Smartsheet vs monday.com – Price and Features Comparison

According to our research, in a Smartsheet vs monday.com head-to-head, monday.com wins comfortably. You’ll find monday.com is much easier to use, has more integration options, and provides a better range of task management features available for just $9 per user, per month.

However, Smartsheet has a lower starting price than monday.com, so if you don’t have much budget to work with and you’re already working with spreadsheets, you may find the transition slightly easier to make. Smartsheet also provides solid security and customer support options and remains a shrewd choice for a large business that works with lots of confidential or sensitive data.

Overall, monday.com achieved the highest score (4.6/5) out of the ten major project management providers we’ve tested, while Smartsheet’s score of 4.2/5 saw the platform finish in seventh place. In this guide:

• Smartsheet vs monday.com: Key Differences
• Best Value: Smartsheet
• Easiest to Use: monday.com
• Best feature set: monday.com
• Best for Task Management: monday.com
• Best for Customer Support: monday.com
• monday.com pricing 
• Smartsheet pricing 
• How Do Smartsheet and monday.com Compare to Alternatives?
• About Our Research
• Smartsheet vs monday.com Final Verdict
• Smartsheet vs monday.com: FAQs

Smartsheet vs monday.com: Key Differences

While both project management tools are excellent, we found monday.com to be the better tool for a number of reasons. For one, monday.com scored 4.5/5 on our ease of use tests, whereas Smartsheet only scored 3.2/5.

monday.com also scores better for security (5/5 to Smartsheet’s 4.4/5) thanks to two-factor authentication being included on every monday.com plan, while this is only a feature on Smartsheet’s Enterprise plan.

Integrations are another point where monday.com is strong, scoring 4/5. You’ll be able to connect monday.com to the likes of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and even Basecamp and Jira. This isn’t quite as good as Wrike (4.9/5) or Asana (4.8/5), but it’s better than Smartsheets 3.7/5. While monday.com integrates with over 50  reporting integrations, for example, Smartsheet only connects to around 10.

However, one area where Smartsheet takes the win is value – while both providers offer limited free plans Smartsheet’s first paid plan is just $9 per user, per month, and it has a lot more features than monday.com’s Basic projects plan ($9 per user, per month) and is more comparable to the Standard projects plan ($12 per user, per month).

It is worth pointing out, however, that monday.com frequently rolls out updates to its service, so you can rest assured that your money will go far. For instance, as of August 2024, users have been able to enable or disable weekends when scheduling projects, save their progress while completing forms, and export canvases to printable PDFs.

Note: All the images used in this article were taken during Tech.co’s project management software user testing series. For more information on how we test project management tools, as well as other products, visit our product research page.

monday.com pros and cons

Along with screenshots from our recent testing series, below are some of the key advantages and disadvantages of monday.com you should be aware of before you purchase the software:

Smartsheet pros and cons

Below we’ve listed some of the key pros and cons of Smartsheet – as well as a few screenshots of the software’s interface that we took during testing, when one member of our testing group worked through a mock project (setting up a Mexican restaurant). As you can see from the images, it’s a little bit more complex than monday.com.

Best Value: Smartsheet

Smartsheet offers a better value for its cost, with a competitive fee. This is because monday.com’s starter plan, the Basic plan, costs $9 per user, per month, while Smartsheet’s comparable starter plan, Pro, starts at a dollar less, for $9 per user, per month – and has a better set of features.

In fact, Smartsheet’s Pro plan is probably more similar to monday.com’s $12 per user, per month Standard projects plan, so it’s definitely a much better option for businesses on a budget. monday.com also undercuts Smartsheets when it comes to the two high-end (non-Enterprise) plans, with monday.com’s $19 per user, per month plan costing the same as Smartsheets’ $19 per user, per month plan.

That said, the two services offer a different range of features under all their plans, so the best option will depend on the needs of your business specifically. We still rate monday.com higher for overall functionality, one big reason why Smartsheet still wins on value is the lack of automations or integrations on monday.com’s Basic plan, given that the similar Smartsheets Pro plan offers 250 automations per month.

