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Notion 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

Notion
Ranking in Project Management Software
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Knowledge Management Software (2nd), Document Automation Software (3rd)
Smartsheet
Ranking in Project Management Software
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Project Portfolio Management (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Project Management Software category, the mindshare of Notion is 2.5%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Smartsheet is 4.9%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Project Management Software
 

Featured Reviews

Iván Fanego - PeerSpot reviewer
Creates customizable systems and improve team collaboration
Notion is a very flexible and customizable platform, allowing users to create whatever they need. The most impactful feature for project management is the ability to invite multiple client stakeholders without complication. Once I understand the basics, it's easy to use despite an initial learning curve. It also significantly improves team collaboration through customized views and visualizations of data.
PaulDiaz - PeerSpot reviewer
Needs to improve baselines and changing dates can be frustrating
I like the dashboarding feature best, as it lets me assemble a workspace with source sheets, dashboards, and reports simultaneously. The standard reports and worksheets are most useful for team collaboration. People look at dashboards during presentations, but they go to the sheets to update projects, add comments, or make notifications. It's automated, so changes come to me or whoever needs to see them. I can send notifications from specific line items. The worksheet is key for tracking project progress, though we track it at a higher level rather than detailed work breakdown structures. Subject matter experts say when they'll deliver things, and that's what we track.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easy to use and very intuitive compared to Microsoft Project."
"Notion has very strong integration capabilities."
"The product is easy to use and has good responsiveness."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Notion is a very flexible and customizable platform, allowing users to create whatever they need."
"Notion is an all-in-one product, allowing us to do many things in a single place."
"We can install it on mobile phones, making it feasible to manage productivity."
"The product is easy to use and has good responsiveness."
"The ability to update in real-time before meetings is great."
"It's very user friendly."
"Their support is awesome. We are on an enterprise plan and there is a customer success at Smartsheet and anyone from our licensed users can just send an email to them and they respond as soon as possible."
"What I found most valuable in Smartsheet is its project customization feature. It's a great solution because you can add in your own WBS. You can see it in Jira style, Kanban, and you can even do Agile and Waterfall. Another feature that's valuable in the solution is when you have those connections, you have that API, you have a sandbox, and you can make a solution, it's a tremendous product because you can pull data."
"Smartsheet is stable."
"The dashboard and the layouts are quite good."
"The most valuable feature of Smartsheet is it can be highly customized."
"I prefer Smartsheet for its flexibility."
 

Cons

"There could be an automation feature included in the product."
"The product could be integrated with external platforms."
"Notion's UI could be better."
"There could be an automation feature included in the product."
"Notion's UI needs improvement."
"The main problem with Notion is that it's not flexible enough for all of the use cases we intend to address. For instance, it is challenging to focus on a single KPI as it's mandatory to have a chart for this purpose, complicating some of our use cases."
"The only problem I experience is that it often hangs."
"One area for improvement in the solution is the absence of integrated charts."
"I think that the mobile interface needs to be improved. If you cannot access it through your laptop, I'd prefer to have that option on the mobile, but I don't think that it's user-friendly and easy to navigate."
"An area for improvement in Smartsheet is that if you're in the government or you're a regulated customer, you're not allowed to use APIs due to internal restrictions, so there are specific things that you cannot connect to it. Another area for improvement in the solution is that because there's a capacity of how many records you can have, and there's a capacity of how many functions you can apply, Smartsheet has set up their system where they can force people into purchasing a $20,000 additional module that is called Control Center, that will create documents for them on the fly, so they don't use so many functions and automation. Smartsheet also needs to improve on training, because the training that is out there is very little. The solution requires a steeper learning curve. You have to do your own training and you have to work on your own solution."
"Asana has a modern look and feel, particularly its agile project management interface featuring movable cards between columns."
"We have to manually put in every dependency in Smartsheet."
"With a large quantity of data, the solution lags a bit."
"The system can become more challenging to use in more complex scenarios, requiring additional add-ons that can be quite costly."
"It already has a really powerful Export to Excel feature, but it can have an Excel add-on. The way to set up single sign-on wasn't too easy in the beginning, and it was hard to get hold of customer service. They should make it easier to set up SSO. Smartsheet's customer service also definitely needs to be improved."
"Areas for improvement in Smartsheet include better integration capabilities with other technologies through APIs and addressing limitations in reporting functionalities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing depends on the usage plans."
"The pricing structure is quite reasonable, and the basic plan covers the most essential features."
"The product is affordable compared to other platforms."
"The product has good pricing."
"It's pretty affordable."
"Notion is free to use."
"I rate the product's pricing a three out of ten. We only need to pay for it if we use it in the workspace."
"The solution's pricing can seem steep, especially when you work with a lot of people. If you are working on your own or for another business, the solution's price won't affect you much."
"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."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"For a normal license, like the one I had: I had my own Smartsheet because I wanted to play with it and I didn't want to mess with what I was doing in Verizon, so I paid $200 monthly, and it gave me all the same functionalities, so I could do whatever I wanted for $200. The problem is if you have anyone else working on it or deploying on it, it's $200 a month for every single person who's deployed on it, that's working on it as an owner or an administrator, so owners and administrators are the only ones who can change, edit, and add data to worksheets and columns. Depending on the size of your organization, Smartsheet can be costly. As for implementing its Control Center, Smartsheet forces you to have three people come in: it's a minimum of three people from Smartsheet for three months who will provide you the solutions for the Control Center side, and that's $150 an hour, so it can become very expensive. For my company, not having the Control Center would save on the setup fees and then the $20,000 a year, because the Control Center of Smartsheet is a yearly subscription of $20,000."
"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 expensive."
"I believe a licensed user costs between 300 to 400 euros."
"The solution is too expensive."
"The tool's monthly fee is 25 dollars, which is within the range of most cloud-based project management tools. I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
8%
University
8%
Media Company
7%
Educational Organization
38%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Notion?
I like the high level of customization in Notion.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Notion?
It's affordable and offers community support if I get stuck. I can find help through community forums like Google, where people share insights on navigating problems. Many people understand it, off...
What needs improvement with Notion?
It is easy to use, and I love its UI. The only problem I experience is that it often hangs. I might find myself trying to load a new page, but I am unable to move from one page to another due to fr...
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?
The pricing is great and reasonable enough that I maintained my copy and bought it for my team independently.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Startups like Loom, Mixpanel, Blinkist, Adobe, Deel and Education facilities such as USC, Dartmouth and The University of Chicago.
Sony Music, ESPN, Hilton, Unisource, Colliers, Extreme Networks, Groupon, Netflix
Find out what your peers are saying about Notion vs. Smartsheet and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.