Today, workplaces thrive on synergy and collaboration. They also require different teams to be on the same page so that work can be done faster with better success rates. This requires powerful collaboration and workflow capabilities, which everyone looks for in project management software.
Introduction
Smartsheet is a powerful project management platform with robust capabilities. Since so many tools are available on the internet, it becomes difficult to choose the best one for your team. Given the potential of Smartsheet, it becomes a good option. And to help you figure out whether it will be the best pick for your team, here’s our Smartsheet review with a detailed explanation of all its capabilities, features, and pricing.
How Can Smartsheet Help?
Trusted by more than 90% of fortune 100 companies, Smartsheet can help you automate processes, manage projects, and scale up to enterprise-grade portfolios and programs. It offers custom solutions to fit your workflow at any scale. Smartsheet provides powerful capabilities that can empower everyone in your team to create solutions at ease rapidly. You can use a rich suite of features like views, reports, dashboards, and workflows to track and capture your plans, schedules, and resources. It can adapt to business needs, whether projects or multi-faceted initiatives. Companies of different shapes and sizes can easily scale confidently while delivering value with the growing business requirements. It can also integrate with many tools and technologies to make your life easier. It also takes care of data security to make the environment safe for your business. You can control everything and use the platform however you want.
Features and Capabilities
Here are the features and capabilities of Smartsheet:
Team Collaboration
Smartsheet will allow you to connect everyone on your team and boost collaboration. Whether you handle small projects, large-scale processes, or big portfolios, it will help you manage them with greater security and flexibility. It will allow users in your team to plan, automate, report, and track work. You can easily visualize and track the work the way you want by switching between views – Gantt, Calendar, card, and grid. It will empower your team to execute their tasks with accountability and speed.
Forms for Data Collection
You can connect and use error-free and consistent data from external and internal stakeholders using customized forms with your brand’s logo, images, and colors.
Task Automation
You can implement powerful and simple workflows quickly in minutes with automated workflows. It will save you plenty of time and effort, and you will be able to do more work in less time. Automate repetitive, tedious processes using alerts, locking rows according to preset times and sheet changes, and requesting approvals and updates. You can combine different conditional paths and actions through a visual editor. You can also set up recurring workflows like daily reminders and weekly status requests.
Content Management
With Smartsheet, you can easily plan, review, manage content production and finalize your assets faster. You can also publish your content to Brandfolder, the number one asset management tool. Smartsheet will help you overview your content production process with the help of a concise project sheet. You can use automated reminders and alerts to ensure your designers work as per the schedule. In addition, you can include tasks in dashboards and reports to enhance visibility. Allow your clients, vendors, and colleagues to review your content pieces without any sheet access. It’s also easy to provide detailed feedback through pinned annotations, approvals, and conversations. Avoid bottlenecks in your processes through simultaneous reviewers. The tool will also help eliminate confusion in content versions, as you will enjoy automatic locking and easy updates.
Smartsheet Control Center
With Smartsheet Control Center, you can easily automate your projects and processes and deliver your projects consistently at scale. It will help you automate project creation, accumulate portfolio analytics, and manage change. It will streamline your team management so that you can execute your complete portfolio by leveraging the right experiences. You can also centralize and control the approval process for your upcoming project requests. In addition, you can use blueprints to drive consistency in reporting and execution and automatically replicate your project plans and workflows. Smartsheet offers a central console to create your approved projects. It will help deploy changes automatically from the central console to existing and new projects. You can also connect your resource plans and develop the right team to complete the job and perform hiring forecasts. Furthermore, you can monitor your portfolio’s health through portfolio analytics to maximize the results. In addition, you can store, freeze, and report historical projects to ensure compliance and perform trend analysis.
Executive Visibility
Centralize all your resources and information that the team will need and empower stakeholders with a real-time, robust view of projects’ status using visuals and KPIs. Smartsheet offers Dynamic View to help business owners share data with the right people when needed for editing and viewing. You can also manage your critical processes with your vendors, external and internal teams, and across organizations. This will help you manage your processes securely. You can leverage granular control and enhance collaboration based on the requirements. No matter how complex the task is, you can simplify it with Smartsheet while offering wider visibility into your execution states. In addition, you can use a pre-built form to filter, collect, and view requests. You can even automate data flow from its assignment to review, approval, and closing. Smartsheet will also allow you to manage your third-party vendors’ data security and privacy and earn their trust. You can leverage condition-based access control or identity control for data access governance. Also, in-context guidance consisting of various steps with guardrails and guidance will lead users.
Streamlined Applications
You can easily navigate through every option with forms, sheets, reports, dashboards, and more. This will streamline the work and make everything easy whether you are at the home, office, on the road, or at your job site by using just a dedicated application where all the work is packaged together. With WorkApps, it becomes easy to build intuitive mobile and web applications without coding skills. You can do it within minutes through Smartsheet and external content such as Google Docs or Tableau dashboards. You can choose any WorkApps templates or start from scratch and buy the applications per your business requirements. WorkApp also offers a customized experience ensuring the stakeholders collaborate well and focus on the relevant content. You will also get to use personalized branding to make you feel the application is created exclusively for and by your company. In the single WorkApp, you can execute complete projects with a tailored experience.
Governance and Control
Smartsheet provides extensive governance and control with the help of Smartsheet’s core functionality, pre-built solutions, and premium add-ons. It can transform how you work with tools like activity logs, admin center, admin tools, and more. Admin center: It will allow you to easily configure and manage the Smartsheet account from a single location. You can easily view and interact with admin tools through a central control console to experience streamlined navigation between usage reports, group and user management, and enterprise configurations. Admin center will help you track the licenses, groups, and integrations that people can access in your organization. It will also help improve the visibility of account and security settings available while utilizing recommended next steps to optimize the account configuration per Smartsheet’s best practices.