It’s worth noting that we found more than a few other project management software options to offer a higher value for the price: ClickUp, Teamwork, Trello, and Zoho projects all fared better in this category.

Assigning a date to a task on monday.com’s Board view. Image: Tech.co’s testing process

Smartsheet vs monday.com: Which has the best free plan?

Smartsheet offers a better free plan than monday.com overall, with a wider set of useful features. However, monday.com’s free plan has some collaboration tools that Smartsheet doesn’t offer, so if your team is big on communicating as you work through tasks, monday.com will be a better bet.

Smartsheet’s free plan supports one user and two “editors” who can contribute to projects, but it’s limited. There are a couple of different views you can use to track your tasks and 500MB of storage. monday.com’s free plan, on the other hand, has a two-person user limit.

Smartsheet’s free plan includes milestones, task dependencies, a resource management add-on, custom automations, a custom chart builder, and a dashboard for your project data. monday.com’s free plan doesn’t have any of these features, but it does have a project message board and document editing function.

In the end, though, neither free option is likely to cut the mustard for any growing company. Starting out with monday.com’s Individual plan isn’t a bad idea, but the benefits of project management software kick in when you start using automations to make repetitive actions less time-consuming and add integrations to help you handle all your software needs from one hub.

Once a paid plan has saved you a few hours of work across an entire month, it has likely paid for itself.

Best for Ease of Use: monday.com

Both monday.com and Smartsheet are very capable programs when it comes to managing projects effectively, but monday.com is by far the easiest-to-use provider currently on the market and provided the best experience during our 2023 user testing series. It scores 4.5/5 for ease of use, while Smartsheet scores just 3.2/5.

Both providers opt for very different approaches when it comes to their layouts – monday.com utilizes white space to create a calming, tidy interface, whereas Smartsheet tacks closely to the appearance of a traditional spreadsheet. Smartsheet feels like it has a bit more structure to it, but monday.com’s is much clearer.

“monday.com felt like it had been tested more times [than other software] and troubleshooted,” said Alice Martin, who participated in our project management software user testing. “Everything is placed very intuitively. It felt kind of like an apple product in the way you just instinctively knew how to work it, which was good.”

Smartsheet was a little more difficult to get to grips with at first. “I found it quite hard to get started,” Alice remarked during our Smartsheet tests. “I think I was expecting it to be a bit more pre-set, but then I figured out that it’s basically just making spreadsheets with more control over what you can include.”

Once we got into the swing of things, updating the spreadsheets became a quick and easy process, whether we were reassigning tasks or tweaking budgets. Smartsheet also has a sidebar for extra tools, such as team messaging:

Smartsheet’s “Conversations” feature. Image: Tech.co’s testing process

Smartsheet doesn’t offer any preset charts or a custom chart builder unless you opt for the Business or Enterprise plan, whereas monday.com will let you build charts on all of its plans. We found monday.com’s project dashboard easier to use on the whole, which is why monday.com scores 5/5 for data visualization and Smartsheet only scores 3.8/5.

While both options are customizable and fairly easy to use, monday.com wins in the end thanks to a simpler, quicker, and more pleasant setup process, and a less cluttered layout.

Best for Project & Workflow Creation: monday.com (Just)

Spreadsheet and monday.com are both highly capable when it comes to managing your team’s workflows and automating the mundane and repetitive tasks that come with managing all projects. Monday.com scored 3.8/5 for this on our recent tests, whereas Smartsheet scored 3.7/5. Smartsheet offers more workflow creation features on cheaper plans than monday.com, but monday.com’s are better.

Creating custom automations is a simple process with monday.com, since the service offers an undemanding text-based creator (pictured below), compared to Smartsheet’s complex flow-chart style builder. Automations are limited to between 250 and 250,000 actions per month, depending on the plan.

Although there are no automation capabilities on monday.com’s free and Basic projects plans.

monday.com’s automation builder. Image: Tech.co’s testing process

Smartsheet’s setup process is easy, too, with a design similar to Excel or Google Sheets. The service’s project management templates pre-populate columns for the name, duration, assignee, and start and finish dates for a task.

