Planview AgilePlace vs. Smartsheet

AgilePlace is a great way for teams, or individuals, to bring visibility to the work in process and in their backlog. The color coding and icon use helps to quickly analyze the type of work or status of the work. The product team is doing a good job at listening to their user's feedback and implementing improvements. Where it falls short is when reporting needs to occur.

The Smartsheet platform is extremely similar to Microsoft Excel, so if you are familiar with Excel, you will pick Smartsheet up quickly. Even if you aren't Smartsheet has a relatively simple user interface, meaning just about anyone can learn it. One thing to note is that the interface is that some may consider the interface so simple that they feel the need to look for more robust platforms. If you have a small to medium project that needs to be manages in a central hub, Smartsheet would be a great fit. If you have a very large project, I might consider looking into more advanced platforms.

Incentivized

• Okta Integration: We love using SSO for all our SaaS apps, and as new team members join, they can be automatically joined to the appropriate LeanKit boards.
• Filtering and viewing: Can filter and refine by several fields as well as custom fields. Assigned Users, Tagged, Card Type, Date, etc
• Their analytics and reporting can be helpful for PMs, especially if they have several teams they oversee.

Incentivized

• The easy to use dashboard has enabled us get comprehensive view of projects across the entire business.
• It has streamlined internal communication with ease of sharing information across different teams.
• Smartsheet automates our workflows, enhances collaboration and ensures there are no data silos.
• I like that it saves time for us and ensures we spend less time switching between apps.

Incentivized

• The formatting of what they call "cards" could be better. They can be clunky if you have a lot of text in just one.
• Needs better support for media, attachments.
• Not the most pretty interface in my opinion, though it works.

Incentivized

• Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
• Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency

Incentivized

we are happy with the tool and the service and continuos improvement of the tool so there is no need yet to change to another one.

Smartsheet has made my work life easier. Reduced my email significantly. Smartsheet and SaneBox have got me leaving the office with 0... Yes 0 emails in my inbox. My inbox would reach 150-250 email per day. Smartsheet brought that number down significantly and SaneBox took it the rest of the way. Do yourself a favor and check out SaneBox, too.

LeanKit isn't the best designed Kanban system I've seen, but overall it's pretty usable. The boards I've used are pretty complex, so it can be difficult to find things. I found that searching and filtering for specific cards was somewhat of a challenge. Dragging a card from one lane to another is kind of a fun way to get things done though.

Incentivized

Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions

Incentivized

Not experienced any outage

Incentivized

Larger boards take longer to load

Incentivized

Every time I have reached out to the AgilePlace support team I have received a timely response in addition to professional & personal feedback. Their consultants are knowledgeable and the management team is happy to jump in and help when needed.

They're a smaller company but they've always given great service when we rarely need to reach out. Pretty good online content but a bigger user base would help to produce more content in a self-sufficient community much as we see with Salesforce. To be fair we haven't needed their direct customer support very often. The sales guys are nice and not too pushy!

Incentivized

Very easy.

Incentivized

Work with the Smartsheet support team to get the best overall. If no one in your organization has used Smartsheet before, the support team will get things started. We had a couple of people who had used this product before and it was a great help in getting our framework together how we wanted to use it.

Originally, we had evaluated two other tools next to Planview LeanKit: Kanbantool and Kanbanflow. The latter was a close contestant for productive use, as it was also very customizable and a joy to work with and look at. It also had lower user fees and a mobile integration. In the end, we picked Planview LeanKit because of several reasons: Aesthetics: The look was much more clean and professional. Reporting: It was obvious from the start that we could use Planview LeanKit as a tool for improvement. API: We needed to integrate the Kanban into our central systems and Planview LeanKit API was (and still is) a way to do it. Card Headers: This sounds like a simple thing, but the headers above the titles fit our work perfectly and looked perfect, which helped the decision.

Incentivized

Smartsheet is a dedicated project management tool that is built on spread sheet principles. When compared to Microsoft's own offering, Smartsheet came out on top in some areas like dedicated project management features vs having to build custom features to Microsoft 365. However when you compare them on price, Microsoft 365 definitely has more value than Smartsheet.

Incentivized

Good use cases for small/large teams

Incentivized

• Our team meetings are more direct and quick to get through thanks to the better visibility of the workload
• Easily being able to move cards between team lanes gives instant visibility to where the responsibility for the next step is needed.

• Our positive ROI has decreased the overall cost in project management as it reduced the amount of MS project licenses we needed.
• We have also seen a positive ROI on using the cloud storage and it automatically supports proper version control.

Incentivized