Smartsheet

The options and opportunities for solutions in Smartsheet are almost endless. You can do SO MUCH in this platform, and there are often many different ways to solve a problem, so you can tailor your solution to fit your needs. As someone that likes to learn new things and enhance processes, this software is like a never-ending gold mine. The Smartsheet Community is amazing. It's run by an official Smartsheet team that genuinely cares and tries to make sure the Community has a great experience and are getting what they need. You can learn so much from the Community and help each other to learn and share solutions. Cannot recommend the Smartsheet Community enough. Feature enhancements are a HUGE plus! Any Smartsheet user can recommend a feature enhancement or new feature. The entire Smartsheet Community can see these recommendations, vote on them, and comment for more details and additional use cases. Smartsheet actually reviews these and provides updates on if they get added to their roadmap. Smartsheet will often release enhancements based on things recommended by actual users. I believe in 2025 they made live 57 feature enhancements that were recommended by users. So cool, and easily one of the reasons I love Smartsheet so much.

1. The ease with which we can build project plans, dashboards and metrics. 2. The ability to share the sheets with individuals both inside and outside the company. 3. The ability to create solutions without the assistance of IT.

1. Familiarity and ease of adoption. The core spreadsheet-like interface makes it instantly familiar and easy for a wide range of users to begin using it without extensive training. This greatly reduces the learning curve and friction for new users. 2. Unmatched Flexibility and Versatility: A major strength is the multitude of use cases Smartsheet fills for our organization. It's not just project management. It can be used for managing Sales Operations, IT Operations, IT Asset Tracking, Logistics, and much more. This versatility of user-driven development, versus requiring IT to be the development bottleneck, is what has driven widespread adoption across my organization.

One of Smartsheet's biggest disadvantages is visual insights. While there is the ability to create dashboards and add reports, metrics, charts, etc., the customization is extremely limited, and there's no way to dynamically filter the information on a dashboard. As of today, most people I know are connecting Smartsheet to other platforms like Power BI or Tableau to visualize their data for insights and executive presentations. Something I see a lot of people struggle with in Smartsheet is simply the learning curve. A lot of people get overwhelmed by what can be done or how to do things, so most areas have a key person or team that creates and manages processes created, while everyone else just edits data. The goal is often to create something that allows people to self-serve as much as possible, but most people I encounter give up if they can't figure out how to do it in 2 seconds. The Smartsheet user interface is definitely geared more towards folks that are in the platform constantly, not for your average user that just needs to find their information and move on with their day. Although this is a more recent issue, it's a big one. The overall focus from executives has moved to making as much money as possible. You can feel it in the customer service, in the new user subscription model, in the solutions and services being recommended. Between that and the push for AI everything, whether it's the right solution or not, I've been reaching out to our Smartsheet Account Team less and less and turning more to the Smartsheet Community. You used to be able to FEEL that everyone genuinely cared about the customers and solutions, but that feeling has definitely changed. It makes me concerned for the future of Smartsheet.

1. The company continues to highlight how you can add additional value with the use of other features like blueprints that come at significant costs. 2. The focus of the company on increasing costs has diminished the value of the software within our company. You used to be able to share sheets with other users for free but now they have switched to they need to be paid users. For a non-profit this is a non-starter. 3. There are still a lot of limitations on how we can use the software and with the recent price changes these limitations become reason to move to something else.

While Smartsheet has been a powerful collaborative work management solution, and a useful no-code development platform, there are a few things that would make it better to support our more complex use cases. 1. No native support for Global Filters or Slicers on Dashboards: Its absence forces us to create an d and maintain multiple versions of the same dashboard to present different views of our data. (e.g., by Department, By Region). This is an issue when you are trying to manage a portfolio of work and prevents a more dynamic and user-friendly experience. 2. Managing Parent-Child Relationships between objects: While you can create parent-child rows in a sheet, it would be great if Smartsheet had features to intuitively link and manage parent-child objects that have different attributes, automations, or workflows. This makes managing parent account objects and their child opportunity objects difficult to manage. Implementing a more robust system to handle relationships between two objects or sheets would make the platform even more powerful as a no-code development platform. 3. User Administration and Licensing model: In 2025, the licensing model changed for Smartsheet. Personally, I find it more difficult to manage. I love the free, collaborative user model where we are only charged for users who create new Smartsheet objects. Granted, no other platform offers such a generous model, but it was nice that Smartsheet had that before.