Smartsheet Reviews: 4.4/5 — Solid Choice

We are a sign company based in Florida and are blessed to be busy all year round. We were in a position where we needed a CRM to handle the daily workflow, and we came across Smartsheets. After multiple calls, Smartsheets sold us a CRM automated customer process with 3 levels of data that would automatically communicate with each other for us to be able to review the individual customer at a glance, check the customer base at a glance, and, as owners, we would be able to see the company daily status at a glance but the CRM program dishonored. We approved the $5000 set up fee and the $1800 yearly cost to use the program. We spent weeks working with the implementation person only to find out that the system is not automated and that we would manually have to connect the three levels of data one click at a time. Each customer would require close to 60 individual steps to secure the sheets. When I asked for Smartsheets to honor their original sales of an automated system, I was told it would cost me an additional $5000 to set up and an extra $1800 a year of service cost. We wanted to use the system but found the bait-and-switch sale performed was unreasonable. I asked Smartsheets to keep their initial promise and complete the work as promised. The request was met with more tries to fix the problem by more customer service team members and programmers, who finally told me that connecting the three sheets automatically was impossible. Since the program is not working and Smartsheets has not fulfilled its sales pitch, I asked for a refund of the investment of $6800, which was denied, stating the funds were used to set up the platform for our company. I said fair enough, refund me the $1800 for the year, which we have definitely not spent, and this was also denied. I am writing this for another possible buyer to be aware of the tactics used by Smartsheets and the less-than-honorable business practices. In business, bait and switch is just uncalled for.

The dishonesty displayed by the team as the process moved along. If the product is not automated, do not sell an automated solution.

Nothing was resolved, and no refund was given for a product that did not work for one whole day. Based on the solution sold.

Theres an app and online site. There are several Youtube videos to walk you thru the basics but from my little experience so far, it seems like a glorified Excel program

Verbiage is unclear and not user friendly like other competitive applications. The different view options is confusing at first. Alerts/notifications would be best sent by text because a lot of our employees are on the move most of the day.Navigating is not as clear as it should be

Its allowing the team to see assigned tasked versus appointing them thru email. We can see when tasks have been complete thru pictures and documentation. The only problem is receiving a notifications thru email versus text.

I do like the ability to customize your own dashboard to see things that are helpful to you personally, but that also creates a very difficult environment for teams who use the system because every dashboard looks different. It makes collaboration and helping others difficult.

I have to use a six page set of instructions to get a project entered and linked in the right places in SmartSheets. It's not at all intuitive or easy to remember all the steps. It's click here, open a new tab, right click, scroll over 100 cells, copy and paste, go back to the other tab, refresh, copy, go back to the other tab, paste, SAVE omigosh don't forget to save. It's too much.

Our team benefits from one place to organize our projects (though SmartSheets is MUCH more time-intensive and complicated than others we have used.)

The forms feature is great for collecting feedback.

It is not 508 compliant and does not work with screen readers.

It helps my team collaborate and store data that everyone can access.

Use to love this service at the ~$100 per year price point, but then they removed the ability to have non-licensed users edit the sheets at that level. Now they want 10x the license fees in order for me to effectively share my sheets with non-licensed users. Clearly, their business model does not apply to smaller companies.

Unfortunately, the licensing will get you if you are not careful. The bulk of the value of this product is the ability to share these types of documents without having to e-mail them to others and maintain version control. I have had an individual license for a number of years that costs $168 per year and allows me to create up to 60 SmartSheet documents with unlimited sharing. This license is no longer available. The "upgrade" to the Pro license is actually a downgrade that costs more--$252 per year. While allowing the account to have three "designers" and more SmartSheet documents, each document can only be shared with ten users. If you want to share any document with more than ten users, you have no choice but to "upgrade" to the next level, which--at $950 PER YEAR--Is almost QUADRUPLE the price! Anyone in even a medium-sized organization will need to share a document or two with more than ten users, so I would not over-commit to Smart Sheets unless you are ready to pay them $1K every year, in perpetuity.

Mostly using it for project management and budgeting.

Smartsheet can integrate with other software (so I've heard) and has great reminders to keep you on track for managing your projects.

Maybe it's just me but it can get pretty confusing with all it's bells in whistles. Sometimes it makes me just want to revert to my Microsoft project to get to the basic bottom line.

