Celoxis is a Enterprise online project management solution for midsize to large businesses to help them plan and manage complex and diverse project portfolios. The collective suite includes modules for resource management, budgeting, revenue forecasting, time and expense tracking, reporting and team collaboration. Celoxis includes features such as advanced scheduling, which combines real-world conditions, such as resource time off, multi-time zone, part-time resources, working weekends etc.,…
N/A
Smartsheet
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration tool. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration with email.
Celoxis is a great option if you are looking for an affordable, easy to use, easy to integrate project manegement solution. It is very powerful for waterfall project management. I evaluated more than 15 platforms and could not find any with a close evaluation in terms of cost-benefit to Celoxis. Of course there are more powerfull tools, for 10 times the price. So far, for project management, there hasn't been a requirement I haven't been able to solve with some work. It really lacks features for Agile methodologies, even if it provides a Kanban view, so far it doesn't provide and additional agile artifacts. If an organization has already reached a very mature project management practice and needs to improve on program and portfolio management, Celoxis won't provide any useful feature. If the organization has the resources (skills and time mostly) to develop some workflows and customization, it might work but with a limit. Hopefully Celoxis addresses these features in the near future.
Smartsheet shines for collaboration. When you have multiple people involved with planning events Smartsheet makes it easy to share and collaborate. For instance, multiple people can be in Smartsheet working at the same time. Also setting permissions for exactly those who need to know is quite easy with Smartsheet. For data analytics and general spreadsheet purposes Excel is better but for project management and event planning Smartsheet is superior
Its hard to overstate the value of familiarity. Being able to use a tool that has some familiarity takes away the time needed to train and orient employees on a new tool and allows an organization to hit the ground running.
Smartsheet covers most of the basics of a project management tool, the usual tasks, milestones and project viewing options.
For data viewing, you get multiple data viewing options including a calendar view (good for marketing teams and those who work around scheduling), Kanban, Gaant etc
Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency
It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.
Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions
I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.
It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.
I used an evalaution matrix built with input of several stakeholders in the company. In the end the matrix included 100 features (non of them was price related). The matrix was heavily focused on waterfall project management, agile related features were only 5 out of 100 features. Features were labeled as mandatory, required or optional. Products which lacked a mandatory feature (like providing technical support) were disqualified. Then a price vs features evaluation was made and only the products with the best combination were seleced to continue: Celoxis, ITM Platform and Mission Control. A final technical evaluation was made comparing the full evaluation but also the evaluation of only the 40 required features. Overall, Celoxis was the better evaluated (76% vs 65% of the second place), for the 40 required features, Celoxis got 91% against 78% of number 2. In the end we chose Celoxis even when it had higher licensing cost.
Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!