Custom workarounds can be added quickly for features Smartsheet doesn’t offer, like budgeting — which is good, since the limited amount of preset templates means that most users will eventually need to build their own.

Best for Task Management: monday.com

Both monday.com and Smartsheet come with the essential task management tools: Gantt charts, Kanban Boards, a spreadsheet view, sub-tasks, task dependencies, and custom fields. Milestones can be set up in both services: Users on monday.com can use the ‘Groups’ feature, with each Group’s collection of tasks comprising one milestone.

monday.com’s Kanban board. Image: Tech.co’s testing process.

monday.com is very customizable, using a system called “Items” with rows to represent each task. Editing takes such a few clicks, speeding up the project setup process that any manager is familiar with by avoiding the need to fill in endless fields. Overall, monday.com scores 4.5/5 for task management, behind only ClickUp and Wrike, Our top-rated task management tools.

Smartsheet is no slouch when it comes to task management, scoring 4.1/5 for this assessment area. It offers a lot of the same features as monday.com, but they aren’t as easy to use. “I found it hard to add task dependencies” commented Tech.co’s Isobel O’Sullivan, who participated in our most recent round of project management testing. “It just seemed like quite a few steps were required to do that”.

Smartsheet’s default spreadsheet interface. Image: Tech.co’s testing process

Best for Customer Support: monday.com

Both monday.com and Smartsheet offer great support for their customers, although monday.com is ultimately ahead by a nose. We ended up giving monday.com 5/5 for customer support and Smartsheet 4.5/5, which are among the best scores received by the providers we’ve tested.

Regardless of whether you end up picking Smartsheet or monday.com, you’ll get an online knowledge base and community forum for solving quick issues and common questions, as well as email-based support for tougher problems. But this is pretty standard in the industry now, and nothing special.

Smartsheet does make 24/7 phone support available, while monday.com does not. However, it’s only for Smartsheet’s Business and Enterprise plans, and it’s a paid add-on for the Business plan as well. Smartsheet does not offer onboarding support, while monday.com includes it free for Enterprise customers.

However, it’s monday.com’s 24/7 live support that really sets it apart. When I was testing the software, the information in my main table wasn’t auto-populating my Gantt chart view like it did with the board view. This was actually a mistake on my part because I haven’t selected anything on the right-hand side setting column to fit into it, but I used it as a chance to test monday.com’s live chat function. Impressively, I was sent a video showing exactly where I was going wrong and how to fix my problem within minutes.

If your business is serving customers and clients every day and simply can’t afford any downtime (I mean, who really can?) it’s assuring to know that monday.com has staff around to help out in this way.

Smartsheet Pricing

Smartsheet offers four plans in total:

• Free: $0 with no time limit/expiration date
• Pro: $9 per user, per month (paid annually)/$9 per user, per month (paid monthly)
• Business: $19 per user, per month (paid annually)/$32 per user, per month (paid monthly)
• Enterprise: (contact Smartsheet or a custom quote)

Smartsheet didn’t use to offer a permanent free plan, but as of February 2023, there’s now a Smartsheet free plan available for a single user and two additional “editors”. There’s also a 30-day free trial and, like most project management products, will allow a third party to collaborate with a paying Smartsheet user as a guest.

Smartsheet Free

As we just mentioned, Smartsheet has a limited free plan geared towards solo users, or those just getting started with project management. You’ll be able to manage two concurrent projects with the free plan, as well as view your tasks in Gantt, Grid, Card, and Calendar views and use up to 500MB of attachment storage.

However, there’s not much on offer in terms of customer support, nor are there many advanced features that teams will find useful. If you want a more comprehensive solution, you’ll need to opt for a Smartsheet paid plan.

Smartsheet Pro

Pro offers a fairly high user cap of 25, but comes with other restrictions — users get just 10 projects and 10 guests (both are unlimited across all monday.com plans) along with caps of 20GB storage and 250 automations per month. These caps are better than monday.com’s own starter plan restrictions of 5GB storage and no automations. Users are also limited to one dashboard and five custom chart builders.

