| Functionality | 3 <p>Caters to key functionalities for small businesses, allowing users to create and manage projects and tasks through to-do lists, a kanban adjacent board, timelines, project specific-shared docs and a unified, transparent team message thread.</p><p>However, in the essence of being simple and intuitive, it lacks components that other tools provide like OKR/goal setting, workflow automation or simply adding custom fields to your tasks.</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 | 5 <p>Learning Curve = 3</p><p>User-Friendliness = 8</p><p>Basecamp has quite an intuitive UI and it's easy to locate where all the important features are after you've done their basic tour. They have a lot of resources to help a user get to grasps with the tool. However, there are some features you may have to search for a bit but it's a small set.</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 | 6 <p>Going back to Basecamp's implicit motto of 'no-fluff, gets the job done', it has a minimalistic UI which is acceptable and is fast to load. Other tools have a more attractive look and feel and could provide a more appealing layout/colour combination.</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 | 2 <p>Basecamp allows you to have custom project views but that's pretty much it. Unfortunately you won't be able to access some of the key features that the other tools provide like custom workflows, reports, tags, fields.</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 | 6 <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, but it lacks a 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 | 9 <p>Amazing responsive customer support via an in-app live chat bot. You should be able to get a detailed response from a person quite quickly. To complement this, they have curated a wealth of resources, youtube videos and FAQs to get you going.</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 | 4 <p>An API is available and it natively integrates with Zapier and a host of cloud resources but it missed out on quite a few useful tools like Github, Zendesk and Freedesk which other tools would be able to accommodate. However, you could use Zapier to connect to a variety of third party tools and Basecamp does link up with a few useful mobile-apps which is a bonus, but this is just something which doesn't happen natively. Someone would need to add those further integrations on your end.</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 | 9 <p>Can export data easily via adminland if you have the permissions for it in the organisation.</p> | 8 <p>Key data and custom reports are available self-serve to export to a CSV file.</p> |
