Planview Portfolios vs Smartsheet comparison

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Planview Portfolios

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Planview Portfolios and Smartsheet compete in the project management software category. Smartsheet seems to have an upper hand with its flexible, user-friendly interface and robust real-time collaboration features which are appealing in various organizational settings.

Features:Planview Portfolios is known for its comprehensive resource management and strategic alignment, offering advanced reporting capabilities and extensive customization options. However, it lacks built-in templates which complicates initial onboarding. Smartsheet stands out with its project customization, Gantt charts, task dependencies, and real-time collaboration. Its intuitive dashboards and automation capabilities significantly aid project management and organizational communication.

Room for Improvement:Planview Portfolios could benefit from a more flexible and intuitive UI, better Agile tool integrations, and enhanced customer access to guides. It also faces challenges with reporting flexibility and support responsiveness. Smartsheet can improve in real-time collaboration, dashboard interactivity, and security options. Users suggest refining API integrations and automation features for better productivity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Planview Portfolios supports various deployment models including public, private, and on-premises but receives mixed reviews in customer service due to personnel turnover. It shows strengths in comprehensive support systems and documentation. Smartsheet excels in public and hybrid cloud environments, noted for straightforward configuration yet faces inconsistencies in customer service, highlighting a need for proactive support measures.

Pricing and ROI:Planview Portfolios is considered costly, justified by its extensive features, providing ROI through strategic management. Its FLEX licensing offers adaptability, though over-purchasing and high consultant costs present issues. Smartsheet offers competitive tiered pricing suitable for various organizational levels, allowing scalable access with free collaborators and licensed users. Some users find it costly for extensive automation and customization, though its low-cost entry provides flexibility.

To learn more, read our detailed Planview Portfolios vs. Smartsheet Report (Updated: April 2025).

Planview Portfolios vs. Smartsheet

April 2025

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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

Planview Portfolios

Ranking in Project Portfolio Management

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Architecture Management (14th)

Smartsheet

Ranking in Project Portfolio Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Project Management Software (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Project Portfolio Management category, the mindshare of Planview Portfolios is 7.4%, up from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Smartsheet is 8.4%, up from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Project Portfolio Management

Featured Reviews

Mark Hillman

Global Head of Portfolio Management at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

User-friendly interface, but the reporting could be improved

The reporting is poor and requires improvement. The tiles and exception-based activities in the application are sufficient to get by. However, when it comes to producing executive reports, MI reports, or any other type of reporting, we must exit Planview and work offline. We have been working with them to improve on that, as well as using some of the Power BI capabilities that have been available for a while, but it's still more difficult than it should be. In the next release, I would like to be able to use the data in the tool to gain insight much more easily.

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PaulDiaz

Project Manager at Amgen

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The financial planning capabilities are very useful. We have integration for an SAP system, and so we load financial data from SAP into Planview for prior months. And then we use the forecasting capabilities to get a complete picture of the cost of a specific project. The financial management is very useful."

"We've brought our portfolio altogether. We have had multiple ways of reporting out what our portfolio is, whether it's in Excel, Word, or in different places. We brought all of our projects together in one place. That has worked out well for us. We've been able to manage the work on Gantt charts and our resources better. The big thing for us on research and development is around managing people's time, on which projects they are working on, and how much effort does it take to launch our projects."

"Its view into resource capacity and availability absolutely help us manage work. We can't plan out projects for delivery until we know if we have resources available to deliver them. That's been really critical. We look at our projects and see what availability of resources we have. That helps us to determine when we can start new work."

"The sheer amount of information available in one single interface is valuable. Everything is there. It is also a lot of work to maintain all the information, but generally, you can find everything you need within this one tool."

"Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool."

"We use time reporting. We convert time reporting into financial costs and do contractor and capacity planning for our resources. We track our work. So, that's the module we use extensively. As a matter of fact, we have upwards of 300 open projects at this given moment. It is pretty close to 300 open activities that are working."

"We provided whatever feedback we had to the Planview team, and they went in and built those additional features that we requested. For example, they created a great way for our users to search for a specific resource, project, program, or role. We were not using some of the features, and we wanted them to not be visible, and they helped us with that. They also brought a feature to provide visibility into when a resource was never assigned to any task. There was no visibility to this before. This feature was really very good for visibility into the resource portfolio."

"Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It affects our project management because our project management uses Planview to monitor their daily work. Every night it loads our SAP system and then they monitor the daily work. They use Planview as a full planning and monitoring tool."

More Planview Portfolios pros

"The management aspect is the most valuable. You can also prioritize tasks and then view tasks by priorities as passports."

"The most valuable feature of Smartsheet is its intuitiveness, ease of use, and overall simplicity."

"The deployment is very easy. All you need to do is log in."

"Smartsheet is stable."

"The ability to update in real-time before meetings is great."

"The most valuable features of Smartsheet are its collaboration tools, the ability to centralize and prioritize projects, and robust reporting capabilities."

"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."

"I think Smartsheet would scale fine."

More Smartsheet pros

Cons

"It is a bit of a rigid system."

"I think some of the administrative aspects of it could be a little easier, especially when it comes to designing reports. The reporting coming out of it could be a little bit better."

"I think that the user interface needs some getting used to. It's not immediately intuitive. That's potentially room for improvement. I think also that an organization needs to have good support from some senior management to get something like Planview established."

"We do have some significant issues with our integrations that we're working through. Those are not as stable or reliable as what we would like."

"The solution needs to be better at accepting new ideas for upcoming releases."

"There can be improvement on the sense of urgency because a lot of times we've exhausted everything that we can, and now, we're reaching out. So, it isn't a, "Well, have you tried to reboot this?" We've already done everything. Once we put in a ticket, there should be more of a sense of urgency on it."

