Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application available as part of Microsoft 365 (Office 365), or standalone, in cloud-based and on-premise editions.
$6.99
per month
Smartsheet
Score 8.4 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.
$12
per month per user (up to 10 users)
Todoist
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Doist, a company boasting an entirely globally distributed workforce, offers Todoist, a project management platform emphasizing the needs of a distributed workforce. The application emphasizes tracking events over time with advanced closed task and progress reporting, with custom graphics for sharing or ease of review.
$8
per month per user
Pricing
Microsoft Excel
Smartsheet
Todoist
Editions & Modules
Excel with Microsoft 365
$6.99
per month
Excel for 1 PC or Mac
$139.99
perpetual license
Pro
$12
per month per user (up to 10 users)
Business
$24
per month per user (3 user minimum)
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Advanced Work Management
Contact Sales
Business
$8
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Excel
Smartsheet
Todoist
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
A discount is offered for annual billing.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft Excel
Smartsheet
Todoist
Considered Multiple Products
Microsoft Excel
Verified User
Program Manager
Chose Microsoft Excel
Excel will always be selected because it's part of the Office Suite. We started to use Smartsheet, but the onboarding and training process took too long when compounded with licensing setup & costs. Apple Numbers works well, but without the maturity of Excel. Since Apple …
Excel has a greater capability of making the sheet look like anything I want. The aspect missing is the ability to report similar text statistics across multiple sheets with ease. I prefer Excel when tracking data.
While other products have been useful for being easily sharable or free, Microsoft Excel handles more data with easier to use functions, pivot tables, graphing, and formulas than all that I have used. Google Sheets is a close second but has not been able to handle the large …
I use both. Excel for more data/spreadsheet focused tasks and Smartsheet for our event planning and project management. Smartsheet allows for collaboration, has project management features like task tracking and the Gantt chart, and even has some handy automation features …
For a pure to do list software, nothing beats Todoist. There are certainly features that Asana, Basecamp and Bitrix bring that Todoist will not do, but they are project management software, not specifically for to do lists. On the other hand, when compared with Wunderlist, Trell…
The primary reason behind my use of ToDoist fell upon the multiple devices syncing and the ease of which to set up a task by using plain English language to set the date/time. When comparing ToDoist to the other solutions I listed above - ToDoist wins on these two items, but …
I don't really know another program as powerful as Excel. I've used Google Doc programs but do not feel they come close. So far, anytime I've needed a table of some sort for data, whether it's budget oriented or information off a survey, the best system has been Excel. We do web audits on occasion and we create an Excel worksheet featuring every URL of the pages we're auditing, notes, data about the content, information about files attached to the page and other information to help us determine what pages need updating, deleting or otherwise. We also use Excel primarily to export our Google Analytics to in order for us to create reports for clients that need to see specific information about their traffic.
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
There have been lots of times when we need to add a new habit into our daily work routines, and having the option to do so in the To-Doist app on the very first screen is incredibly helpful. It's a good reminder, and I believe that professionals who truly appreciate and properly value the implementation of good habits would be very grateful for this feature. It's also a time saver because you don't have to manually type it in every day/week / etc.
It is very good at embedded formulas and tying cells to one another
It allows me to compare deals terms on a side-by-side basis and talk my clients through it easily.
It is very helpful as well in terms of allowing me to filter/sort results in many different ways depending on what specific information I am most interested in prioritizing.
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
Excel offers collaboration features that allow multiple users to work on the same spreadsheet, but managing changes made by different users can be challenging. Excel could improve its features by offering more granular control, better tracking of changes, and more robust conflict resolution tools.
Itcan be a barrier to productivity when importing and exporting data from other applications or file formats. To improve its features, it should offer better support for standard file formats and more robust error handling and reporting tools.
Excel can be challenging for finance students and working professionals, but it can be improved by offering more robust tutorials, better documentation, and more user communities and support forums.
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
The Todoist application now works almost identically across all platforms. There is a minor improvement that I would like to see on iOS and that is the ability to show task count by custom filter.
In Board view, I want to be able to easily add sub-tasks to a parent task.
Besides those two minor improvements, I am extremely happy with the application.
Excel remains the industry standard for spreadsheets and has maintained simple and straight-forward formula writing methods. Although there is a learning curve to do more complex calculations, there are countless help sites and videos on the Internet for almost any need.
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.
I'm giving it a 7 because it is my go to. But the fact other prefer Google Sheets when working with a team does get irritating. I've used the online version of Microsoft Excel that other teams can get into and it still seems behind Google Sheets. It's a little clanky and slow? If that's even a term.
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
Excellent features and concept, simple implementation, but the software is not very clear in training new users and communicating features. The occasional unexplained crash or freeze is not handled gracefully by the desktop software, requiring either the user or tech support to manually restart.
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.
I've used Todoist for about three years now and I haven't needed to contact support, which I'm considering a 10 out of 10. Honestly, their platform is so easy to use that I never had to look up a knowledge base or forum to be able to do what I wanted in Todoist. So I'm not sure what their support system looks like or how it works, but I do know that if I haven't needed support, that's also a good sign!
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.
Out of Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, IBM SPSS, and Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel is by far the most common tool used for anything data-related across organizations. Accordingly, our organization has also implemented Microsoft Excel as a first-step tool. We recently adopted Microsoft Power BI (the free version), and use it occasionally (mostly for creating dashboards), but it is less commonly understood by stakeholders across our organization and by our clients. Accordingly, Microsoft Excel is more user-friendly and because of its popularity, we can easily look up how to do things in the program online. Google Sheets is a comparable alternative to Microsoft Excel, but because it's cloud-based and we have sensitive data that needs to be protected, we chose against using this software. Finally, a few users (including myself) have access to and utilize IBM's SPSS. For my role, it's a helpful tool to do more rigorous analyses. However, because of its cost and limited functionality as a simple spreadsheet, we only use it for more complex analyses.
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!
[Todoist: To-Do List & Task Manager] is significantly simpler and cheaper than most of the alternatives and doesn't complicate the management of tasks with a plethora of unnecessary features. While all the alternatives have strong feature sets, what Todoist does better than any of them is manage tasks, in theory the central point of them all.
Each user can use it to whatever level of expertise they have. It remains the same so users can contribute to another's work regardless of whether they have more or less expertise
Location-based reminders ensured that my staff didn't miss things when they went onsite with a customer. This has led to renewals on a regular basis.
Sharing of task visibility for managers with their direct reports has enhanced 1-on-1 meetings and ensured that field coaches kept focused
The cost of Todoist vs. the value it creates is a huge selling point for the software. For the price per user, I've found nothing that even comes close!
