Smartsheet vs. Excel: Which should you use? [2025]

Excel is one of those rare brands—like Kleenex or Band-Aid—that's so ubiquitous it's almost become a generic term for spreadsheet. While Excel deserves its reputation as king of the spreadsheet apps when it comes to heavy number-crunching, there are situations where you'll want to consider an alternative. One of those situations is project management—and that's where Smartsheet comes in.

It's hard to know where the line is, though. Does your project have enough moving parts to justify moving from Excel to Smartsheet? Are your data analysis needs more than Smartsheet can handle?

I recently spent time comparing Excel and Smartsheet head-to-head, focusing on each app's project management and data analysis capabilities. In this article, I'll help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of each tool so you can decide which is right for you.

Table of contents:

• Smartsheet vs. Excel at a glance

• Smartsheet is easier to learn

• Smartsheet was built for project management

• Excel is the gold standard for spreadsheet software

• Smartsheet makes it easy to automate workflows

• Excel has better AI features via Copilot

• Excel (online) offers more practical functionality for free

• Smartsheet has more native integrations, but both integrate with Zapier

• Smartsheet vs. Excel: Which should you use?

Smartsheet vs. Excel at a glance

Here's a quick rundown to help you understand the core differences between these two apps.

• Smartsheet is best for teams and collaborative project management. Its purpose-built features for task tracking, real-time collaboration, and workflow automation make it ideal for organizations that need to coordinate work across teams without requiring technical expertise.

• Excel is best for data analysis and computational power. Its unrivaled calculation capabilities, advanced formulas, and visualization options make it perfect for number-crunching, financial modeling, and extracting insights from complex datasets.

Smartsheet is easier to learn

I remember learning Excel in middle school; a decade later, I was adding it as a "skill" to my first resume. Microsoft has dominated the spreadsheet game for so long that at this point, basic Excel knowledge is almost universal. That means there's essentially zero learning curve for simple use cases like color-coded project organization, for example, or functions like SUM or AVERAGE.

But for anything more complex than that, you're likely to run into trouble unless you're willing to get technical. Want to reference data in another Excel file? Prepare to learn VLOOKUP: =VLOOKUP(A2, '[OtherFile.xlsx]Sheet1'!$A$1:$B$100, 2, FALSE. Want to send a reminder as tasks approach their due dates? You'll need to figure out VBA macros.

Sub SendReminder()

    If Cells(2, 1).Value <= Date + 2 Then

        ' Code to send email via Outlook

    End If

End Sub

By contrast, even Smartsheet's most advanced features are relatively accessible to novices since they're powered by no-code automations or built-in workflows. If you want to pull data from another sheet, just click Link from cell in other sheet and follow the instructions. And setting reminders is as easy as clicking Set reminder.

Smartsheet's app feels modern and inviting. You can quickly figure out anything you need to via Smartsheet University, a hub with videos and how-to articles; it also offers a step-by-step onboarding and clear user interface.

You can't say the same for Microsoft Excel. Whether you use the desktop or web version, it feels like a product from another era.

Excel doesn't offer much hand holding, unless you pay extra for Microsoft Copilot (which I'll get to in a bit). There are decent built-in tutorials like "Get to know Power Query" and (my personal favorite) "Beyond Pie Charts." But because they're delivered in the form of templates, Excel's tutorials are hard to find and clunky to navigate through.

One of Excel's advantages is its enormous selection of templates. You'll find hundreds of prebuilt worksheets, from lead trackers to social media content calendars.

Some of the Microsoft-created templates look rather dated. But because Excel is so widely used, you can find a seemingly infinite number of user-created templates with a simple Google search. (I was even able to find a 5-year financial model for ice cream shops.)

Smartsheet offers fewer than a hundred templates—and certainly nothing specific to ice cream entrepreneurs.

Despite the smaller selection, what's available is consistently high quality. For example, Smartsheet's business budget management template includes an entire prebuilt workspace with separate sheets for each month of the year, a reporting sheet, and a dashboard with visualizations.