Tracking large projects across multiple departments -- it's a great idea but if everyone isn't sure on what they are doing within Smartsheet, it can really mess other teams up.

Nothing so far, not found it useful at all

When I am sent a link to the project I am meant to work on, and am met with about 20 lines of info I have to wade through. I have never easily found the information I require

Navigating through the mounds of useless information

It loads quickly. It loads quickly. It loads quickly.

You need to save pages before leaving. this feels kind of old school. The UI is awful.

Sharing info with colleagues. Better than email

The idea that we could have a repository of information that functions as a project history

That it's much more time consuming to comment in SS than in an email, and so far, harder to search

Some members of the team feel that they can get an immediate project status through SS

The Workflow capabilities are great and simple to use. Which is great, however, this is hardly anything new. I also like that it does what a bunch of other apps already provide for free.

It's too expensive and it's not worth it. 800 Dollars for 3 users a year? For essentially Excel? And a few automations? I'd rather donate 800 dollars to charity.

I tend to not use this. I am already using a bunch of applications that are more suited for my tasks and this one just sits somewhere in the middle and I'm not sure what to do with it.

The tabular format in which you can export is helpful for projects and clients who do not have Smartsheet. The flexibility in format/files types allows for better collaboration.

What I most dislike about Smartsheet is the limited functionality and integration with other PM tools. Also, the limitations of visual graphs and representation of a project plan create a lot of manual data extraction efforts when focusing on specific PM tracking metrics.

Smartsheet is helping standardize our delivery model and various scheduling methods our PMO is enforcing as we grow.

I like that it is similar to Excel. I like that you can attach documents to a row. We were using Smartsheets to track customer's orders.

I don't like that it doesn't have the bar across the top of the tool to type in. I don't like that I have to double click to open a cell. If Smartsheet had that bar, my feeling about it would be different.

We were tracking orders and finding contract associated with orders was very simple.

I like that multiple teammates can edit a document simultaneously.

I dislike the user interface. It seems overly restrictive.

I'd say we're solving very few problems with Smartsheet. Again, we prefer a number of other platforms over Smartsheet.

I really liked being able to get notifications whenever someone made updates to a smartsheet. This allowed for easy collaboration between teams in my remote work atmosphere.

I didn't like how hard it was to dynamically pull info or updates from one sheet to another. I found that functions or tools that are available in google sheets either didn't consistently work or were very delayed (i.e. you had to close out of the sheet and then re-open it to see updates).

We tried to solve and reduce communication gaps between the sales teams and internal technical teams. The benefits of smartsheet has made it easy to track when sales have closed new deals.

I do like that the software is feature rich. This allows you to do just about anything you need to.

What i like about the software comes at a cost. It's too complicated for untrained people to use. We have project managers that refuse to use it because of its complexity and it is causing us to look for other solutions that are a bit easier to use. (Basecamp, asana)

Project management

I like seeing the comments and attachments in line with the task item.

It is another system people need to use which has been a barrier to entry for our team.

We have stopped utilizing Smartsheet and are using the Microsoft suite of applications as users already felt comfortable or had awareness of these applications.

Not much at all. It just doesn't work well.

I can search our accounts alphabetically.

We use it to keep track of items we want to discuss in our weekly meeting. It has done well for that.

The product is good form project management and building workflows.

Support Team is non supportive. They keep transfering to another team for help and in the end your just beating around the bush. A simple downgrade , took me months to get done. The support team infact tells you cancel the account upfront.

As of today none.

We can not comment on this because of issues

Beware company bills for trial even when not ordering the package. They will not stop sending collection notices. Have to get legal involved

None

Not a whole lot but I do like using it for Gant Charts. Outside of that, I can't see how this tool is anywhere near as simple or easy as Google Sheets

Where do I begin. I can't delete columns that I want to delete due to the random primary column rule. There are no easy shortcuts or hotkeys that can carry over from Excel to Smartsheets. Impossible to make any sheet pretty with the use of cell borders. No cell comment feature which is insane--you have to comment on the entire row or column! I can't edit font in a cell unless I want the entire cell to be that character or font. This is just 15 minutes using this terrible tool. Every question I google on SmartSheets shows me a frustrated community page where people's minds are dumbfounded at how simple features and functionality of a sheet is non-existent.

