We performed a comparison between Planview PPM Pro and Smartsheet based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Project Portfolio Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution is great for viewing projects and timelines."
"The timesheet & staffing management function gives us clarity in terms of how capacity planning has to happen and how much actual effort is going into the programs. The risk and project status information gets captured in the project gives more clarity for stakeholders to understand how the programs are running. We have only explored a portion of the application features so far."
"The Warm screen, even though we're not going to the deep levels and deep details of all the projects and trying to assign resources at the lowest level, it gives us a quick visual of what resources are being worked on, what projects, and on what activities they're working on. At least at a very high level, because we're not using all the assignment components to the fullest detail, but at least with what Planview gives us as a tool and how we're leveraging it, it gives us that quick view of who's working on what project and who's booking time to what project at any given time or any given a week."
"Has good visibility."
"It gave us a clarity of purpose. Everybody knows what they are doing and that they are all aligned: Managers know what employees are doing. Employees know what they are doing and the managers think they should be doing. That is the clarity which really helps in efficiency."
"I've worked at many different companies, and the customer service and the support from Daptiv are unlike anything I've encountered before. They far excel any other company I've worked with. I always say to people that Daptiv is like a sub-department in your company. You don't realize they're a vendor. It feels like you're working with somebody who is part of your own company."
"It is flexible, because so far we haven't been able to figure out anything that it cannot do. It's highly configurable. We've added custom field design screens to fit our needs, develop reports, and dashboards that give us the ability to deliver much better information, especially to senior IT management."
"It is certainly the resource management feature that is most valuable for us. It is the supply and demand. Like most companies, one of the hardest nuts to crack is understanding where your people are and getting them to do the right thing at the right time. So, certainly, out of all the functionality, this has been the saving grace for us because it now provides us with the insight to do future planning and stop taking on more work than we are physically capable of doing as a company."
"Smartsheet is stable."
"Their support is awesome. We are on an enterprise plan and there is a customer success at Smartsheet and anyone from our licensed users can just send an email to them and they respond as soon as possible."
"As I am in the corporate legal department, I have to deal with a number of contracts and sometimes it's hard to keep up with email transactions. Having the tracker sheet and being able to build dashboards and workflow has been quite valuable."
"What I found most valuable in Smartsheet is its project customization feature. It's a great solution because you can add in your own WBS. You can see it in Jira style, Kanban, and you can even do Agile and Waterfall. Another feature that's valuable in the solution is when you have those connections, you have that API, you have a sandbox, and you can make a solution, it's a tremendous product because you can pull data."
"Smartsheet is easy to use."
"Smartsheet is a really good tool for collaboration."
"I like that Smartsheet integrates Excel with a cloud-based project management software."
"Enables coordination and sharing of information that is relatively inexpensive."
"The reporting has some areas for improvement. It is not always as simple as we would like to get the reports we want or the information that we want."
"I would like to schedule reports. I would like to be able to schedule a report and every Monday it sends that report to these people. That circumvents having to give them a license. It's just a way of saying "Okay, this is what's going on this week," and it just happens. I don't have to worry about it."
"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."
"We don't use their existing dashboard functionality. Hopefully, with the new reporting release that is coming out in November, we will be able to evaluate as to how we can leverage that. What I hear, "Everyone has either a Tableau or something else because Planview doesn't provide a dashboard." We should not need to use another tool. Planview has the data, so it should be able to give us what we want. This would also reduce costs since we are paying licenses for those tools too."
"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."
"Reporting and dashboards need improvement. I know they're doing a major revamp of that. We're really looking forward to that because that's something that is really being requested by our customers to give them better visibility, reporting, and dashboards that are easier to understand."
"From a usability standpoint, the part where there are people on the tasks section on a team is a little challenging. Then for some reason, the in-demand reports are embedded in the resource section and to run them is just completely different and separate from the reports entity which is a lot."
"The biggest things are the status notes and internal notes. They have made some great improvements these past couple of weeks, but they are still lacking a bit. There are still a little kludgy. It just needs to be a bit more straightforward with notes, copying and pasting. They've made huge improvements, but it still could do some work. E.g., for some reason, the formatting is still looking a little bit weird on selecting different fonts."
"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."
"Lacks the ability to edit attachments within the solution."
"Smartsheet should continue to expand the spreadsheet-type functionality because it's limited currently. Most business users are familiar with Excel and Office, so Smartsheet should adopt a similar way of navigating the program."
"We have to manually put in every dependency in Smartsheet."
"It already has a really powerful Export to Excel feature, but it can have an Excel add-on. The way to set up single sign-on wasn't too easy in the beginning, and it was hard to get hold of customer service. They should make it easier to set up SSO. Smartsheet's customer service also definitely needs to be improved."
"Smartsheet could improve by having seamless integration with Azure Board."
"You were forced to create a new tab rather than add another sheet."
"An area for improvement in Smartsheet is that if you're in the government or you're a regulated customer, you're not allowed to use APIs due to internal restrictions, so there are specific things that you cannot connect to it. Another area for improvement in the solution is that because there's a capacity of how many records you can have, and there's a capacity of how many functions you can apply, Smartsheet has set up their system where they can force people into purchasing a $20,000 additional module that is called Control Center, that will create documents for them on the fly, so they don't use so many functions and automation. Smartsheet also needs to improve on training, because the training that is out there is very little. The solution requires a steeper learning curve. You have to do your own training and you have to work on your own solution."
Planview PPM Pro is ranked 7th in Project Portfolio Management with 34 reviews while Smartsheet is ranked 4th in Project Portfolio Management with 34 reviews. Planview PPM Pro is rated 7.8, while Smartsheet is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Planview PPM Pro writes "Attentive customer service". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Smartsheet writes "Has customization, data pulling, and cross-functional global communication features; it's a secure solution". Planview PPM Pro is most compared with Planview AdaptiveWork, ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management, Planview Portfolios, Planisware and monday.com, whereas Smartsheet is most compared with Microsoft Project, ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management, Spreadsheet.com, Adobe Workfront and Wrike. See our Planview PPM Pro vs. Smartsheet report.
See our list of best Project Portfolio Management vendors and best Project Management Software vendors.
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