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.
$14
per month
TaskRay
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
TaskRay is a project management platform for managing project within Salesforce. It enables work to be planned quickly and efficiently, across geographically distributed teams.
It supports collaboration using Chatter groups, and file sharing.
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.
TaskRay is a great solution for small to medium sized businesses running multiple projects at the same time. It is very cost effective and their development team is actively adding new functionality regularly. If you prefer working from a tiled Kanban board view, this is highly worth evaluating.
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
Unfortunately TaskRay does not allow us to share templates externally with customers.
We have employees all over the world and we don't think TaskRay will support other languages such as Japanese. Note, I am speaking with a sales rep next week to confirm this, so we may be incorrect.
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.
It's hands-down the best PM tool we have ever used. Nothing compares in ease of use and being easy to learn. It also looks great and makes sense immediately
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.
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 are still in our year long evaluation process. But TaskRay has been the easiest, and most successfully adopted tool so far. Even if we do not end up choosing TaskRay, I do not regret implementing the system or the experience working with the team at TaskRay. The only reason we may not end up going with TaskRay is lack of templates and slightly stunted reporting features (this is mainly due to Salesforce limitations). Our organization is growing so quickly, we need to consider tools that are better able to regiment processes in a larger group of Customer Service Representatives and give management more detailed insight into those activities.
