SmartSheet Pricing Model Changes— Is It Worth Staying or Is It Time to Search for Alternatives?
SmartSheet is a popular cloud-based work management platform known for its spreadsheet-like interface for managing projects and tracking tasks across departments. Many teams appreciate its familiar spreadsheet-like features, making it easy for anyone acquainted with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets to get onboard, albeit somewhat limited in features.
Over the years, SmartSheet has grown in prominence, including notable acquisitions that have expanded its reach and user base. However, alongside its popularity, the platform has earned a reputation for making abrupt changes to its pricing model, leaving users questioning whether sticking with SmartSheet is still worth the cost, or if it’s time to explore other alternatives.
Current SmartSheet Pricing
SmartSheet offers a tiered subscription model designed to cater to various organizational needs. As of 2025, the two SmartSheet tiers with clear pricing are as follows:
1. Pro— $12 USD/ month/ member
- 1 to 10 members only
- No guests allowed. Viewers only
- Unlimited sheets, dashboards, reports, forms
- 250 automation actions per month
- 20GB attachment storage space
2. Business— $24 USD/ month/ member
- 3+ members (minimum $72 USD/ month)
- Unlimited guests and viewers
- Unlimited automation actions
- 1TB attachment storage space
Both plans above do not include AI tools (despite SmartSheet’s heavy marketing on their AI capabilities) and have limitations to their level of customizability. In addition to these 2 tiers, SmartSheet also offers Enterprise and Advance Work Management plans that require custom pricing. These two tiers include AI tools, other customization features, better access controls, and customer support.
However, anyone who takes a quick trip to SmartSheet subreddit threads will easily notice how customers are not satisfied with SmartSheet’s services, primarily due to their abrupt pricing changes and poor customer service. Many customers openly voice out concerns on whether it’s still worth sticking around or time to switch out. If you’re wondering the same, you’ve come to the right place, as we’ll break it down for you!
SmartSheet Throughout The Years
Developed in 2005, SmartSheet wasn’t always as popular in the early days. It wasn’t until their 2010 redesign where they cut a large chunk of their features to prioritize simplicity and user-friendliness that their user base grew. In 2021, SmartSheet’s pricing model included the Individual (now Pro) tier for $19/month, Business tier for $32/month, and Enterprise tier (custom pricing).
From 2024 to 2025, SmartSheet significantly reworked their licensing structure by removing free collaborators and unlicensed editors, transforming free users to either “viewers” (users with view-only access) or external “guests” (users with edit and comment permissions, restricted to external email domains). Under the previous structure, those who don’t create new sheets are free to collaborate free of charge. After the restructure, all collaborating users (with the exception to external guests) must become paid members.
In short, SmartSheet stopped offering widespread free collaboration. They made this available only to viewers or external parties and required everyone else to obtain a paid license.
What does this mean?
Let’s say ABC Company has 5 departments with 10 employees in each department (50 employees in total). Each department delegates 1 team member to create new sheets while everybody else simply collaborates by adding information, updating cell values, etc.
In the legacy collaboration model, ABC Company would only need to purchase 10 licenses, while the rest of 40 employees can be free collaborators. External parties such as vendors and customers can also collaborate for free. Under the Business Plan, ABC Company would be spending only $32/month x 10= $320/month ($6.4 per user, per month— effective cost per active user).
Under the new model, internal users can no longer collaborate for free, which means the company would need to purchase 50 licenses. External parties such as vendors and customers can be invited as “Guests” and continue to be unlicensed users. From $320/ month under the legacy model, ABC Company would now need to spend $24/ month x 50 = $1200/ month under the current pricing model. That’s 4x more than before!
Later that year, SmartSheet was acquired by Blackstone, taken private, and delisted as a publicly traded company.
📚 Read more about SmartSheet’s changes to user subscription models here.
Since the new licensing structure potentially increases the number of paying members for companies, SmartSheet provided a provisional user “grace period” that can be utilized only once for each user.
SmartSheet Largest Limitations
Taking pricing factors aside, we evaluated SmartSheet’s features and capabilities to gauge whether these pricing changes can be justified.
Data Relationships and Management
Similar to Microsoft Excel and spreadsheet tools, SmartSheet is flat in structure and does not support subtables or line items. This poses challenges for companies who wish to store data for sales orders, purchase orders, and similar line items that work better with subtables. This also means that SmartSheet is unable to reference all records related to a particular piece of data. From this feature alone, we can see why SmartSheet positions themselves as a project management and task tracking solution, since it is simply not built to be a relational database.
Linking data and forming relationships is a pain, as users are generally not able to select data on Sheet A from the data in Sheet B. For instance, let’s say I created a tracking sheet entitled “2025 Product Review” to track our annual product analysis. In it, I have columns like “Product Names,” “Product Specifications” where I wish to fetch from my Products Sheet. For a software like SmartSheet, you’d expect to be able to select “Product Names” from a dropdown box by linking both sheets together, but we found that it’s not possible without installing third party solutions. Natively, SmartSheet would only allow you to fetch information like “Product Specifications” by manually encoding the Product Name and using the VLOOKUP or Index/Match functions.
Collaboration Controls
For most companies with teams that collaborate, access controls and permissions are a great way to ensure data integrity and boost productivity by eliminating distractions for employees. SmartSheet allows global and sheet-level permissions to be configured; but editing and viewing are on an all-or-nothing basis. This means administrators can’t limit editing abilities only to specific records, columns, or entries that the user has created— it’s either they can or cannot edit a certain sheet, similar to Google Sheet’s permission controls.