Smartsheet was built for project management

With Smartsheet, you can choose from a handful of project views: grid, card, board, table, timeline, Gantt, and calendar. This flexibility allows teams to visualize their work in the most effective way possible, whether they need a high-level overview or detailed task tracking.

It's also easy to handle project-based reporting. Most Smartsheet templates come with a prebuilt reporting dashboard, which makes it easy to get a bird's-eye view of your project's status.

If you're managing a team, you'll also appreciate Smartsheet's workload tracking features (available on the Business plan), which lets you see who's overloaded and who's free to take on more work.

Excel is useful for simple projects, but it's missing the intuitive project management features that make Smartsheet useful. You're mainly limited to a grid view, for example: while you can find Gantt chart templates and project timelines, they're clunky to work with. Plus, there's no way to easily jump between views like there is in Smartsheet.

Smartsheet also allows you to attach files directly to rows or sheets, making it easy to keep all relevant documents, images, and other resources in one place. You can also have conversations about specific tasks or the project at large with per-row and per-sheet comment threads.

You can have threaded conversations in Excel, but it's harder to navigate. And if you want to attach files with your comment, you're out of luck. The best you'll be able to do is share a link to the file (if it's stored in the cloud). 

Excel is the gold standard for spreadsheet software 

When it comes to raw spreadsheet power, you can't beat Excel. Whether you're working with intricate financial models, large data sets, or complex statistical analysis, Excel offers all the functionality you need to crunch numbers and visualize your data. 

Excel's formula library—while not especially easy to use—is vast and incredibly powerful, with over 500 built-in functions ranging from basic arithmetic to complex statistical analyses. The ability to write nested formulas, create array calculations, and build sophisticated financial models gives Excel users virtually unlimited potential for data manipulation.

Consider this example: a financial consulting firm could use Excel to create a model to recommend investments based on their clients' assets and risk tolerance. The model could include Monte Carlo simulations to predict possible outcomes and account for uncertainty.

This level of analytical sophistication simply isn't possible in Smartsheet. You can create simple charts and graphs for reporting, and there's also an option to purchase Smartsheet's Pivot App as an add-on to analyze large datasets. But in general, Smartsheet doesn't offer the same depth and breadth of data analysis tools to be a true competitor in the spreadsheet space.

Smartsheet makes it easy to automate workflows

If you're using Smartsheet as a project management app, chances are that you need a way to automate your most repetitive tasks like assignment alerts, approval requests, and status updates. 

Smartsheet offers an easy-to-use workflow builder to help you do exactly this—and it goes beyond simple task automation. You can create multi-step workflows that work on conditional logic, making it easy to keep projects moving smoothly. For example, you can set up a workflow that automatically pings a task assignee to share a weekly progress update if the task is not yet complete.

Smartsheet offers a handful of automation templates, including Alert someone when specified criteria are met and Record the date when specific criteria are met. If the automation you need isn't available as a template, it's pretty straightforward to design your own from scratch.

You can also automate workflows in Excel, but the experience isn't nearly as user-friendly as Smartsheet's workflow builder. For one thing, unless you use Excel's limited set of pre-made workflows, you'll need to have a decent grasp on coding language to create custom workflows. For another, Excel doesn't display automated workflows as a visual flowchart of if/then actions the same way Smartsheet does.

If you don't want to fiddle with code, you have a couple of options. You can use Record Actions, which monitors how you interact with your Excel file and saves whatever you do as a step-by-step automation that can be repeated. You can also use Excel's surprisingly robust AI features to set up automation scripts for you. But even then, it's nowhere as easy as it is with Smartsheet.

Excel has better AI features via Copilot

Microsoft Excel isn't the likeliest app to have a passionate userbase, but against all odds, it does. Miss Excel, an Excel educator, has millions of social media followers who eagerly await posts on topics like "What to do when your pivot table won't update."

