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Basecamp vs Smartsheet comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Basecamp
Ranking in Project Management Software
26th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Smartsheet
Ranking in Project Management Software
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Project Portfolio Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Project Management Software category, the mindshare of Basecamp is 1.3%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Smartsheet is 2.3%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Project Management Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Smartsheet2.3%
Basecamp1.3%
Other96.4%
Project Management Software
 

Featured Reviews

Abenazzer Tadesse - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Operations Officer at BeOnline ICT
An easy-to-use project management solution with good stability and scalability
The recent update on the solution has made it a little bit complex. For example, to create a team and a project, there is a separate button that you need to click. Recently they updated it with only one button making it difficult for us to create teams or supply teams other than a project. Hence the solution could be more user-friendly. Additionally, some additional features need to be integrated so it'll be easy for other companies or project managers to manage software projects.
DS
Project Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Automation simplifies manual tasks and facilitates team communication
There are many useful features in Smartsheet. One can easily share plans with the entire team, and it functions similarly to Microsoft Project. Creating dependencies across all tasks is smooth, and team members can make adjustments if necessary. Automation helps by simplifying some manual work, saving time and facilitating communication.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The ability to network informally is great for communicating with colleagues."
"The app functionality and ease of seeing the different functionalities parsed equally on the screen with consistent menu access to shift between areas."
"The ease of use is valuable."
"The ability to network informally is great for communicating with colleagues."
"As I am in the corporate legal department, I have to deal with a number of contracts and sometimes it's hard to keep up with email transactions. Having the tracker sheet and being able to build dashboards and workflow has been quite valuable."
"Smartsheet is scalable; we deployed it in 47 large distribution centers across the United States, and we had six projects running on it while the corporate office could view all of the projects at once because the program management option is terrific."
"If you just need a planning tool, it's a low-cost and effective option."
"It's stable and simple to use."
"The product is easy to use."
"The ability to update in real-time before meetings is great."
"I would highly recommend this tool; it's sophisticated and uses the fundamentals of an Excel spreadsheet to coordinate things, with advanced features that include notifications, communication, attachments, and other features."
"We practically couldn't run our business without it at this point."
 

Cons

"The product isn't easy to use. It's not very intuitive."
"Formalized area to store contact information indexed in a way that can pre-populate other areas would be helpful."
"The product isn't easy to use. It's not very intuitive."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"Smartsheet should continue to expand the spreadsheet-type functionality because it's limited currently."
"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 want to improve baselines, predecessor-successor relationships, and the ability to use manual starts and stops while keeping relationships intact. Changing dates and durations can be convoluted, unlike in Microsoft Project. There are many things I'm used to in other software that don't happen in Smartsheet. It's offset by how easy it is to link sheets and pull data at higher levels, but figuring out why I can't change data sometimes can be frustrating."
"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 ended up getting really complicated."
"There should be an option to minimize the amount of data on the homepage in order to ease access and downloads in areas with slow internet connection."
"The system can become more challenging to use in more complex scenarios, requiring additional add-ons that can be quite costly."
"Smartsheet also needs to improve on training, because the training that is out there is very little. The solution requires a steeper learning curve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Smartsheet can be low-priced, with personal subscriptions around eight dollars a month, but I imagine it gets pricier for enterprise systems. Microsoft Project can be more expensive."
"It is less expensive than Microsoft Project for enterprise or Oracle Primavera by an order of magnitude. If you buy a Microsoft Project license, it's probably $300 or so by itself, whereas Smartsheet is probably less than $50 per head."
"There would be more extensive usage if the solution were cheaper. It's really expensive right now, and that's why we provide a few licenses for admins. The rest of them are just users without admin privileges."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"There's a trial version and a free version. Each license costs a decent amount, $25 per month or something."
"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."
"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. I was responsible for negotiating the price with the Smartsheet team, but I don't remember what the price was. Its standard license probably was around 5,000 to 6,000 a year. The enterprise version is significantly more expensive."
"I would assume there is a licensing fee. I don't think that it is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
23%
Security Firm
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise22
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Has anyone moved from Microsoft Project to Smartsheet? How has your experience been with Smartsheet?
Hi @Eire Zimmermann, I helped an organization evaluate both MS-Project and Smartsheet when they were conducting their PM tool RFP. The short of it is this, MS Project is not caught up with the mo...
What do you like most about Smartsheet?
The tool creates shareable dashboards. These dashboards allow us to display project deliverables' status, their position in the queue, expected delivery timelines, and more. The best part is that t...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Smartsheet?
Licensing might be cheaper per user. I rate it as seven or eight due to its demanding nature. For personal use, I have a monthly subscription, while the company uses an annual basis.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ashland Addison Florist Co., Victory Auto Wreckers, Ideal Box Co., Hollymatic Corp.
Sony Music, ESPN, Hilton, Unisource, Colliers, Extreme Networks, Groupon, Netflix
Find out what your peers are saying about Basecamp vs. Smartsheet and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
885,880 professionals have used our research since 2012.