Pro users get all the big management tool options: Gantt Chart, Kanban Board, a spreadsheet-type view, sub-tasks, milestones, task dependencies, and custom fields, as well as both pre-built and custom automations and project templates. They’ll get email support and an online knowledge hub, but won’t receive phone, live chat, or 24/7 support.

Collaboration features include a calendar, team messaging, and task comments, but do not include resource management, an online whiteboard, or document editing tools.

Smartsheet Business

The business plan has everything in the Pro plan, and removes most caps: Users, guests, automations and integrations are all unlimited, although there is a three-user minimum, while the storage limit is boosted to an impressive 1TB (matching monday.com’s Enterprise storage), and projects are capped at 100 per user.

Features are expanded slightly, with a focus on team management:  User permissions, resource management and document editing are added, phone support is available for an additional fee, and dashboards and custom chart builders are now unlimited.

Smartsheet Enterprise

Enterprise removes any remaining restrictions on projects per user and storage, while also including 24/7 phone support at no extra charge. It also adds single sign-on for better security, but no major features are added beyond that. In contast to monday.com’s enterprise plan, Smartsheet’s plan doesn’t include any onboarding assistence.

Check out our full guide to Smartsheet pricing for a full breakdown of how far your money will go.

monday.com pricing

monday.com offers five plans:

• Individual: $0 with no time limit/expiration date
• Basic: $9 per user, per month (paid annually)/$12 per user, per month (paid monthly)
• Standard: $12 per user, per month (paid annually)/$14 per user, per month (paid monthly)
• Pro: $19 per user, per month (paid annually)/$24 per user, per month (paid monthly)
• Enterprise: (contact monday.com for a quote)

There’s no free trial, but that’s because users can just get the free Individual plan to test drive the platform.

monday.com Individual

The monday.com Individual plan is free and, like all permanent free plans, it’s too limited to work for most needs. There is no longer a project limit, but users are capped at two, while no automations or integrations are allowed at all. Storage is limited to 500MB as well.

Individual users will get access to email support as well as many of the features offered under the Basic plan, like monday.com’s form builder (pictured below). Still, without access to automations, the service won’t save you much time, and you’ll also bump up against the storage cap fairly quickly.

Building a form in monday.com. Image: Tech.co’s testing process

monday.com Basic

Basic offers unlimited users and expands the storage limit to 5GB, but automations or integrations are still not offered.

Task management tools include a Kanban Board and spreadsheet-type view, sub-tasks, and custom fields, but no Gantt chart or task dependencies. Milestones can be measured with a workaround, but aren’t included as a main feature in the Basic, or in any plan. Preset and custom project templates are available, and data visualization tools include dashboards, a widget builder, and preset charts and widgets. You’ll also get task comments, an online whiteboard, and document editing, but will not have access to resource management tools, team messaging, calendars, or a project message board.

Security features include two-factor authentication and user permissions. Email support is offered, but (like all monday.com plans) it’s not 24/7 and there’s no phone or live chat option.

monday.com Standard

Standard doesn’t add much to the Basic plan. The big additions are automations and integrations, both capped at 250 actions per month. You’ll also get the Gantt chart view and the ability to offer guest access, as well as a calendar — which is useful for scheduling when collaborating with colleages.

monday.com Pro

Pro increases the storage limit to 100GB and dramatically expands the automations and integrations to 25,000 actions per month. New features include task dependencies, budget management (using the  ‘Formula Column’ feature), a custom chart builder, resource management, and time tracking.

monday.com Enterprise

Finally, Enterprise adds onboarding assistance and the largest caps yet, as well as 1,000GB storage and 250,000 actions per month for automations and integrations. Much like Smartsheet’s enterprise option, it’s a plan for big companies that have outgrown the previous plan.

Check out our full page on monday.com’s pricing for an in-depth breakdown.

How Does Smartsheet and monday.com Pricing Compare to Alternatives?

