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.
$9
per month per user
Taskworld
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Taskworld is a project management solution built around task management and collaboration capabilities.
For teams and users who are very familiar with Excel and its mode of operation, Smartsheet will feel like a walkover. If you have a number of users who use Excel or Google Sheets for their personal project management then you will find this tool to be very useful and somewhat familiar.
Teams that may be used to other project management suites or styles would find Smartsheet a bit challenging to adapt to, as formulas and formatting can be challenging to adapt to.
I don't know anything about pricing, but if Taskworld were an inexpensive choice I would say it works fairly well for small to mid-sized companies with complex workflows. It's great for managing tasks that move through multiple-stage pipelines that aren't necessarily linear. However, depending on the price it's not worth the spend for all the technical difficulties it brought. Our company was relatively small (60 employees) and yet we constantly faced "server issues" and bugs and even software-wide crashes that seriously impacted our ability to do business. If you choose to go with Taskworld, be sure you have a solid disaster-management plan in place just in case, because chances are you'll experience bugs on a weekly basis
Task Management - It's super easy to track progress on Taskworld. If your team keeps up with it, you'll never wonder where in the project someone is, because it's marked.
Project checklists - Having these to organize out smaller portions of the tasks makes everything so much easier and helps keep track of progress.
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
Taskworld crashed ALL THE TIME. It was so frustrating. You'd notice certain functions not working (like adding an additional location or reassigning a task) and then the whole thing would go down. We lost at least 3 individual business days due to Taskworld acting up.
We often requested features and bug fixes that took forever to be resolved. Taskworld staff was responsive, but issues took too long to resolve. As a small example, the GIF functionality of chat and task communication was down for weeks with no explanation.
Small glitches were frequent and obnoxious. We had to clear caches all the time in hopes that we'd be able to use Taskworld the way it was intended. There were many times employees didn't get notified of their "@ mentions" or weren't seeing notifications at all. It was a nightmare of death by a thousand cuts.
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.
I can't say too much about the support we've gotten from Taskworld, because we haven't needed it. There haven't been any issues we've to have to reach out about because it works too well. Given the quality of the application, I'm sure the quality of the support follows.
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.
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!
We used Basecamp very briefly before switching over to Taskworld. Basecamp wasn't nearly as dynamic as Taskworld and served more as a static archive than an active workflow software.
