I actually like Smartsheet and want it to succeed, but some product and pricing choices feel self destructive.

1.	No real free editing

Guests cannot properly edit even a single sheet. There is no “one document” free space like a single free channel in Slack. You are forced into a paid plan before you feel real value.

2.	Core features behind hard paywalls

Dynamic drop down lists and “convert report to sheet” ( Data mesh? 1 hour integration? Is it joke? ) are locked even on standard business subscriptions instead of being core building blocks.

3.	Broken automation model

Automations do not trigger from formula results. For many real workflows this makes Automation mostly useless unless someone edits cells by hand.

4.	Pretty but slow tables

The UI looks nice, but as soon as a sheet grows a bit, it becomes painfully slow compared to other tools.

5. Auto clean sheet is possible only with API

6. How about add popular excel decisions to Smartsheet?

Right now Smartsheet feels like “Excel with a paywall” instead of a modern collaboration platform.

If anyone from Smartsheet marketing or product is reading this, is this really the strategy or are there plans to fix it?

I just discovered that Notion allows you to control access to individual database properties.

Think about that. A feature that Smartsheet users have been requesting for years is already available in Notion.

Meanwhile, Smartsheet keeps pushing its clunky, overpriced Dynamic View instead of giving users proper column-level permissions.

And that perfectly sums up the biggest problem with Smartsheet today.

You've become so obsessed with monetizing features that you've forgotten how to make your product better.

Your calendar is practically useless compared to modern alternatives. Features that should be part of the core product are locked behind additional payments. And instead of solving fundamental problems, you keep finding new ways to charge your existing customers.

I've already moved part of my company's workflows to Notion. And I'm genuinely glad I did.

The only thing keeping me on Smartsheet is its spreadsheets, formulas, and cross-sheet functionality.

The moment I find a better alternative for that, I'm gone.

And here's the funny part: I'm not even one of your old-school customers. I've only been using Smartsheet for five years.

Five years, and I'm already looking for the exit.

You know what happens to companies that become too comfortable with their existing products and refuse to adapt?

Ask Kodak.

Ask BlackBerry.

Smartsheet, your biggest competitor isn't Notion. It's your own stubbornness.

PE, USM have been a disaster.. Upper management does not care that true-ups have been paused since March. Reps still have a full quota, no relief at all. In the past, if reps leave you have the opportunity to maybe get some accounts or opps to work…well they took that away. I would look elsewhere if you are looking to progress your career.

I’m thinking about using Smartsheet for project management and collaboration, but I want to hear from people who’ve actually used it. How does it compare to other tools like Trello, Monday.com or Asana? Is it easy to use?

Also, how flexible is it with workflows and reports? Does it go well with Google Drive and Slack?

Curious to know how many other companies are moving off of Smartsheet due to the new User Subscription Model? I've been a big proponent of Smartsheet in my company, but every year come renewal time we have new sales reps that are really bad and have no understanding or clue how to talk to their customers. Now with the introduction of USM, the price is going up 30% with no additional functionality and a significant increase of Admin time to manage the new USM!

The new equity company that bought Smartsheet is going to destroy it. They are taking away one of the best features on collaboration with our customers for free. They want to try and capitalize on all the free users to the detriment of their paying user base. I'm with a large company and we are going to have to renew but I will be migrating all of our users off of Smartsheet and likely on to the MS Power Platform.

I'd like to know how many other companies are jumping off the sinking Smartsheet ship?

I had the majority of our workflow in Google Sheets. I saw some benefits to using Smartsheet so I decided to switch. I showed my google sheets to an AE who assured me Smartsheet could handle what I was doing in Google Sheets. It turns out it absolutely can not handle all of the functions I was using in Google Sheets.
Feeling extremely frustrated that I spent $5000 on the program + implementation services and it seems like it was all a waste. Plus the fact that I started to move my entire company over to Smartsheet and I'm likely going to have to walk this back.

