Planview vs Smartsheet is rarely a feature contest. Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-style work management platform that a PMO can stretch into portfolio reporting. Planview is a quoted enterprise portfolio suite built around demand, capacity and financial planning. If your teams already live in Smartsheet and you need a rolled-up status view, Smartsheet is usually enough. If you must rank competing investments against a budget and a capacity ceiling, Planview is built for that and Smartsheet is not.
Key takeaways
- Smartsheet lists per-member prices (Pro $9 and Business $19 a month on annual billing at our last check). Planview publishes no price list for its portfolio products.
- Vendr reports a median Planview contract of $72,408 a year, with implementation adding 20 to 50 percent in year one.
- Smartsheet wins on adoption speed and cost per seat. Planview wins on scoring, scenario planning and role-based capacity across the whole portfolio.
- The deciding question is whether the PMO reports on work already approved or decides which work to approve.
Planview vs Smartsheet at a glance
| Decision factor | Smartsheet | Planview |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Grid-based work management with dashboards, automation and portfolio add-ons | Family of enterprise portfolio, work and agile products, several acquired |
| Pricing model | Per member, published for Pro and Business, custom for Enterprise and Advanced Work Management | Quoted, by product, user type, modules and services |
| Portfolio add-on | Control Center, an add-on for Business and Enterprise plans (price not published) | Planview Portfolios is the portfolio product itself |
| Prioritization and scoring | Built by hand with formulas and sheets | Native demand intake, scoring and funding scenarios |
| Capacity planning | Resource views by person and project | Role-based capacity against demand across the portfolio |
| Time to first dashboard | Days to weeks | Months, usually with a services project |
| Best fit | Business teams already in Smartsheet, status roll-ups for 20 to 150 projects | Large PMOs and IT organizations governing investment decisions |
Swipe to see more →
Where Smartsheet wins
Adoption. Nobody needs a training program to open a sheet, and a project manager can build a plan, a RAID log and a status report on day one. For a PMO whose problem is that nobody reports status in the same format, standardizing on shared sheet templates and one rolled-up dashboard fixes the problem in a few weeks. Our guide to Smartsheet for project portfolio management walks through what Control Center adds and where the grid stops being enough.
Cost per seat also favors it. A published $19 Business seat is a number you can put in a budget without a sales call, which matters when the PMO has to justify spend to a finance partner. Planview rarely loses on features, but it often loses on the time it takes to get anything running.
Where Planview wins
Decisions made before work starts. Planview takes intake requests, scores them against criteria, shows the funded line and tests what happens when the budget moves. Capacity is planned by role across the whole portfolio, so you see the shortfall before three projects start in the same quarter. That is the job of strategic portfolio management software, and a spreadsheet grid does it only through heavy custom construction that breaks when the person who built it leaves.
Planview also covers adjacent needs under one vendor: agile delivery, roadmaps and value stream flow. The cost of that breadth is a lineage of acquired products. Our Planview alternatives guide maps the lineage, and the Planview vs Planisware comparison covers how it differs from the other large suite.
What each one costs for a 60-person PMO
Illustrative arithmetic, not a quote. At 60 Business seats on annual billing, Smartsheet is 60 x $19 x 12, or $13,680 a year before Control Center or Enterprise features. Planview sits near the Vendr median of $72,408 a year for a comparable footprint, and with the 20 to 50 percent implementation uplift Vendr reports, first-year spend lands between about $86,900 and $108,600. The gap is roughly six to eight times, which is also the difference in what the two products are asked to do.
| Line | Smartsheet (Business) | Planview (reported median) |
|---|---|---|
| License, year one | $13,680 | $72,408 |
| Implementation | Mostly internal time | +20 to 50 percent, $14,500 to $36,200 |
| Portfolio add-on | Control Center, quoted separately | Included in Portfolios scope |
| Year-one total (before add-ons) | $13,680 | $86,900 to $108,600 |
Swipe to see more →
Check the inputs yourself. Smartsheet publishes its tiers on the Smartsheet pricing page, and buyer-reported Planview contracts are summarized on Vendr's Planview page. Our Planview pricing breakdown and the category-level PPM software pricing guide explain what moves the quote.
How to decide in one afternoon
Answer four questions with your own portfolio in front of you.
- Do you approve work in this tool or only report on it? Reporting points to Smartsheet. Approving against a budget points to Planview or a focused prioritization tool.
- How many roles compete for the same people? If capacity conflicts surface every quarter, role-based planning is the requirement.
- Who maintains it? A Smartsheet portfolio built on formulas needs an owner. A Planview rollout needs an admin team and a services budget.
- Can the portfolio wait six months for value? If not, start in Smartsheet and revisit.
A third path exists when the real gap is ranking and funding. A focused project prioritization tool with published plans can produce the scored, funded list in one planning cycle, and it gives you a concrete requirements list if you still go to a suite later. For the wider field, see the best PPM software compared.
Is Smartsheet a PPM tool?
Partly. Smartsheet covers portfolio visibility: roll-up dashboards, status reporting and resource views. It lacks native demand scoring, funding scenarios and role-based capacity planning, which Gartner-style strategic portfolio management requires. Many mid-sized PMOs run happily on Smartsheet until the number of competing requests outgrows manual ranking.
Which is cheaper, Planview or Smartsheet?
Smartsheet is cheaper per seat by a wide margin, and its price is published. Planview is quoted and typically costs several times more once implementation is included. Cheaper per seat does not mean cheaper per decision: a PMO that pays analysts to rebuild scoring sheets each quarter pays for the missing features in labor.
Can you move from Smartsheet to Planview later?
Yes, and it is the common route. Keep intake fields, scoring criteria and role names clean in Smartsheet from the start, because those carry over cleanly to any suite's import. Messy free-text columns are what make a later migration expensive. If your PMO also publishes a status portal or an intranet on WordPress, a managed host such as Nowhosted keeps that site out of the project's critical path while the tooling question is decided.