I'm not an Excel enthusiast, so I didn't really get all the fuss—until seeing Copilot in Excel. It single-handedly addresses the steep learning curve that keeps many users from getting the most out of Excel. (It's hard to think of a better use for AI than making spreadsheets less frustrating.) You can ask Copilot to generate complex formulas for you, filter and sort your sheet instantly, look up values in separate sheets, or visualize data with PivotCharts. 

Apart from outsourcing Excel grunt work to Copilot, you can also get strategic: Copilot can help you identify potential cost overruns, for example, or forecast a project timeline based on current progress rates. You can also simply type, "Show me insights on this data" and see what Copilot comes up with. 

The only drawback is cost: you'll need to pay an additional $30/month per user for Copilot if you're on a Microsoft 365 Business plan. If you use Microsoft 365 for Home, Copilot is included, but you only get 60 AI credits each month. 

Smartsheet's AI tool is more limited, and most users can't access it anyway: it's only available on the Enterprise plan for teams of 10 or more users. While there are project management-specific AI tools on the Smartsheet product roadmap—like "smart assign" to delegate tasks to the right people—for now, it's essentially an analysis tool. Smartsheet AI can currently generate formulas, create summaries and descriptions, and analyze data.

Excel (online) offers more practical functionality for free 

If you want a free spreadsheet solution, Excel is your only choice. Smartsheet used to offer a limited free plan, but it now nudges users toward a 30-day free trial instead.

Excel, on the other hand, lets users on a free plan do it all: create, edit, and share. The only caveat is that you're limited to using Excel online. To get the desktop app, you'll need a Microsoft 365 subscription. But it's more affordable than Smartsheet—starting at $9.99/user/month—and with it, you'll also get access to other Microsoft apps like Word, PowerPoint, and OneDrive. 

Smartsheet's plans start at $12/user/month for the Pro plan, which includes unlimited viewers, 250 automations per month, and Gantt, table, board, and calendar views. The $24/user/month Business plan caters to teams: you get unlimited viewers and guests, unlimited automations, timeline view, and team workload tracking.  

Smartsheet has more native integrations, but both connect to Zapier

Excel has been a mainstay of the Microsoft 365 suite for nearly three decades. This means it plays pretty nicely with other Microsoft apps like Microsoft Teams, Word, Outlook, and OneDrive. For example, you can collaborate on and review Excel spreadsheets with teammates directly from Microsoft Teams. But that's the extent of its built-in integrations.

Smartsheet, on the other hand, natively integrates with over 150 apps, including the entire suite of Microsoft 365 tools. If you want to attach a Google Drive file to a task, for example, you can pull the file directly into your Smartsheet task.

Whether you choose Smartsheet or Excel, you can also connect with thousands of other apps with Zapier's Smartsheet and Excel integrations, so you can do things like automatically add data to either app and get notifications when changes are made. Learn more about how to automate Smartsheet and how to automate Excel, or get started with one of these pre-made templates.

Smartsheet vs. Excel: Which should you choose?

It comes down to your biggest need: project management or data analysis.

Choose Smartsheet if you need a modern project management app that's designed with teams in mind. Its intuitive project features, no-code automation, and collaboration tools solve the exact pain points that make Excel cumbersome for project management.

Choose Excel if you need a powerful tool for advanced number crunching. If your projects involve sophisticated formulas, statistical analysis, or custom visualizations, Excel will serve you better than Smartsheet's more limited analytical features.

If you already have a Microsoft 365 subscription and need only basic project management features—like a Gantt view to stay up to date on project progress—experiment with Excel's built-in features. You may find that it offers more than enough to keep your team organized. If not, then you can consider using a dedicated project management tool like Smartsheet.

Related reading: 

• Smartsheet vs. Airtable: Which should you use?

• How to build a KPI dashboard in Excel in 3 steps (with free templates)

• The best free project management software

• Project management templates to organize any workflow

• How to use Excel for project management (with 11 free templates)

This article was originally published in July 2024 by Hsing Tseng. The most recent update was in May 2025.