May 2021 Review: With so many project management tools out there, we analyse & review their pros & cons.
Smartsheet ranked #1 on functionality, customer support, scalability & value for money.
If you are managing projects and teams then you know how important to be able to collaborate, manage, and report on work in real time, automate workflows, and deploy new processes at scale.
Smartsheet is the #1 Project Management Software for enterprises. They are an award-winning software for dynamic work management. Smartsheet was more than a productivity or task app, it’s the end-to-end work execution platform with the proven track record to help your organization achieve more.
WHAT WE LOVED
- Free Trial: 30 day free trial (no credit cards required)
- Proven Efficiency Metrics: 65% of Smartsheet users see greater cross-team accountability and participation.
- Rated Market Leader: Smartsheet named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Collaborative Work Management Tools, Q4 2020.
- Great Customer Reviews: 4.5/5 Based on 4,200+ reviews. 24/7 lighting quick service, and, they even have a gun consulting team for hire.
- Connectors & Integrations: connect with your company’s other communications and storage software (MS Teams, Slack etc)
- Secure: Smartsheet partnered with Amazon Web Services to optimize dynamic work
- Loved by Enterprises: Smartsheet is used by 75%+ Fortune 500 companies & 90% + Fortune 100 companies
- Customer Support: We found their phone and email support was excellent, friendly & pretty fast
- Pricing: Great value given what you get. $14 for individual plan (teams <10 people), $25 for Business. Enterprise plans are available.
But why is Smartsheet better when compared with Monday, Asana, Trello, Teamwork, & Hive?
Well, after careful review, Smartsheet was just a more comprehensive tool right out of the box. Also, it did the best job of scaling as you team/department needs it. The others were great but are felt light compared with Smartsheet. Sure it’s not free like some others. But, as they say, you pay peanuts get monkeys. If you need something for a small project with no more than 3 people then get one of the free ones. If you need to rope in a larger team and use slack/teams to communicate, then Smartsheet is the pick.
Other Contenders
WHAT WE LIKED
- Easy to use– Good for small teams. It won’t overwhelm you with a barrage of advanced tools and features
- Free basic plan – the free plan isn’t that robust but enough for collaboration with a few people.
WHAT WE DIDN’T LIKE
- Scalability – unfortunately, it doesn’t flex up as well as Smartsheet. That’s important as your projects and teams get more complex as your business grows
- Project Management Templates – Asana offers pre-built templates that make it easy to get started with a particular use case. However, Asana can be challenging to customize for processes and projects that don’t perfectly fit a given template. Asana also lacks the functionality to include external web content in dashboards, making it challenging to create site-like portals as a central source of information.
WHAT WE LIKED
- It has been good, but only for certain sectors of an organization. It can be tough to get an organization-wide adoption.
- Gantt chart and email notifications were quite easy and visually appealing
WHAT WE DIDN’T LIKE
- Learning Curve & Implementation – its not just us, alot of people complain about the learning curve, and implementation of the system can take up to a month, boo.
- User Interface – Wrike’s user interface is poorly designed and the platform is difficult to use.
- When there are new features introduced to the software, but there are no video tutorial attach with it
WHAT WE LIKED
- Visually pretty and shows you exactly where things stand at a single glance
- Spreadsheet import function is easy to use (but links don’t always carry across).
WHAT WE DIDN’T LIKE
- Absence of a “repeating or scheduled task”.
- Lack of CDN/Bandwidth: probably greatly expanded their user base too fast, the problem is they don’t have the servers to support this many users.
- Pricing – you need to pay $8 – $16 per seat/per month, so ends up being pretty expensive when you have larger teams
The Winner - Smartsheet Ranked #1
1. Better Scability
Smartsheet had the easiest to use filters, cross-sheet linking, reports, charts, and dashboards, We loved that Smartsheet enables you to organize work in easy to read and actionable way.
Monday.com was ok for small projects, but became harder to manage projects when they got beyond a certain scale.
2. Enterprise Ready
Smartsheet did the best job of being able to scale up really well. This includes controls to manage access, ownership, and usage, set permissions, dig into audit trails, and configure your plan and users on a global scale, it was super powerful & flexible.
Monday.com, Asana and Trello are a lightweight software solutions mostly for SMBs and freelancers. Admin capabilities are limited.
3. Top-Notch Security
Smartsheet has tools for enterprise provisioning, managing, and scaling, all while being HIPAA, SOC2, and GDPR compliant
4. Build-In Automation
Smartsheet has simple, user-configured work automation capabilities including automated approvals, update requests, and information rollups.
Monday.com, Asana & Wrike generally lacks automation capabilities beyond integrations with 3rd party workflow applications.
5. Better Pricing
All Smartsheet plans allow free internal and external collaborators. Free collaborators can contribute on any Smartsheet item they’re shared to.
Monday.com recognizes ‘guests’, but requires paid licenses in most plans. Asana and Wrike are the same.
Use Smartsheets Templates
Smartsheet had thousands of templates that you can pick for various projects, this is great to quickly get up and going with a project without having to a plan from scratch.
Smartsheet Customer Reviews
Our Conclusion
Choosing a project management tool isn’t easy today, there are so many factors to consider. Not to mention, many offer dumbed down versions for free. But, when it comes to a tool that has all the right features for team collaboration Smartsheet beat the competition hands down. They have full functionality and the ability to scale with your project management needs.
Sure, they are free, but there is a reason 90% of the worlds best companies use them. We recommend giving them a trial for 30 days before Monday, Asana, Wrike or any other project management tool.
ReviewRumble.com’ content are the opinion’s of the author’s only based on their collation of online customer review and their experiences with the brand(s). ReviewRumble may be compensated for any business done by anyone connecting with businesses listed in the article.