| Functionality | 7 <p>Airtable offers most of the functionality that companies will need but lacks a few useful features. Users will benefit from strong workflow automations, dependencies, the ability to link tasks, projects, key metrics and company goals, forms which auto populate spreadsheets with responses and more. However, Airtable lacks in-real-time collaboration, the ability to create internal documents and some strong time-tracking features.</p> | 8 <p>Smartsheet has all the functionality that companies will need - including some more sophisticated functions required only my large companies. Smartsheet offers: excellent portfolio management features, cell history, strong automation and some nifty team capacity reporting features.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 6 <p>Airtable is generally easy to use. We estimate that an average start-up employee would require around half a day and some guidance to proficiently use all key functionalities of the platform. The notable exceptions to this are the extensions required to make custom reports and creating subtask in table view.</p><p><br></p><p>Airtables key processes are easy to find and do not require many clicks to reach. Some more complex processes like customizing the UI itself can be more hidden.</p> | 5 <p>Smartsheet is designed to function in a similar way to a spreadsheet. If you are comfortable using these or have used them before, learning your way around Smartsheet will be easier. However, even if this is the case, processes can be a bit fiddley compared to other project management tools. We estimate that average start-up employee and would require a few days and some guidance before being able to use the product fluently.</p><p><br></p><p>Key information and processes are generally easy to find but not always easy to perform.</p> |
| Look and feel | 8 <p>Airtable has a more customizable UI than most. You can alter colour and some layout features vai their interface designer. However, inevitably, UIs will not differ so much from one user to the next. They could all still have more sleep designs and more colour.</p><p><br></p><p>Loading times are fast (1 second per page).</p> | 6 <p>Smartsheet lacks colour and is generally a bit plain to look at. That being said, the software is visually acceptable and for the most part has fast loading times (~1 second). When first creating a new project or workspace, loading times can be slower (upwards of 6 seconds) - but this is a one off occurrence.</p> |
| Customisability | 8 <p>Airtable has strong customizability. Automations integrate with third parties and offer a decent selection of action/ trigger functions, as well as, conditional logic. Highly customizable forms also allow for conditional logic, many answer types and cosmetic customizations like banners, logos and colours. Out-of-the-box reporting extensions also allow for customizable reports.</p> | 8 <p>Smartsheet has some very strong customisation features. The most impressive being their forms which are customisable in almost every way - from question type to, condition logic, to cosmetics etc. Automation is also nicely customisable with a vast array of action and trigger functions, as well as conditional logic available. Smartsheet could benefit from a few more task views - other similar project management tools offer far more!</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 8 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, because it has a very rich library of templates. Full setup should take less than a day.</p> | 8 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, because it has a very rich library of templates. Full setup should take a day or two at most.</p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p>An in-app chatbot is useful for filtering through self-serve material, but if you want to talk to a real human you need to do this via email (not that forms can be submitted via email) and agents will reply within 48 hours - but usually in less than 12 hours.</p><p><br></p><p>Airtable's self-serve materials are excellent. Articles, videos and seminars all have excellent depth and quality. These can all be access in app.</p> | 6 <p>Personalised support is available via email and and in-app chat. The in-app chat feature is not something to rely on too much as responses are not always fast. Email agents are very accommodating, useful and fast (relies in less than 6 hours). </p><p><br></p><p>Self-serve materials are strong but not exceptional. They do not have 'how to's' for every feature. This is likely to drive traffic to their paid 'Smartsheet University' where they charge to teach you basic, intermediate and advanced functions in Smartsheet. </p> |
| Integratability | 8 <p>Airtable only offers 36 native integrations which pails in comparison to other project management software - like Clickup or Asana. However, most of the big names are covered - like Jira, Github, Slack etc. Some integrations also include automations - e,g. sending messages in slack or creating a weekly digest in google documents.</p><p><br></p><p>Airtable also offer an API allowing users to build integrations where necessary.</p> | 7 <p>Smartsheet offers integrations with most third-parties that companies will need. However, some notable exceptions are Notion, Github and Zendesk.</p><p><br></p><p>Smartsheet also offers can API that allows teams to build custom integrations where necessary.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 8 <p>Exports of key and custom data and reports are available self-serve via a CSV file.</p> | 8 <p>Key data and custom reports are available self-serve to export to a CSV file.</p> |
