Prophix vs. Smartsheet

Prophix is best suited if you have a very extensive budgeting process that currently relies on multiple Excel spreadsheets. It is also great if you have on-prem tools that may no longer be supported for reporting. It may not be appropriate if you require an unlimited number of mid-tier users, as it can be very expensive annually. It's definitely not a cheap tool, but the cost can at least be optimized based on users' use cases. In both organizations I've worked for that use it, cost has been mentioned.

Incentivized

The Smartsheet platform is extremely similar to Microsoft Excel, so if you are familiar with Excel, you will pick Smartsheet up quickly. Even if you aren't Smartsheet has a relatively simple user interface, meaning just about anyone can learn it. One thing to note is that the interface is that some may consider the interface so simple that they feel the need to look for more robust platforms. If you have a small to medium project that needs to be manages in a central hub, Smartsheet would be a great fit. If you have a very large project, I might consider looking into more advanced platforms.

Incentivized

• Reports are very customizable - once you learn how to create reports, it is really easy to design the final output you'd like.
• The tool is easy to use, especially for those that don't work in the finance function.
• It offers an excellent workflow capability to send out tasks to cost center owners all over the company.
• We love the ability to create and customize cubes.

• The easy to use dashboard has enabled us get comprehensive view of projects across the entire business.
• It has streamlined internal communication with ease of sharing information across different teams.
• Smartsheet automates our workflows, enhances collaboration and ensures there are no data silos.
• I like that it saves time for us and ensures we spend less time switching between apps.

Incentivized

• Ability to filter report views for report binder without creating duplicate reports.
• More extensive documentation and examples in the ProCalc library.
• More ProCalc functions that deal with the time dimension and allow functions that can utilize the system date. So if it is day 8 of the month.
• Ability to save company color scheme for use in reporting.
• Would like to create a link between the account dimension and another dimension so I can easily report on account properties. For example, an account property could be columns in a report.
• Would like to see the ability to have a report view on a dashboard. The tables are poorly formatted, and I’d like more formatting ability.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

The system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments

Smartsheet has made my work life easier. Reduced my email significantly. Smartsheet and SaneBox have got me leaving the office with 0... Yes 0 emails in my inbox. My inbox would reach 150-250 email per day. Smartsheet brought that number down significantly and SaneBox took it the rest of the way. Do yourself a favor and check out SaneBox, too.

I don't rate anybody a 10 because I believe there's always room for improvement, so I'll go with an 8. And I'm giving 8 because it has helped us do more than we were doing before, and I believe there's still room for improvement.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The availability in Prophix is relatively good. We have occurred random outages in different versions that wipe out data, which can be brought back. Or we have ran into system wide slowness that impacts all users in the system, but we have been able to get more capacity to supply our performance.

Incentivized

Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.

Incentivized

We’ve gotten moved around a lot and so we don’t always know our pod people. Also when we book sessions with a random person it seems like we have to take the first 15-20 minutes explaining our system and process.

Incentivized

They're a smaller company but they've always given great service when we rarely need to reach out. Pretty good online content but a bigger user base would help to produce more content in a self-sufficient community much as we see with Salesforce. To be fair we haven't needed their direct customer support very often. The sales guys are nice and not too pushy!

Incentivized

We worked with a consultant provided by the vendor for implementation. Training involved online and in person. The in person training was done throughout the implementation. It was very hands on training. As we worked through sections of the set-up, we were training on how to use various features within the product. It made learning the system very easy.

Incentivized

We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.

Incentivized

Since company's IT department was not part of the implementation and it was done only by an executive assistant who did not have extensive knowledge about finance and accounting it was done VERY Poorly and haphazardly. Nothing was done properly and it was not planned correctly. It worked for short term but after 2 years we had to re-do all the cubes and it was very hard to fix and correct things

Incentivized

Work with the Smartsheet support team to get the best overall. If no one in your organization has used Smartsheet before, the support team will get things started. We had a couple of people who had used this product before and it was a great help in getting our framework together how we wanted to use it.

Prophix is so much easier to use that other platforms or products. It can be customized so much easier than other larger, more expensive products. I work for a small university where we have a small finance team and Prophix allows us to tailor reporting to emerging needs in real time without having to reconfigure clunky systems with expensive modifications

Incentivized

Smartsheet is a dedicated project management tool that is built on spread sheet principles. When compared to Microsoft's own offering, Smartsheet came out on top in some areas like dedicated project management features vs having to build custom features to Microsoft 365. However when you compare them on price, Microsoft 365 definitely has more value than Smartsheet.

Incentivized

I gave Prophix a 10 on scalability because we currently deploy the solution to department heads across our entire organization and never have any issues with those individuals using or accessing the system to look at their financial information within premade templates . They currently enter budgets and review reports within the system currently. The only issue is they cannot typically use the ad hoc functionality because that would require higher level licenses that cost more and it is not worth it to give them more costly licenses since they really aren't working in the system quite like the robust finance users

Incentivized

• Reduced time to produce reports and compile budget leaving the team with more time to analyse the data, rather than concentrating on just compiling reports or budgets.
• Improved visibility and variance reporting capability providing actionable insights to stakeholder.
• The above points lead to greater buy-in into reporting and planning processes.

Incentivized

• Our positive ROI has decreased the overall cost in project management as it reduced the amount of MS project licenses we needed.
• We have also seen a positive ROI on using the cloud storage and it automatically supports proper version control.

Incentivized