Roadmunk vs. Smartsheet

We replaced Trello with Roadmunk for our Roadmapping purposes. For the poor Product Manager and Product Team that is incessantly asked "where is the product roadmap" by Sales and Management, this is the tool for you! Easy, simple, and makes pretty pictures for those constituents. It is less useful for full Requirements documentation. "Ideas" is OK, but too hard to get submissions from non-Roadmunk users, and clunky integration back to the primary road mapping function. Needs an improved editing environment to fully express Reqs using this tool, but it's not that far off!

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Allows us to easily customize swimlanes based on audience and task
• Provides a visualization of resource load "weight" in a particular swimlane
• Gives us a visual vocabulary to explain our agile process and its impact to customers

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• The fact that you have to add a date to everything; dates stick to people’s minds.
• Connecting bars to milestones; unclear which to use when.
• Collaboration isn’t great; can’t track changes, add comments, etc.

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

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.

Incentivized

Performance has improved meaningfully over the last 12 months or so, especially in our views that contain many roadmap items. Some challenges remain, however, particularly when changing the timeline and in scenarios of multiple users interacting with the roadmap simultaneously.

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

We never really had to go back to Roadmunk for support, but they do provide a wealth of informative updates that can be consumed at the individual user's own pace.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

We've used Google Calendar, Microsoft Office products, Trello, and others. Roadmunk seems to combine the best of all of those, and then offers a little more.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

• Def saves us HOURS per quarter probably 50 man-hours per year re: automated visualizations vs. yoga poses trying to use Excel, JIRA, PowerPoint, Visio, etc.

Incentivized

• This has really opened up collaboration across teams. A lot less working in silos.
• It hasn't fully replaced any one tool so it means having to go to another place. Hopefully, we can eliminate a tool or two in the next six months.

Incentivized