Smartsheet can run project portfolio management, and plenty of PMOs do it well. The base Pro and Business plans give you sheets, reports and dashboards, which is enough to roll up status across a few dozen projects. Real portfolio features, meaning standardized project templates, automated intake and roll-ups that update themselves, come from Control Center, which is an add-on for Business and Enterprise and part of the Advanced Work Management package. Smartsheet does not publish its price.
What Smartsheet does not give you out of the box, even with Control Center, is a decision: a ranked portfolio, a funding line and a capacity check by role. That is the part this page spends most of its time on, because it is usually why a PMO starts looking.
Key takeaways
- Smartsheet Pro costs $9 per member a month billed yearly and Business $19, per Smartsheet's pricing page in September 2026. Enterprise and Advanced Work Management are quoted.
- Control Center automates project creation from blueprints, pushes changes to every project at once and builds portfolio roll-ups. It is an add-on on Business and Enterprise, bundled into Advanced Work Management.
- Smartsheet is strong at tracking and reporting a portfolio. It is weak at choosing one: scoring, ranking against a budget and role-level capacity are things you build yourself.
- Smartsheet has been privately owned by Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners since January 22, 2025, which is worth knowing before a multi-year renewal.
- Many PMOs keep Smartsheet for delivery and add a separate decision layer for prioritization and capacity, rather than replacing it.
Can Smartsheet be used for project portfolio management?
Yes. Smartsheet works for project portfolio management when the job is tracking and reporting many projects in one place. Teams build an intake form, one sheet per project and a summary sheet that rolls up status, dates and budget into a dashboard. Past roughly 30 to 50 active projects that manual structure gets hard to maintain, which is the gap Control Center fills.
The honest line is between portfolio reporting and portfolio management. Reporting answers "what is happening across our projects". Management answers "which projects should we be doing at all, in what order, and can we staff them". Smartsheet is very good at the first. The second is possible, but you are building it from formulas, and the model lives in whoever wrote them.
Here is how the pieces map across the plans.
| Portfolio need | Pro and Business | With Control Center | Advanced Work Management |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intake form for project requests | Yes, native forms | Yes, and approved requests can create projects | Yes |
| Standard project template | Copy a folder by hand | Blueprints provision new projects automatically | Yes |
| Change every project's template at once | No, edit each sheet | Yes, change management across projects | Yes |
| Portfolio roll-up and dashboard | Manual summary sheet with cross-sheet formulas | Automatic roll-up of project summaries | Yes |
| Resource planning | Workarounds in sheets | Resource Management is a separate add-on | Included |
| Weighted scoring and ranking | Build it with formulas | Build it with formulas | Build it with formulas |
| Funding line against a budget | Build it with formulas | Build it with formulas | Build it with formulas |
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The last two rows are the point. No Smartsheet tier ships a prioritization model. You can write one, and many PMOs have, but every weight change becomes a formula edit and every audit question becomes "who changed this column".
What is Smartsheet Control Center?
Smartsheet Control Center is a portfolio management add-on that creates projects from standard templates, called blueprints, and keeps them consistent at scale. A PMO defines the blueprint once, and each approved request becomes a new project with the same sheets, reports and dashboards. Control Center can also push a template change to every existing project and roll project summaries up into portfolio reports.
In practice it solves three problems a growing Smartsheet estate always runs into. The first is drift: without it, the twentieth project copied from the template has been edited so many times that the portfolio summary no longer lines up. The second is provisioning time: someone in the PMO spends hours setting up each new project. The third is change: adding a new status column to fifty projects by hand is a lost week.
What it does not do is decide anything. It makes the portfolio consistent enough to report on. The ranking, the budget cut-off and the question of whether the team can deliver still sit with you.
How much does Smartsheet Control Center cost?
Smartsheet does not publish a price for Control Center. It is sold as an add-on for the Business and Enterprise plans and is included in the Advanced Work Management package, all of which are quoted by sales. Expect the quote to depend on your member count, the other premium add-ons in the deal and whether professional services are included for the blueprint build.