"Its support to legacy paying customers is something PlanView is not handling well. We were unable to implement due to lack of professional support by PlanView. "

"Being the IT development manager who implements the upgrades for Planview, I would love to see more thorough testing of expenditures and more thorough testing in general. When we do an upgrade, we have to do quite a bit of testing because we can affect the bottom line."

More Planview Portfolios cons

"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."

"Asana has a modern look and feel, particularly its agile project management interface featuring movable cards between columns."

"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."

"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."

"The dashboard is not user-friendly, it needs improvement."

"The long-term timelines could be improved, especially the visuals on the projection Gantt chart."

"Initially, there were issues like dropdowns. Those have been overcome."

"Lacks the ability to edit attachments within the solution."

More Smartsheet cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing costs are probably $150,000 to $180,000 a year with 270 licenses total."

"The cost of other pieces and integrating them in needs improvement."

"We have portfolio managers, resource managers, project managers, and time reporting licenses. These are the licenses that we have."

"We overbought our licenses. We looked at our needs three to four years down the road and tried based our contract on that. However, we were over aggressive. We use about a third of the licenses that we have. We're looking to adjust the makeup so we can start utilizing the amount of money that we are spending. Right now, we're overspending, and my organization is not seeing the value in Planview because we are paying so much for licenses that we're not using."

"We have several hundred licenses. It costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year."

"Our licensing costs are about a quarter of a million dollars per year."

"With the costs, they were very understanding. Knowing that we were an existing customer, they were very much willing to work with us to make sure that we were able to transition to Enterprise One from PPM Pro."

"The licensing part is a bit costly in comparison with the other available PPM tools."

More Planview Portfolios pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"I would assume there is a licensing fee. I don't think that it is free."

"I pay $ 120 or $ 128 a month for two to three users."

"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."

"There's a trial version and a free version. Each license costs a decent amount, $25 per month or something."

"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."

"The solution is reasonably priced."

More Smartsheet pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Educational Organization

40%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Planview Portfolios?

Planview Management integrates seamlessly with other tools and systems used within the organization, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) syst...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Planview Portfolios?

Planview Portfolios is not too expensive. You get what you paid for.

What needs improvement with Planview Portfolios?

Enhancements are needed in: Advanced reporting and analytics: While Planview Management provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities, further enhancements could include more advanced data v...

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.

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Product Reports

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Planview Portfolios

April 2025

Download Smartsheet product report

March 2025

Also Known As

Planview Enterprise One, Troux

No data available

Overview

Planview Portfolios offers a comprehensive platform for managing IT, project and resource management, along with strategic planning. The tool focuses on optimizing resource allocation and financial analysis, supporting global operations.

Organizations use Planview Portfolios to streamline project tracking from inception to completion, enhancing strategic alignment with corporate objectives. The tool integrates with platforms like JIRA to provide seamless workflows and supports critical business processes, including budgeting and capacity planning. Teams benefit from customized configurations and robust reporting, further supporting effective decision-making. Despite its strengths, improvements are sought in navigation, documentation, and integration capabilities.

What are the key features?

Customizable interface: Allows personalization to meet specific needs.
Comprehensive resource and financial management: Enables detailed tracking and analysis.
Robust reporting: Provides extensive data insights.
Integration with Power BI: Enhances data access for stakeholders.
Resource and capacity planning: Optimizes workforce allocation.

What benefits should users expect?

Improved strategic alignment: Supports better decision-making.
Increased operational efficiency: Streamlines project management.
Enhanced resource optimization: Ensures optimal use of workforce.
Better financial insights: Allows precise budget tracking.

In industries like IT and project management, Planview Portfolios supports complex portfolio handling, ensuring visibility across global operations. Companies in these sectors leverage its strategic planning tools for strategic alignment and resource management, integrating with existing systems for improved process efficiency.

Planview

Smartsheet is a dynamic platform with features like real-time data sharing, Gantt charts, and integration with Jira and Microsoft Teams, offering valuable tools for efficient task management.

Smartsheet combines Excel-like functionality with cloud accessibility, making it efficient for tracking, reporting, and workflow management. Users benefit from its scalability and robust security, making it ideal for enterprise-level projects. However, improvements in data visibility, real-time collaboration, and user-friendliness can enhance its utility. Customizable dashboards, project management features, and seamless integrations offer great flexibility, though there is a demand for better automation, API enhancements, and new templates.

What are Smartsheet's most important features?

Real-time Data Sharing: Facilitates seamless collaboration between users.
Project Management Tools: Includes Gantt charts and task prioritization for efficient project tracking.
Integration: Works with major platforms like Jira and Microsoft Teams for comprehensive data flow.
Automation Capabilities: Reduces manual work with robust automation functionalities.
Customizable Dashboards: Allows users to tailor dashboards to meet specific needs.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Efficiency: Streamlines workflows with tools that enhance project tracking and collaboration.
Scalability: Supports growing enterprise demands with its scalable architecture.
Security: Provides robust, secure environments for data management.
Adaptability: Offers flexibility to customize workflows for improved resource management.

Smartsheet is utilized by organizations in industries like engineering, education, and IT for project management, task tracking, and data integration. It enables planning, scheduling, and team collaboration, facilitating dashboard creation and automation of processes. Its flexibility in customizing workflows is appealing to those managing projects and programs.

Sample Customers

UPS, NatWest, Ingram Micro, Canadian Tire, Viessmann, Volvo, NASCO, UNESCO

Sony Music, ESPN, Hilton, Unisource, Colliers, Extreme Networks, Groupon, Netflix