I'm trying to get out of having to use Microsoft Excel and uploading it into BOX to update since we have folks unable to update a single doc without major version control issues. For some reason we can't get Google Sheets which is ideal for this type of shared, collaborative work.

can be useful for tracking progress, good for multiple people to track on one document

not intuitive--for users of microsoft excel or other programs, smartsheet is more difficult to use

tracking progress of projects especially for manager to ensure goals are being met

Ability to nesting rows under a parent row.

There are too many product limitations especially around row limits. Feels like Google Sheets does everything Smartsheet does, but better and with an easier to use interface. Smartsheet training and support is not good either.

Project management

I like the fact that our company was able to collaborate with extender vendors on projects using Smartsheet. It was easy and ensured both companies stayed on track towards project goals.

I did not like how the smart sheets looked like excel sheets and did not really stand out in any well. It did to use visual appealing colors or widgets to make me want to use the tool.

Smart sheet enabled my company to collaborate with extender vendors.

Visual representation of project completion

Projects could not be easily outlined in the sheet, format was too rigid for different applications

We replaced smartsheets with a different project management system.

Smartsheet is an online 'projects' style PM tool, that can be shared across the team.

not very agile-friendly. it's either because it's not agile at all or because the learning curve is too big

Not very agile friendly.

You can see your projects in one place and you can view risks in another sheet/window.

Can’t scroll with a mouse in google chrome. Doesn’t have good customization.

I can navigate a normal excel spreadsheet better.

Being able to create customized sheets, forms and reports. Linking data from other sheets.

Lag in getting support for critical issues. Have to wait days or even weeks to get support to respond. Updates to Smartsheet often take away features/capabilities that then make more work, add cost and time to finding a "workaround". User requests go largely ignored/unanswered. Many, many user requests from 2, 3, 4, 5 or more years ago still have not been resolved. Development team apparently works in a vacuum, no apparent 'real world' experience or thought.

Time and expense tracking. Our customized Smartsheet solution WAS saving me time and effort until the latest update that took away Report Builder functions from free users. Now updating Report Builder values falls back on me, costing our company time and money. Have spent another 1+ hours on Pro Desk sessions that only result in more complicated sheets, more burden on myself and users costing us more $. Add this to the 15+ hours I spent with Support trying to resolve this and finally being told I need to buy another 10 licenses in order that users can edit one simple date field in Report Builder, and I fail to see why we should continue using Smartsheet.

I do not like Smartsheets. There are other tools out there that are cheaper. This just seems to be overpriced for the features.

It is pricey. It is not easy to use. It just seems like a glorified spreadsheet that is trying to be more and failing.

None.

The best thing about Smartsheet was being able to save and share information in real time for those individuals who had any particular "Smartsheet" shared with them. You could invite people to see the information read-only, and you could designate who had edit rights and any particular project.

What I did not like about the tool was trying to export the information into a regular excel spreadsheet. No matter how many ways I tried, I could never get the information I put into Smartsheet to come out like a standard excel file. It also does not let you copy and paste when you have lost all hope and are willing to do it manually. I know the whole point behind the tool is to have the information central in one place, but let's be realistic - there are always going to be people (especially those more senior) who do not want to log in and say "just send me the information on an excel attachment," this is when Smartsheet becomes an issue and I found myself having to manually re-type all of the information into an excel file. Not an efficient use of time at all. After 2 years I was able to make a case to not use Smartsheet anymore.

The reason why the organization I worked for implemented Smartsheet was because we used an external agency for many of our marketing efforts and they felt as though Smartsheet was the best tool to use to share information between us and them. While it did streamline these efforts and communication, they also encouraged us to use the tool to share information internally, and I previously mentioned that many people I worked with would want a simple excel attachment, this was an issue with Smartsheet and found myself having to maintain the information in it just to communicate with the agency, and then duplicate efforts in another format. So to me, it was not beneficial.

Smart sheet does have some excellent capabilities. These include letting people create shits with goals that can be set up as one time, or recurring. Additionally allowing people to choose how complete an item is, give expected completion dates, and add other organizing features.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to use many of these features. The way the subscriptions are set up, is that only one person per subscription can create sheets. this means that if you have multiple projects running, potentially in different departments, you need to talk to the one person who can create a sheet before anyone else can go and edit it.

I was attempting to use it to keep better organizational track of tasks needed to be completed in my department. The abilities are all there, but they just aren't easily accessible.