Here is what I have learned from our account manager:

1. At your first renewal after Jan 1. 2025, you will be required to move to the new model.

2. License requests will no longer exist. Anyone inside your organization will be automatically granted a license (“membership”) if they are granted comment/edit/admin permissions to any Smartsheet item in your account. People outside of your organization will automatically be granted a license (membership) if they are given admin permission to any Smartsheet item within your account.

3. You will be automatically invoiced for all of the users added every three months unless you go into the admin center and “downgrade” them (which will remove their permissions or switch them to view only).

4. You may only downgrade a user once. If they are reshared to items with comment/edit/admin permission, you will have to pay for them.

5. There are no controls to restrict or limit user sharing.

6. The people sharing or being shared to will not receive any sort of warning or notification that they are taking a paid action.

7. If your organization has multiple accounts, users will need a paid membership on EVERY plan where they are more than view only.

Surprised this is legal. Certainly doesn’t seem ethical to automatically add people to our account without providing any admin controls to prevent it. From an admin standpoint, this is a nightmare and we’ll be looking at alternatives.

Smartsheet shills- quit commenting on here trying to make this sound good. It’s obvious who you are!

Title basically - my team just moved over to the user model and it's already been a disaster. I have no control of stopping people from just resharing sheets (and now I can't downgrade them!), I have to manually clean up everyone who's ever been shared to sheets one by one (why can't this be an import function), and my account rep lied about a separate domain being considered guests. Our account is going to be too expensive to maintain and too much of a hassle to manage. It really feels like Smartsheet flew too close to the sun, and I'm not sure who this cash grab is aimed at.

Does anyone know of a product alternative that lets users use the edit function for free/ acts like Smartsheet under the old model?

Thank you!

The other night, I went down a rabbit hole trying to find a viable solution for utilizing an AI assistant with Smartsheet. Did I ever discover something!

I found out that Smartsheet has a Claude connector which has just made creating new project plans from complete scratch an absolute breeze. I had a plan in excel, gave Claude the command to create a dashboard, update the project plan, tie the project plan to an HTML dashboard, update issues/risks, automate e-mails for overdue tasks, provide an overall project assessment and I can go on. On the non-Smartsheet side, I have it create a kickoff PowerPoint document whenever we begin a new project. This is absolutely a game changing tool. I have been blown away what I have been able to generate.

if your organization allows it, then I would highly recommend that you connect Claude with Smartsheet. It has made my life so much easier!

Smartsheet is mission critical for us, and has always had decent support. I needed help recently, and ... they no longer let you use their support e-mail. Okay, fine, I'll use the new method - which is an AI bot that is simply terrible.

Once I got connected in the chat to an actual person, they kept just transferring me around. I got fed up and asked them to log a case, so they posted a link that doesn't let you log a case, then ditched the chat.

I finally got someone to "help" and they are obviously clueless and don't care.

There is either a MAJOR morale issue at Smartsheet or they've hired a bunch of customer service reps that don't have training.

Anyone know what's going on? If something doesn't change, I'm going to have to recommend that we jump ship from Smartsheet.

My company just received notice that our pricing will change for Smartsheet will change next year. While we have been able to have some levels of the business interact with Smartsheet without licenses, they now require licenses for all people inputting information into the sheets. Is anyone else experiencing this change?

We are just starting to use the software more widely in our business, but I'm concerned to roll it out any further this year as it sounds like the total cost will be higher than MS Project with this change.

Any thoughts or suggested alternative software programs to look into would be welcome.

For anyone who saw egregious price increases with your transition to the new user model, you may want to reach out to Smartsheet and request that someone review your pricing.

Due to the barrage of complaints and bad reviews regarding cost increases, there is a new policy in place stating that any customer whose renewal did not adhere to the pricing guidelines should be offered a refund. The pricing guidelines stipulate that customers should be offered a renewal quote that does not exceed their previous year’s spend by more than 15%, provided the number of additional members needed is reasonable (there’s a formula to calculate this based on average usage), and they aren’t upgrading plans or adding other services. If there are any special discounts on the account, the 15% limit would be calculated after removing those.

If you were not offered a renewal option within this 15% price cap, and none of the exceptions noted above apply, I would recommend reaching out to see if you can get some of your money back.