The plans underneath it do have list prices. This is what Smartsheet's pricing page showed in September 2026:
| Plan | Price per member | Portfolio relevance |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | $9 a month billed yearly, $12 monthly | Small teams, up to 10 members, no Control Center |
| Business | $19 a month billed yearly, $24 monthly | The usual base for a PMO; Control Center and Resource Management available as add-ons |
| Enterprise | Custom | Governance and admin controls; Control Center available |
| Advanced Work Management | Custom | The package Smartsheet positions for large-scale portfolios, with Control Center and Resource Management included |
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A worked example helps with the budget conversation. A PMO with 40 members on Business pays $19 x 40 x 12 = $9,120 a year before any add-on. The portfolio features then arrive as a separate quote on top. So the question for your finance partner is not "what does Smartsheet cost" but "what does the portfolio layer add, and what would the same outcome cost elsewhere". Prices change, so check the pricing page on the day you build the case.
Is Smartsheet a PPM tool?
Smartsheet is a work management platform that can be configured into a PPM tool, rather than a PPM tool by design. With Control Center and Resource Management it covers intake, standard project setup, portfolio reporting and resource scheduling. It does not include native portfolio scoring, scenario planning or funding decisions, which dedicated PPM suites and portfolio workspaces treat as core features.
That distinction matters when you compare it with vendors. Against a spreadsheet, Smartsheet is a large step up. Against an enterprise suite such as Planview or Clarity, it is lighter, faster to adopt and far weaker on financials and scenarios. Our comparison of the best PPM software sets it against the full field.
Where Smartsheet portfolio management starts to strain
These are the signals, in the order PMOs usually meet them. None of them means you must leave. Each one tells you what to add.
| Signal | What is really happening | What fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| The summary sheet breaks every month | Projects have drifted from the template | Control Center blueprints |
| Nobody trusts the priority column | Scores are typed in, not calculated from agreed criteria | A weighted scoring model with weights set before scoring starts |
| The steering group approves everything | There is no visible budget cut-off | A funding line drawn down the ranked list |
| Projects are approved and then stall | Capacity was checked in total, not by role | A capacity plan by role and month |
| Sheets load slowly and formulas time out | The model outgrew the grid | Move the model out, keep delivery in Smartsheet |
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The fourth row is the one that costs the most money. A portfolio can be perfectly reported and still overcommitted, because the dashboard shows 110 percent of total capacity while the real shortfall sits in two roles. The resource capacity planning tool page explains why a total always hides the gap.
Smartsheet alone, Smartsheet with a decision layer, or a PPM suite
Three options cover almost every PMO in this position. The right one depends on what you are short of.
| Option | Best when | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Smartsheet with Control Center or Advanced Work Management | Teams already live in Smartsheet and the pain is consistency and reporting | You still build prioritization yourself, and the add-on is quoted |
| Smartsheet for delivery plus a portfolio workspace for decisions | Delivery works; the steering meeting cannot agree what to fund or cut | Two places to look, so keep the portfolio register as the one source for approvals |
| A dedicated PPM suite | You need financials, timesheets, scenario planning and deep governance in one system | Implementation time and a larger contract; teams may resist leaving Smartsheet |
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The middle option is the one people overlook. If the teams like Smartsheet, forcing them into a suite to fix a steering-group problem is expensive and slow. A focused workspace that holds the scoring model, the project prioritization tool logic and the capacity plan can sit above it, while the projects themselves stay where they are.
If your requests arrive as business cases in PDF, getting their cost and benefit tables into a sheet is often the slowest part of intake; a PDF to Excel converter saves the retyping before the numbers go into either tool.
How to decide before the renewal
Run a short test on your own portfolio rather than a vendor demo. Take the last twenty requests the steering group saw, and check four things.
- Can you rank them in one sitting? Score each on the same five criteria and sort. If this takes a week of formula work in Smartsheet, the ranking is the missing piece.
- Can you show what falls below the budget? Add up cost down the ranked list and mark where the money runs out. That line is the conversation the meeting should be having.
- Can you see the shortfall by role? Load demand by role and month for the approved work. If you only have a total, you do not yet know whether the plan is deliverable.
- What does year two cost? Price your expected members in twelve months, plus every add-on you would need for the first three answers.
If Smartsheet with Control Center passes all four at a price you can defend, stay and buy the add-on. If it passes the reporting questions but not the ranking and capacity ones, you have found the gap. The PMO software guide compares the tools that fill it, and the plans for the Portfolio Hub workspace are published, so you can price that option before the renewal call.