complex workflows easy to manage. The flexibility to customize dashboards, track progress, and integrate with other business tools enhances productivity for teams of all sizes.

What do you dislike most about this product?

Smartsheet's main downside is its learning curve, especially for users unfamiliar with spreadsheets or project management tools. The cost can be high for small teams, with advanced features requiring premium plans. Additionally, it lacks built-in time tracking and more sophisticated resource management compared to some competitors.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Start with Smartsheet’s free trial to explore its features and assess if the interface suits your team. Invest time in learning automation and reporting for maximum efficiency. If managing complex projects, consider premium plans. Integrate with your existing tools like Google Workspace. Provide team training to minimize the learning curve.

What differentiates Smartsheet from other similar products?

The great feature value is Smartsheet’s ecosystem. The platform also connects with various other business tools including CRM systems, messaging platforms and productivity suites. This multifaceted interoperability enables companies to create one single digital workspace that displaces data silos and increases productivity. The ability to schedule data migration between Smartsheet and other enterprise applications sets it apart from others that are less integrated.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

The customizable reporting and dashboard-building tools of Smartsheet are also a strength. Reports can be built professional-looking, livestreaming and pulled from multiple sheets and projects. The dashboard drag and drop editor is available so anyone, even non-technical, can design entire project plans, splicing and matching charts, metrics, and timelines. Such data flexibility enables stakeholders across all departments to know project status in real-time and act based on data. You can program data sharing between Smartsheet and business-critical systems, this makes it stand out from competitors that can’t.

What do you dislike most about this product?

The drawback is the platform’s way of managing resources. Smartsheet does include some very basic resource planning and forecasting functions but is limited in comparison with dedicated resource management tools. For users who want some advanced capacity planning, skill-based resource allocation, or resource forecasting over the long term, Smartsheet’s capabilities are a bit skewed. This is especially hard for teams leading large, complex projects with a range of resource needs.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

You have to have proper training and change management when using Smartsheet. Platform interface is a bit easy to understand but all you can do with it is grasp its nitty gritty. Make Smartsheet champions in your organization to increase adoption and knowledge transfer. And remember to make use of Smartsheet’s extensive learning resources such as webinars, documentation and communities. If you read through these articles, your team will be quick to understand how to operate the software and brainstorm with creative use cases to implement its capabilities for your business needs.

What differentiates Smartsheet from other similar products?

Smartsheet is different by being at once a spreadsheet tool and a project management software. The platform’s grid pattern is familiar to spreadsheet people but it also offers some robust tools such as Gantt charts, kanban boards and automated workflows. This hybrid solution is easier to learn than some more advanced project management systems and therefore more readily accessible to the wider set of users in an organization.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

I love that Smartsheet is so automated. The app gives users the power to create detailed multi-step workflows that could be quite useful for streamlining projects. You could, for example, automate push notifications for future due dates, approve documents when certain conditions are satisfied, or even just notify you when a task is complete. That kind of automation is time saving, human error-reducing and it assures the project management of an organization.

What do you dislike most about this product?

The only downside of Smartsheet that I don’t like is that it’s not very offline. It does have a mobile app available, but the app’s capabilities are limited when you’re not connected to the internet. This is an issue for team members that have to update project data or look at sensitive information in locations with a poor internet connection. The lack of powerful offline support could affect productivity of teams operating from different countries or on the road.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

If you are a business owner thinking about using Smartsheet, I suggest first conducting a thorough project management and team analysis. Smartsheet is ideally suited to teams where flexibility and teamwork are key and project managers might not be the same. For your business that cares about something flexible enough to fit multiple project workflows and evolve with your company Smartsheet is a good option. Just make sure its features are exactly what you need (e.g. in resource management and custom use cases for the industry).