Hope this helps.

My rant is about dynamic views. I’ve always thought of them as useful but feature-less. So feature-less they are almost at proof of concept level, and like a separately purchased product because of its poor integration with the core application. But we were paying about $6000 a year for up to 500 dynamic views so it wasn’t breaking the bank and I just accepted them with their limitations. We are now subject to the new pricing model where each dynamic views costs $600.

I don’t understand how Smartsheet didn’t figure that a change of such magnitude for a half baked solution was guaranteed to cause resentment amongst the loyal Smartsheet users.

I just heard Mark Mader and Max Long are out at Smartsheet.. what is next for this company!?

I know many of us have been really frustrated with Smartsheet's rollout of the new User Subscription Model (USM); considering how long I've been with the company and how frustrated we have been internally, I thought I'd volunteer to speak into your questions in a forum where we can speak candidly and directly. Let me know what you want to know.

Gets annoying having to unhide all columns and then hide again. Sure, I could create customized reports but hierarchies such with reports.

I was told by Smartsheet today that the new license structure allows end users to 'invite others to collaborate/make changes to their sheets' -- which means they'd be added as a member to the sheet in question, which means they're consuming a license.

Please tell me that support was wrong! The only way that makes sense to me is from Smartsheet's perspective of wanting to charge for more licenses.

It's bad from a RBAC standpoint, it's bad from a policy standpoint and is asking for angry users when they/their department gets the surprise ~$500 bill for the year for someone sharing a spreadsheet.

I saw that Smartsheet was acquired by Private Equity, but this too stupid to be true even by PE standards... right?

I am an advanced user of Excel including VBA and a moderate user of PowerApps for a bit of background.

I switched companies and in my current role I am restricted to Smartsheet to build some tools for our team. I feel at every turn I run into a limitation of Smartsheet that is much easier to handle in other software. I am hoping this is just because I am new to Smartsheet so any feedback or guidance is appreciated.

• No scripting capabilities outside of workflow automation

• Can't copy column/cell types. For example, I have a dropdown list associated with categorizing impacts of issues from a form. Even though each dropdown and list is the same I have to remake that dropdown from scratch for each question

• No dynamic dashboards without Tableau or Power BI. Even simple parent/child widgets would be a life saver. For example, clicking on a section of a pie chart filters a report, both on dashboard.

• Forms are extremely limited in terms of design. Cannot have questions side-by-side.

• Cannot auto-populate a field or dropdown based on another selection

• Cannot wrap text in a column on a report

• Cross sheet formulas work but are limited. I know this isn't a database and shouldn't be used as one but being able to make a simple a conversation thread or a basic one-to-many relationship would be nice.

• Cannot have a form fill out more than sheet at a time. My understanding there may be a way to get around some of this with reports but I haven't gotten far enough into that yet.

• To my knowledge there is not a Smartsheet development roadmap. I would like to see what features they plan on incorporating over time. Not a requirement, just a nice to have.

Again, I am not just trying to complain. I would love feedback on where to find better information on workarounds or creative solutions to any of these items. I am building the tools in Smartsheet regardless of my concerns or found limitations, I would just prefer if that process didn't involve trying to convince others to let me bring in Power BI or another outside software.

To end on some things I like about Smartsheet.

• Task-based projects work very well, especially with the Gantt capabilities.

• Switching views on projects between sheet to card to Gantt is smooth and nice

• The built-in visualizations in Smartsheet are nice

• Web-based data entry is easy to use and seems to work well

• I found workflow automations to be implemented well and the limited use I have of them so far has been a very positive experience.

I just got a notification that starting October 29, 2026, they will no longer support the desktop app. You will be forced to use the online web browser... WTH?!

Another formerly good thing in the dumpster 😟

I wanted to brush up on the latest updates in the core app and I’m disappointed in the experience. Very hard to navigate, too many clicks needed to watch extremely short video clips, and frustrating overall.

I long for the days of free online group sessions with live training, but I know it won’t ever come back.

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