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Planview PPM Pro vs Smartsheet comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Planview PPM Pro
Ranking in Project Portfolio Management
7th
Ranking in Project Management Software
16th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Smartsheet
Ranking in Project Portfolio Management
4th
Ranking in Project Management Software
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Project Portfolio Management category, the mindshare of Planview PPM Pro is 7.2%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Smartsheet is 7.8%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Project Portfolio Management
 

Featured Reviews

Prateek Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 10, 2022
Notifications of approaching project deadlines help us plan and also avoid delays
Scenario planning is the most important feature. You can easily align strategic management and the portfolios within your organization. It helps you visualize all your strategic plans and the KPIs. It provides that information on a unified dashboard, in which you can track all your resources and the portfolios. It helps senior stakeholders and executives with clear reporting about project intake and demands, in real time. It also has some built-in, reusable templates and you can modify them according to your requirements. You can also create templates and workflows from scratch, so that you can plan things accordingly. The team collaboration is nice compared to other tools. You just add your team members, provide them access and, according to the user's level, they are able to use the application. For example, when we create a new project, we create work streams, timelines, and the sub-tasks. Then we have to think about how many team members are required—the skills of the developers, testers, QA teams, consultants, and marketing. We add those team members to that project and provide them access to their tasks so that we can track their progress in the real time. That really helps us. We might have 35 to 40 team members in different locations using this product simultaneously. In addition, the task management features are useful when you have timelines for project completion and for progress. It shows you any gaps or timelines that you have breached. Task management is very useful, and that would be true in any project management tool. Another helpful feature, because we define timelines in the grant chart for each project, is the time tracking. It is very crucial for us to complete a project on time and meet the deadlines for our clients. The way PPM Pro tackles these is great. It provides a notification to us when a timeline or a sub-task within it is approaching the deadline. Integration with PPM Pro is fine. It provides APIs and the integration mechanism for third-party tools and applications, like Microsoft Office and Microsoft Project. We have only integrated it with Microsoft Excel because we generally capture the requirements and the timelines offline. Because the solution doesn't work offline, in situations where the internet is not available, or we are on-the-go with a client, we capture the requirements in Excel. The integration means we get the data from Excel into PPM Pro.
Asma Ali - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 19, 2022
Easy to use, simple to set up, and great for non co-located environments
At one point we were trying to use it to organize a curriculum for students to just have the weekly stuff. We kind of ran into trouble doing this. It's not really designed for that. What we were trying to do is give them a real-time syllabus with pre-readings and activities and stuff embedded. It ended up getting really complicated. They also had access, and while there’s probably a way to not give them access, I didn’t know how to set that. I just wanted to let them download. It got complex. It wasn’t just people updating what they were working on. It was something else and it didn’t work. 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. We use Box to store recordings, for example, of sessions and stuff. We’d like to store it in this solution. We already integrate Smartsheet into Teams for updates and stuff. That works well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is that my team can use one tool that's reliable, scalable, and provides the leadership team visibility to what's going on."
"The solution's time-tracking abilities are one of the strong points. The only challenge is enabling it to the minute-level task. It's not at a project level but it's at an organization level. If I want it to be at a higher level as compared to some of the other projects where I want it to go to the nth level of a task for the time reporting, I cannot control it at a project level but it's controllable at an organization level. That's the only big challenge that I have."
"It has a nice dashboard view, so you can analyze the progress on a project from a single place. It provides a nice graphical representation of all the project management with visualizations of Gantt chart and customized reports. You can easily track all your progress on project tasks and flag any issues."
"In my current company, it provides a quicker ramp up to understand what it can do for people by taking away all their barriers to entry: time, managing resources, and linking projects."
"Has good visibility."
"The dashboards are one of the most valuable aspects of this solution, although, we've only developed a few that anyone's using. There is more maturity there and, of course, we're a month and a half into this, but getting our executive leadership to see these things is half the battle. I think dashboards are going to be critical."
"Flexibility is the most valuable feature of the solution. We're able to do a lot of integrations with ConnectWise, which is another IT services tool that we use. So, we can integrate with that, and it's pretty flexible. We just went live a couple of weeks ago, but already we're able to bring visibility into our resource utilization and project status with clients."
"Time tracking, portfolio management reporting, and what-if analysis create visibility into project planning, resource capacity, and demand planning."
"The most valuable feature of Smartsheet is its intuitiveness, ease of use, and overall simplicity."
"The most valuable features of Smartsheet are its collaboration tools, the ability to centralize and prioritize projects, and robust reporting capabilities."
"It is my favorite project management tool. The reason for that is that it is very flexible. It is much easier to use than Microsoft Project in terms of creating custom fields. It is very similar to Excel. So, people understand it, which makes it a little bit easier to use for most users."
"If you just need a planning tool, it's a low-cost and effective option."
"Enables coordination and sharing of information that is relatively inexpensive."
"I prefer Smartsheet for its flexibility."
"Smartsheet is stable."
"The ability to update in real-time before meetings is great."
 

