Smartsheet Review

What Smartsheet Is

Smartsheet is a project management and work execution platform founded in 2005 and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. It went public in 2018 and as of 2024 serves more than 10 million users across 80,000 organizations, including Sony, Cisco, Netflix, and Pfizer. Its defining characteristic is a grid interface that functions like a spreadsheet but with project management capabilities (Gantt charts, dependencies, automation, resource management) that spreadsheets cannot provide natively.

The spreadsheet heritage is deliberate. Smartsheet was built for teams whose existing workflow lives in Excel and who need to move to a more structured project management tool without abandoning the row-and-column format that their work naturally fits. For these teams, Smartsheet’s adoption curve is dramatically lower than tools built around Kanban boards or custom workflows, because the interface immediately translates from what they already know.

Key Features

The Grid View and Spreadsheet Interface

Smartsheet’s primary interface is a grid: rows representing tasks and columns representing properties. Columns can be text, numbers, dates, dropdowns, contacts, checkboxes, formulas, and more. Rows can be nested to create a task hierarchy (parent tasks with child sub-tasks), which maps to a WBS-style project structure that most formal project managers recognize immediately.

The grid interface supports the same formula logic as Excel: SUM, IF, VLOOKUP, and hundreds of other functions work exactly as they do in spreadsheets. Teams that have built complex Excel trackers with formula-driven calculations can replicate that logic in Smartsheet while gaining the project management capabilities Excel cannot provide. This formula compatibility is one of the most cited reasons operations and finance teams choose Smartsheet over more visual PM alternatives.

Gantt Chart and Dependency Management

Smartsheet’s Gantt chart is the most mature available in a cloud-based PM tool. Every task in the grid view has a corresponding bar in the Gantt view. Predecessors create dependency arrows: a task cannot start until its predecessor finishes (finish-to-start), must start when the predecessor starts (start-to-start), or must finish when another finishes (finish-to-finish). The full range of dependency types is supported.

Critical path highlighting identifies which tasks have zero float and directly control the project end date. Baseline tracking records the approved schedule at project kickoff and displays variance against the current schedule throughout execution. For project managers accustomed to Microsoft Project, Smartsheet’s Gantt provides comparable scheduling rigor at a lower per-seat cost and significantly better collaboration capabilities.

Resource Management

Smartsheet’s resource management capabilities are most developed on the Business plan. Team members are assigned to tasks with an estimated hours field; the resource management view aggregates all assignments across all sheets in a portfolio, showing each team member’s total allocated hours by week. Overallocation is visible at a glance, and the view can be filtered by team, project, or time period to identify capacity constraints before they become scheduling problems.

The resource management view updates in real time as task assignments and durations change in the underlying sheets, which makes it a practical capacity planning tool rather than a static report that must be manually updated. For project managers coordinating multiple concurrent projects with shared resources, this is one of Smartsheet’s strongest differentiators.

Automation and Workflows

Smartsheet’s automation builder supports conditional workflows (if a row’s status changes to Complete, send an email to the task owner and move the row to a completed section), scheduled actions (alert the project manager every Friday at 9am if any task is more than three days overdue), and approval workflows (when a row is submitted via form, route it to the approver and update the status based on their response). The automation is formula-aware: conditions can reference calculated fields and trigger only when specific formula results are met.

Business plan accounts get unlimited automation runs. Pro plan accounts get 250 automation runs per month, which constrains teams with high-frequency automation needs to the Business plan upgrade.

Dashboards and Reporting

Smartsheet dashboards aggregate data from multiple sheets into a single view using widgets: charts, key metrics, shortcut links, images, and embedded reports. A portfolio dashboard can show project status across ten active projects, highlighting tasks that are late, at risk, or on hold, without requiring the viewer to open each individual project sheet. The dashboard is live and updates automatically as underlying sheet data changes.

Who Should Use Smartsheet

Operations, construction, manufacturing, and healthcare project teams with strong spreadsheet fluency are Smartsheet’s clearest fit. The grid interface immediately translates for anyone who has managed work in Excel, and the Gantt and dependency management capabilities fill the gaps that Excel cannot. Teams managing formal project schedules with multiple dependencies, baseline tracking, and resource constraints consistently find Smartsheet more appropriate than visual board tools that do not accommodate the scheduling rigor they need.

PMOs and program managers coordinating multiple concurrent projects benefit from Smartsheet’s portfolio management capabilities: cross-sheet reporting, resource management views, and portfolio dashboards that surface issues across a program without requiring navigation into each individual project sheet.

Who Should NOT Use Smartsheet

Agile and engineering teams will find Smartsheet’s capabilities insufficient for sprint-based delivery. There is no backlog, no sprint planning workflow, no velocity tracking, and no developer tool integration. Smartsheet’s strength is in sequential, schedule-driven project management. Teams running iterative sprints are better served by Jira, ClickUp, or Linear.

Teams that prioritize visual interface polish and fast non-technical stakeholder adoption will find Smartsheet’s grid interface dated compared to Monday.com or Asana. The spreadsheet aesthetic is efficient for project managers who are comfortable with it; it is intimidating for non-technical team members who have never worked in a spreadsheet-heavy environment. Stakeholder adoption on Smartsheet often requires more training than on more visual alternatives.

Small teams with simple project management needs will find Smartsheet’s pricing hard to justify. The lack of a free plan and the Business plan’s $19 per user per month cost for full feature access means Smartsheet is among the more expensive mid-tier tools for the feature set it provides. Teams that do not need Gantt charts, dependency management, and resource management can get comparable project tracking from Asana or Trello at lower cost.

Smartsheet Pricing

Smartsheet has no free plan. All plans require a paid subscription, and the most useful features for project management purposes require the Business plan.

The Pro plan at $9 per user per month (billed annually) includes unlimited sheets, Gantt views, card and calendar views, 250 automation runs per month, and integrations. It is limited to one administrator and 10 licensed users maximum, which makes it appropriate only for small, stable teams.

The Business plan at $19 per user per month (billed annually) adds unlimited automation runs, unlimited licensed users, resource management, team workload tracking, activity logs, and advanced reporting. This is where most professional Smartsheet users land.

The Enterprise plan is custom-priced and adds enterprise security controls, SSO, directory integration, work insights, and Smartsheet Brandfolder for digital asset management.

Verdict

Smartsheet is the most appropriate cloud PM tool for operations and project management teams whose work involves complex scheduling and whose team is most productive in a spreadsheet format. Its Gantt chart, dependency management, baseline tracking, and resource management are more mature than most competitors, and the formula-compatible grid interface significantly reduces adoption friction for Excel users.

The gaps are real: no free plan, an interface that feels dated compared to newer visual PM tools, and no Agile or sprint-specific functionality. Teams choosing Smartsheet should do so because the scheduling rigor and spreadsheet familiarity are genuine requirements, not because it is the default choice when Excel no longer scales. For teams without those specific needs, more visual and more affordable alternatives typically produce better adoption outcomes.

Affiliation disclosure: This review was produced by ClickUp’s editorial team. ClickUp is a direct competitor to Smartsheet. We evaluated Smartsheet based on three weeks of hands-on testing on a Business plan and have disclosed where ClickUp offers comparable features. Readers should weigh this context when interpreting our assessment.