Moreover, user groups and user group-based controls are only available for Business and Enterprise tiers. Instead of setting permission by roles (eg. Sales team can edit Sheets A, B, C, but not D), Pro tier administrators would need to manually configure each user’s permission and access controls individually. This time consuming process hinders productivity and makes room for human slips and errors.
System Maintenance and Support
In addition to users’ claims of SmartSheet’s subpar customer support, we found that users would also need to manually clean data before importing them into SmartSheet. The system does not support data mapping during import and will import everything, regardless of whether the same data has already been imported into SmartSheet before. This means users would need to manually clean and cross-check data before importing to prevent duplicate entries.
In terms of data backups, SmartSheet only backs up data, comments, and attachments. They do not back up designs, formats, reports, and configurations made to the system. This can be worrisome for businesses needing to transfer or restore lost sheets. Similarly, version history only tracks changes to cell values, comments, and attachments. It does not track formatting, structure, or allow full sheet-level rollbacks in the event that users wish to restore an older version of a certain sheet.
SmartSheet is solely a cloud-based system and does not offer an on-premise version. This may be a concern for businesses in industries with strict regulatory or compliance requirements.
SmartSheet— Is It Still Worth It?
Given SmartSheet’s aggressive pricing changes and functional limitations, it is no surprise that some businesses have opted to look for alternatives. The very thing that initially expanded their user base— their oversimplified spreadsheet-like user interface— is the very thing that limits their features and capabilities.
Since migrating to a new system will still require some time, effort, and study, it may be worth it to continue staying with SmartSheet if:
1. The new licensing seats policy does not affect you
2. You work solo or have very few system collaborators who need editing and commenting privileges
3. You have a simple organization structure where sophisticated permission and access controls are not needed
4. You only need to analyze simple, disconnected, and flat data on a spreadsheet-style workspace without need for building data relationships
5. You only need it for simple project management and tracking
However, if your business is growing and you need a scalable long-term solution that goes beyond simple project management and tracking, it may be time to search for other viable solutions.
Ragic— More Power for Less
If you’re looking for a SmartSheet alternative that offers more built-in features for less cost, Ragic might be a good fit for you!
Pricing Model
Similar to SmartSheet, Ragic also offers various pricing options and subscription tiers. However, Ragic’s pricing plans are more modular, offering greater flexibility for companies to start small and upgrade as they grow. Ragic’s subscription tier are as follows:
1. Free— $0/month/ user
- Unlimited number of users
- Unlimited templates and records
- 3 customized sheets with 1000 records each
2. Lite— $5 USD/ month/ user
- Unlimited templates and records
- 5 customized sheets with unlimited records
3. Professional— $19 USD/ month/ user
- Unlimited templates and records
- Unlimited customized sheets with unlimited records
- Unlimited actions and automations
- 30GB storage space/ user
4. Concurrent— $49.9 USD/ month/ user
- 10 users minimum
- Unlimited number of users, logged in maximum 10 at a time (perfect for companies with large number of users who do not stay logged in at all times)
- Unlimited customized sheets, templates, records, and actions
- 100GB storage space/ user
5. Enterprise— $55 USD/ month/ user
- 10 users minimum
- Dedicated managed VM, upstime SLAs, SMAL provider, sandbox accounts
- Unlimited customized sheets, templates, records, and actions
- 100GB storage space/ user
Ragic offers transparent pricing options without hidden costs and need for custom quotations. All plans, including the Free tier, are equipped with unlimited external users who can view, edit, and create records when permitted. This means companies can create public forms on Ragic for external parties to fill up (eg. vendors, clients, applicants, etc.) without them becoming a paid seat.
Built-In Features
On the surface, Ragic might look like any other spread-sheet like application, but with line item and subtable support, Ragic can do more by accommodating sheets that store sales orders, purchase requests, and other list items in an organized manner.
Building data relationships is also a breeze with Ragic’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface. For example, by using Ragic’s link and load feature, users can select “Product Names” from a dropdown menu on the “2025 Product Review” sheet by referencing data in the “Products” sheet, then automatically fetch related fields such as “Product Specifications” onto the “2025 Product Review” sheet— something we weren’t able to do in SmartSheet.
Additionally, the system is also able to consolidate all records related to a specific piece of data through data relationship building.
Equipped with sophisticated access controls, integrated approval workflow, reminders and custom email feature, barcode support, as well as reporting features, Ragic allows businesses to build systems tailored to their specific needs without using a single line of code. Each feature functions like a LEGO building block, allowing users to mix and match according to their needs. This high level of customization facilitates greater productivity among teams and companies.
In contrast to SmartSheet, Ragic backs up the entire database including data, design, configurations, formatting, comments, attachments, and reports, making it easy for businesses who need to transfer or recover certain sheets or databases. The system also supports full version history at record and cell level, allowing precise rollback of individual records.
The Helpful Support Team
The responsiveness and reliability of the support team in understanding customer needs and delivering helpful responses in less than 24 hours has been a key factor in customer satisfaction with the Ragic platform. Read about what current users say about Ragic’s customer support:
2. Abrolhos Islands Management Council
Think Ragic might be a good fit for you? Try it out!
Category: Tips and Tricks > Software Comparison