Cons

"The reporting has room for improvement. I know it's all in the revamping all the time with it, but there are things that I know my PMOs don't like. For instance, they want a pie chart and I think it's a bug in the system. I've been working with somebody on it, but then she thought it was because they were trying to look at negative values, which a pie chart doesn't do, but little things like that quite haven't gotten to what we need as far as reporting, but I think it's on the roadmap."
"The integration with some of these other tools that we use, like the Azure DevOps needs improvement. I heard there are few things coming within Planview or PPM Pro itself, but I think it's still future dated. These integrations are key for us from an organizational perspective."
"Based on my experience, the financial management screens have gone a long way, but I think there's still some room for improvement in terms of how you model them and the different version controls."
"The calculated field area needs improvement. There are a lot of formulas and functions available to make a calculated field, but it is still not comprehensive. We process the data to represent it through a report or dashboard. Due to the current constraints, for complex calculations, we do the data processing outside PPM Pro."
"One thing in particular I'd suggest is that we used the fast track service to implement PPM Pro. While it had a lot of value to it, people may be expecting a different experience. An experience where maybe an entourage of consultants come onsite to help you do the implementation, as opposed to working over the phone with just one resource. This might be an option to offer later down the road where there are complex implementations."
"There should be the ability to store historical functions, but this is not just for this tool. It is applicable to many tools. It would be great if we were able to store specific historical data, such as risk management."
"PPM Pro requires a great deal of internet bandwidth because it's a cloud-based solution. This can present a problem if a team member is working in a remote area where they can't access high-speed internet or experience outages. They may face challenges logging in or updating tasks. If the internet connection is inadequate, it may not sync with the solution."
"I think PPM Pro is going to release a resource self-service admin which is going to duplicate the standard groups. I think that will help us a lot because right now a standard group has their own permission and we don't know what permission is getting out to the users. After the resource self-service admin will be in place, I think we will be in a much better position in terms of the formation profile."
"The solution should include integrations with other platforms or software."
"You were forced to create a new tab rather than add another sheet."
"Every feature for text mining, even process mining, would be a plus. We have about two hundred contract management events daily. First, I share specific documents. I talk about the search function because we assume it has a thorough search when we read the catalog. But when you test it, you realize it doesn't search within attachments. So, it's a great search function, but you need the brand folder. It has many options and can become complex."
"With a large quantity of data, the solution lags a bit."
"The product must include more modules for project management."
"The system can become more challenging to use in more complex scenarios, requiring additional add-ons that can be quite costly."
"They provide a limited number of sheets which is not enough."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have their Flex plan."
"The licensing model is simple. Planview has plans at different levels, so you can pick one according to your budget and user base. They also have customized plans."
"Bulk volume discounts are a little better. Right now we have to buy in lots of 20 at $200 a license. That's a little steep. For example, with Service Now, I pay $48 a seat for a license."
"$6 million has been the return on investment so far, and that was because of work intake. Now that we are scrutinizing the work intake and asking questions like, "Is there an alternative to your $10 million project?" We had one project come in for $10 million, scrutinize it through our gate review process, and wound up with the alternative, which was $3.8 million. So, a $6 million savings."
"Pricing was fair and I thought it was comparable to the other ones that we looked at. Other than ServiceNow, it was the most expensive, but we knew we were going to get a lot of value for that, so we went with it. We paid $40,000 for the implementation and for the workshops."
"Because we have PPM Pro with Project place, we transitioned to the Flex model."
"They could improve on the pricing. They are charging $25 to $30 per user per month. It varies according to the access a user has, such as admin, developer, contributor, or owner."
"My advice is to pay attention to integration opportunities to reduce your licensing cost with Planview. There are additional costs for consulting services and advanced customer support."
"I believe a licensed user costs between 300 to 400 euros."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"Smartsheet has many licensing models. You need to add the package that best suits your requirements. The license is paid per user and it is monthly. The cost was approximately $7 per PC, $15 for professional, and $33 for the enterprise plan."
"If I'm not mistaken, it was pretty manageable. It was about 200 bucks a seed. The business really felt a strong need for it. So, it was viewed as a safer and more straightforward cost that we were willing to pay as compared to Domo, which took some convincing."
"This licensing is straightforward and they charge per user."
"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's a license for Smartsheet, and the enterprise plan comes down to about $750. My company also pays an extra $60 monthly apart from the standard licensing fee."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Educational Organization
41%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Planview PPM Pro?
The product's deployment is straightforward.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Planview PPM Pro?
Licensing costs are competitive enough. The price is reasonable given that the solution is geared towards large companies.
What needs improvement with Planview PPM Pro?
The product feels like a toy. The tool needs to improve its roadmap. It needs to improve things on a project management level which includes communication as well.
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?
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.
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

The Weather Channel, corcs, Crayola, Scan Health Plan, Vermont, Bank of the West, North West Company, University of Southern Mississippi, Jeffries, Purdue University, Chesterfield County Virginia, City of Memphis
Sony Music, ESPN, Hilton, Unisource, Colliers, Extreme Networks, Groupon, Netflix
Find out what your peers are saying about Planview PPM Pro vs. Smartsheet and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.