We performed a comparison between Microsoft Project and Smartsheet based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Project Management Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It served the purpose. It was pretty user-friendly."
"Microsoft Project is used to track the project delivery and the project management."
"The product's initial setup phase is easy."
"The solution is well established and runs very accurately."
"It's an easy solution to set up."
"The reporting and national resource capacity planning are the most valuable features."
"We value all the features. Previously, we used Jenkins for similar purposes, but Microsoft Projects works fine. We're looking to improve integration with different clusters on production and automate various aspects of software development. This includes integration for alerting, monitoring, and pricing purposes, among other things."
"The user interface is very clean."
"This solution provides easy collaboration and allows non-building users to use the system without requiring a license."
"The most valuable features of Smartsheet are its collaboration tools, the ability to centralize and prioritize projects, and robust reporting capabilities."
"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 these dashboards can be shared with our clients without a license."
"Smartsheet offers more than Project because it's similar to a table-based, database-type system. It's like a hybrid between Excel and project software. We were able to enter the formulas and do much of the automation. We added budgets to it and linked them to a vendor page. Smartsheet let us integrate the budget into the project seamlessly. With Project, we needed to open up Excel."
"The most valuable feature of Smartsheet is its intuitiveness, ease of use, and overall simplicity."
"The fact that you can have different access groups is definitely a pro for Smartsheet. It also has the ability to integrate with a lot of tools."
"The most valuable feature of Smartsheet is it can be highly customized."
"Enables coordination and sharing of information that is relatively inexpensive."
"The licensing cost is expensive and has room for improvement."
"I would like Microsoft Project to better align with our business needs, with improved consultant support for setup and integration features that show all relevant aspects at the top level."
"It is a traditional Waterfall-based solution, so it doesn't lend itself particularly well to Agile development. You can record Agile sprints within it, but it is not really an Agile-based product. It can store the basic information about budgets that an Agile set of work is looking to use, but that's about it."
"Its price can be improved."
"The solution's interface seems to be an outdated one. So, I would like its interface to be improved."
"It's hard to reach technical people to get the help you need."
"The dashboard could be improved."
"It needs to be more comprehensive."
"We have to manually put in every dependency in Smartsheet."
"I think it is all going to be about APIs in the future and I don't think Smartsheet is doing a lot in that regard. They have some integrations with Jira, but you have to pay for them."
"It would be beneficial to enhance user-friendliness and make it less complex while maintaining its overall excellence as a product."
"Smartsheet should continue to expand the spreadsheet-type functionality because it's limited currently. Most business users are familiar with Excel and Office, so Smartsheet should adopt a similar way of navigating the program."
"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."
"They provide a limited number of sheets which is not enough."
"Smartsheet needs to improve the user interface."
"Areas for improvement in Smartsheet include better integration capabilities with other technologies through APIs and addressing limitations in reporting functionalities."
Microsoft Project is ranked 2nd in Project Management Software with 77 reviews while Smartsheet is ranked 4th in Project Management Software with 34 reviews. Microsoft Project is rated 8.0, while Smartsheet is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Project writes "A stable solution that very accurately runs projects". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Smartsheet writes "Has customization, data pulling, and cross-functional global communication features; it's a secure solution". Microsoft Project is most compared with Asana, Jira, Microsoft Project Server, Broadcom Clarity and monday.com, whereas Smartsheet is most compared with ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management, Spreadsheet.com, Adobe Workfront, Planisware and Broadcom Clarity . See our Microsoft Project vs. Smartsheet report.
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@Eire Zimmermann,
Smartsheet is amazingly flexible. You can configure a template project plan, and view it either as a traditional Gantt chart or as a kanban style board with multiple simultaneous swimlanes derived from any column that is configured as a drop-down list. This allows you to work with the same plan in multiple ways based upon the type of team or preference of the team.
The only thing of note that Smartsheet cannot do (or at least I did not find it yet) is to level a plan based upon resources and task priority. With the workflow engine, you can automatically send emails based upon any rule you configure. I had RACI columns for every task so I could auto-notify folks when the task was done. Very cool stuff.
Dashboards are okay but not as powerful as other tools in that each component on the page does not know about any of the other components to auto filter. Pretty limiting. I export data to another external visualization tool like Domo if the budget allows it.
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 modern automation and low-code capabilities that you will see in many SaaS PM tools today (Smartsheet, Asana, Workfront, etc.).
Being able to add simple automation with logic like, "If 'Project Status' = 'Red', then Alert XYZ Stakeholder" is made simple with Smartsheet. With this type of low-code functionality, you can begin to remove that robotic, manual work of typing up emails and sending messages from your day-to-day.
Moreover, Smartsheet's reporting capabilities are something that I have yet to see any other PM tool on the market compete with. Think reports for important launch dates, milestones, past due tasks, or at-risk items.
Then when you add the capabilities of the Smartsheet's logic-driven forms for project intake, you really have a system that can become a pseudo-ERP/workforce management tool. Not to mention Smartsheet's cost is much lower compared to MS Project since you only pay for licenses that manipulate data.
Hope this helps in some regard,
Ian
Unfortunately I have never used Microsoft Project so I can’t compare. My use with Smartsheet was pretty basic and more for project plans.