Intelligent Workflows
Automate your processes across your platforms using Bridge. It’s a no-code interface that will help you connect your data across different systems and update your routine tasks. This will increase efficiency and accuracy and allow the team to spend more time on innovation without wasting time on manual steps or relying on multiple systems for storing data and performing work. This means you can eliminate many data entries on systems like CRM and work on important things without copying or pasting data across systems. You can also connect record systems to the right processes and make informed data-driven decisions. In addition, you can set up fresh configurations between systems and adapt to existing ones to meet your needs.
Resources and Digital Asset Management
You can unlock the true potential of your people and teams to manage, measure, and distribute asset performance. Apart from assets, it will also help you manage your resources. You can easily mobilize your team to execute a task, track tour budgets and schedules, and forecast your hiring needs. Effectively schedule and find your best project team, forecast your hiring needs, and resolve staffing conflicts to simplify your resource allocation. Look across your projects, track your teams, and schedule projects as per the team’s capacity. With pre-filled timesheets, you can allow the teams to submit hours while keeping them focussed on their work. You can utilize dynamic reporting to visualize complex data, spot project trends, plan for growth, and understand performance throughout your organization. Smartsheet, with Brandfolder’s leading digital asset management platform, will help your team manage your content, work in just one place, and deliver an enhanced customer experience. It will also help maximize your content’s impact. As a result, asset distribution can enhance by 7x faster and tagged for searchability. It will also offer capabilities like analytics and measurement, rich file metadata, proofing, Smart CDN, and more.
Integration
Smartsheet can integrate with multiple tools and systems that modern businesses use. Some of the tools it integrates with include Slack, Gmail, AWS, Teams, Salesforce, Dropbox, Okta, DocuSign, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and more. Thus, by connecting with these services, you can efficiently share information, boost collaboration, and enhance decision-making across the organization. Other capabilities:
Apart from the above, Smartsheet offer other capabilities, including: API File attachments Baselines Calendar and card Cell linking and connectors Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) Content collaboration Custom email domains Data retention controls Document generation and e-signature Mobile applications and portals
And more
Pricing Models
Smartsheet offers many pricing plans to help you customize and scale your business needs. It’s suitable for various use cases whether you want to manage your projects effectively or scale and standardize best practices in your organization. Here are the pricing plans:
Free: It’s free of cost and applicable for 1 user and up to 2 editors. This plan is for beginners in project and task management. It includes features like 2 sheets, 100 automation a month, 500 MB attachment storage, and more. Pro: It costs $7/month and is applicable for a maximum of 10 users and unlimited viewers. It’s suitable for teams and people that want to track, manage, and share projects with unlimited viewers. It includes free plan features, unlimited sheets, reports, forms, and dashboards, 250 automation a month, 20 GB attachment storage, and more. Business: It costs $25/month and is appliable for a minimum of 3 users and unlimited editors. It’s for businesses who want to manage your programs and projects with many editors and require more capabilities. It includes all the Pro plan features like unlimited automation, 1 TB attachment storage, and many advanced features. Enterprise: Contact their team to get a customized quote as per your needs. It’s suitable for organizations running processes at scale with enterprise-level controls. It includes all the Business plan features, unlimited attachment storage, more integrations, custom email domains, and more advanced features.
Smartsheet vs. Monday
Smartsheet is often compared with monday.com since these are both project management software with similar capabilities. These work as resource management, task management, and portfolio management systems. Both are accessible via a web browser or mobile application on Android and iOS. However, both platforms have features that make them stand out.
Where Smartsheet Scores Over monday
Smartsheet is easy to learn and use. It also has strong community support and training so users can easily enhance their Smartsheet skills and go from beginners to experts. It’s also flexible and will help you flip from tasklist to card views and schedule. Smartsheet offers different views like Gantt, Calendar, and Kanban board, along with reminders, task dependencies, and a task hierarchy with more than 4 levels. On the other hand, monday.com only offers a Kanban board. Coming to work management, you have reports, forms, charts with real-time data, dashboards, custom fields, multi-level sort, 50+ formula functions, and more. But monday.com offers custom fields, forms, and conditional formatting only, while the other capabilities are unavailable only at higher plans. For collaboration, both Smartsheet and monday.com are good, but some features, like changing history, automated update requests, proofing, and branching forms are only available in Smartsheet. Smartsheet is also stronger when it comes to security with features like EPM, Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK), SSO, activity logs, and reporting. Smartsheet is best for professional service teams since it’s a flexible platform with advanced features and security and privacy capabilities.
Where monday.com Shines Over Smartsheet
monday.com is effortless to use for beginners and experts alike. Its UI is beautiful and user-friendly. It can sync with user emails like a dream and ensure all the updates and messages are received well. It has a good set of productivity features where multiple people can work and collaborate on the same project simultaneously. It offers better dependency tracking, task management, and enhanced visual calendar management. It’s also easy to integrate with other tools. It also has a free plan so that people can get started faster. monday.com is best for startups and freelancers wanting to use a task management system to improve their productivity without spending too much.
Final Words
Smartsheet is a robust tool with many features and capabilities to make your task or project management smooth. From collaboration, task management, and integration to security and compliance, Smartsheet offers everything you will ever want in project management software. Since it has a free plan and a 30-day free trial, you can use it to determine if it works for your team. Next, you can check out what a work order is.
