Getting the right project management tool can be challenging in a market saturated with various productivity and collaboration platforms. But you can always run to brands offering traditional tools or to traditional names in the industry offering advanced technologies. Smartsheet, for example, competes with Microsoft Project in providing businesses with software solutions that combine traditional methods and modern technologies.
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Smartsheet vs. Microsoft Project
Smartsheet is a dynamic, spreadsheet-like online collaboration and work management platform. It is a helpful tool for managing various types of projects, allowing you to track customer information, assign tasks, and monitor activities and communications easily. More than 40,000 businesses across industries from over 160 countries use Smartsheet.
Developed by one of the pioneers of the computing world, Microsoft Project is a cloud-based enterprise productivity and collaboration tool offering various features and management capabilities. It is a simple and powerful platform designed for both small and large projects, and it can keep everyone in your team focused and organized. Microsoft Project started as PC-based, first released commercially for DOS in 1984. The Windows version came out in 1990.
Customizing the tools
Smartsheet delivers a spreadsheet-like platform equipped with project management and analytics tools to assist in handling different types of work data. It has built-in templates to quickly solve problems, letting you customize them to fit your needs and preferences. You can get the work done fast and easy — plan projects, assign tasks, create and share calendars, track budget and perform cost analysis, visualize data, and monitor progress and team performance.
Microsoft Project empowers everyone with its simplicity and ease of use, streamlining complex projects, allowing you to choose and customize the tools you need. It integrates business intelligence with its interactive dashboard to help you visualize and better understand the details of your projects and programs. Its built-in project management templates are ready for use, so you can start quickly.
Collaborating with teams
Smartsheet lets you keep your team organized, have a balanced workload, and stay focused on the tasks toward reaching team objectives. Processes are simplified, allowing for team collaboration and secure sharing of files and allocating resources in real-time. It automatically sends notifications to keep you updated, and you can communicate with your team on the discussion board, making collaboration fun and engaging.
Microsoft Project integrates with Microsoft Teams for seamless collaboration — whether team members are office-based or working remotely elsewhere. It lets you share files, chat, and meet with your team. With Microsoft Project, you can easily make a budget based on the assigned work, resource allocation and rates, and program costs. You can also generate and share reports on your project’s status and progress, complete with impressive visuals.
Simplifying the workflow
Workflows are streamlined in Smartsheet. It has a customizable Gantt chart for managing projects and data tools to securely manage information, share and request files, and track and resolve issues. It also offers project launching tools, so it is easy for you to plan projects and assign tasks. You can manage processes, customer information, task lists, sales sources, and schedules.
Microsoft Project allows you to automate cloud-based workflows with great flexibility and security via Azure. With its wide-ranging selection of tools and approaches, you can flexibly and easily meet demands and expectations. It allows you to have a centralized view of all your projects and programs. Microsoft Project helps you simplify planning projects, assigning tasks, and scheduling.
Integrating other tools
Smartsheet’s integrations enable you to access a myriad of other tools, applications, and third-party platforms. It works well with Slack, Google Apps, Box, Dropbox, VMware, Amazon Web Services, Zapier, Salesforce, and more. While Microsoft Project integrates with other Microsoft technologies to provide comprehensive business solutions. Its integrations include Power BI,
Office 365, SharePoint, Azure, and Skype.
Which is a better platform: Smartsheet or Microsoft Project?
Smartsheet’s scalability makes it useful for a range of business sizes from small to large enterprises. It also has traditional project management tools that project management professionals would love.
However, Microsoft Project is already leading the industry. It is an enterprise project management platform developed and designed to help project managers plan projects, assign resources to tasks, create schedules, manage the budget, monitor status, analyze workloads, and track performance.
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