Neither Smartsheet nor monday.com will give you the absolute best bang for your buck. Smartsheet and monday.com start at $9 per user, per month. That’s not the worst cost and may be below the industry average, but it’s not the lowest cost either.

Read our guide to the top monday.com alternatives, or read on to discover three top project management software services that our researchers have found will deliver the goods for less. Alternatively, if you’d like to see how Smartsheet stacks up against a database management tool, check out our Smartsheet vs Airtable comparison.

Zoho Projects – From $4/user/month

Zoho Projects offers the best value: It starts at $4 per user, per month when paid annually, and offers a free tier as well. It delivers a functional platform with two different automation builders (simple and complex), plenty of collaboration features, and — unlike monday.com or Smartsheet — dedicated budgeting tools.

That said, it does not quite have the same level of customization that you’ll get from Smartsheet, and you’ll have to learn how to navigate a somewhat finicky system with a lot of menus to sort through. You can learn more about Zoho Projects in our full pricing guide.

“A lot of things that should have been easy just weren’t easy,” commented Stephanie Lennox, who participated in our user testing series. “It wasn’t intuitive and it has a lot of information, and when you’re a project manager, often you just want to focus on one thing at a time. ”

ClickUp – From $7/user/month

ClickUp’s starter plan costs $7 per user, per month when paid annually, and it has a free plan, too. Top benefits include quick setup, an instant-messenger functionality, and an AI assistant that can help with summarizing notes and threads. Soon, it’ll be able to generate suggestions for tasks and sub-tasks.

But you’ll face plan-based restrictions on how many times you can use certain features, with automations restricted heavily under the first two plans, and the service isn’t built for post-project feedback discussions.

ClickUp was our top-rated provider when we tested the software in 2022, but it slipped behind monday.com and Teamwork on our 2023 tests. This is in part due to its underwhelming performance on our ease of use tests, during which some of our testers experienced the program freezing and long loading times.

Our full review of Clickup has the rundown – alternatively, see how ClickUp compares to other project management providers.

Teamwork – From $5.99/user/month

Teamwork isn’t quite as inexpensive as Zoho Projects, since the lowest plan starts at $5.99 per month, but it performed much better on our ease of use tests, scoring 4.3/5 to Zoho’s 3.2/5. It also scores better than Smartsheet in this regard – it’s quicker to set up and has less of a steep learning curve.

You’ll get an easy-to-use interface for setting up tasks quickly, as well as one of the best automation builders we tested. There’s also a budget-tracking tool that can be used at a task level on Teamwork’s more expensive plans. Teamwork also has an excellent free plan if you want a wide range of tools for managing tasks, such as custom fields, a Gantt chart, and a Kanban board but don’t have any money to spend on software for your team.

About Our Research

Here at Tech.co, we conduct research into all of the software and services we review. This consists of extensive market research to identify the key players in every vertical we cover, as well as interviews with small and medium-sized businesses to understand the challenges they face when shopping for tools designed to improve their day-to-day work lives.

We then use what we’ve learned to create testing criteria that are actually valuable to our readers making these decisions. For the project management software category, we analyzed and tested 10 platforms, focusing on six core assessment areas. These are:

• Integrations – This refers to integrations, security features, and other elements of the software that ensure the entire system works together and works with existing business software you might rely on.
• Customer support – This refers to the support options that are made available to the customers who use the project management service and may include online resources as well as email, live chat, and phone support.
• Pricing factors/Value – This includes plan costs, features or limits included with each plan, and add-ons available at an extra cost.
• Functionality – Our feature testers split the project management software analysis into five more sub-categories: Task Management, Project and Workflow Creation, Data Visualization, Collaboration, and User-centric.
• Ease of use testing – This tested both what types of tasks could be completed using the software, as well as how quickly they could be completed and how simple this process was.
• Security – This consisted of analyzing the providers’ security options, including what authentication options are on offer.

Although we have commercial partnerships with some of the providers we write about, this never affects our product rankings or the conclusions we draw in our articles. These are solely determined by our research, which allows us to stay editorially independent.

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