Glide vs. Smartsheet: Which Tool Is Right for Your Team?

Businesses often consider Glide and Smartsheet when looking for a solution because they both sit near the same problem: important work is trapped in spreadsheets, and those spreadsheets eventually become too manual, too fragile, or too hard to scale. Both platforms help teams bring more structure to that work. But they solve the problem in fundamentally different ways.

Smartsheet is a work management and project tracking platform that combines the familiarity of spreadsheets with tools for collaboration, automation, and reporting. At its core, it looks and behaves like a spreadsheet, but it’s designed to help operations leaders plan, track, and manage work at scale.

Glide is different. Glide is not just a spreadsheet upgrade or a project management system. It is a no-code app builder that lets businesses turn their existing spreadsheets into custom software, creating project management tools that are tailored to their precise needs.

That difference matters. A team using Smartsheet is usually still working in a system built around sheets, reports, and dashboards. A team using Glide is transforming spreadsheets into fully custom internal tools.

This guide will help you compare the two tools and choose the best one for your business.

Glide vs Smartsheet summary

This is the basic breakdown if you’re trying to choose between Smartsheet and Glide. Here's the TL;DR

Use Smartsheet if…you are a project manager who needs a standard PM tool and prefers to stay in a familiar spreadsheet-style interface and you don’t need too many collaborators (or have the budget for added seats on Enterprise), or if you are in a high-compliance industry like government or healthcare.

Use Glide if…you value flexibility and customization, want to build more intuitive interfaces that work easily on mobile and in the field, or want to use integrations, automations, and other advanced features without the high per-seat cost of Smartsheet.

Smartsheet pros and cons

Smartsheet is a purpose-built work management platform that looks and feels like a spreadsheet but with powerful project management features layered on top. Most issues with Smartsheet come down to one core tension: Smartsheet tries to be both a simple spreadsheet tool and a full project management system. This means it ends up being more complex than simple tools and also less flexible than true custom software.

Pros of Smartsheet:

PM features ready out of the box. Gantt charts, dashboards, automations, forms, and reporting are all built in. However, you’ll need some time and skill to build more comprehensive views.
Familiar spreadsheet-style interface that is easy to adopt for teams already using Excel or Google Sheets.
Handles complex, multi-project environments well. Smartsheet is particularly strong for operations, PMO, and enterprise use cases with complex needs.
Integrations. Connects natively with Salesforce, Jira, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, and hundreds more.
Low learning curve for anyone familiar with spreadsheets.
Strong compliance for high-needs industries like government and healthcare.

Cons of Smartsheet:

Cost. Plans can get expensive, especially at the team or enterprise level, and many key features are gated behind higher tiers.
Limited customization. You work within Smartsheet's design and logic. You can't fundamentally change how it works or looks.
Can feel rigid. If your workflow doesn't map well to Smartsheet's paradigms, you'll be fighting the tool rather than using it.
Overkill or underkill. Smartsheet often has far more (or fewer) features than you actually need.
Clunky, outdated UX. Interface can feel outdated compared to newer tools.

Glide pros and cons

Glide is a no-code app builder that lets you create custom web or mobile apps on top of data sources like Google Sheets, Excel, Airtable, or its own internal tables. Glide is lean, adaptable, and infinitely scalable. It has advanced features like AI, automated workflows, and integrations without the high enterprise costs of Smartsheet.

Pros:

Fully tailored to your workflow. You design the interface, data model, and logic around exactly what your team needs, nothing more, nothing less.
Branded & white-labeled. Your app looks like your tool, not a generic SaaS product.
Flexible data model. You define the tables, relationships, and fields that make sense for your specific projects.
Cheaper at scale. Once built, Glide's per-editor pricing is more economical than Smartsheet’s per-seat enterprise plans for large teams.
Great for unique use cases. If your project management needs are non-standard, a custom app can handle edge cases that off-the-shelf tools can't.

Cons:

You have to build it. Even in no-code, designing a solid project management app will take some time and thought. Anyone can build in Glide without needing coding experience, but teams may want to hire a Glide Expert to get a solution faster or add advanced features.
Missing some advanced PM features. Things like Gantt charts, critical path analysis, or resource leveling require significant effort to replicate.

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Smartsheet improves the spreadsheet model. Glide moves beyond it

Smartsheet’s biggest advantage is familiarity. It feels like the natural next step for teams that already live in spreadsheets. Instead of starting from a blank software development process, a team can bring work into a sheet, add forms, build reports, create dashboards, and automate repetitive updates. For many organizations, that is a meaningful improvement over Excel or Google Sheets.

But Smartsheet still carries the logic of the spreadsheet. Work is organized in rows and columns. Users still need to understand where information lives, how sheets relate, what reports mean, and how updates flow through the system. Even when Smartsheet adds richer layers like dashboards and WorkApps, the underlying model is still work management built around structured work assets. Smartsheet describes WorkApps as role-based views that package sheets, dashboards, reports, third-party content, and other Smartsheet assets into easier-to-navigate apps.

Glide starts from a different assumption. Existing spreadsheets are used to build fully functional software applications, tailored to the specific use case they’re needed for. The spreadsheet or database is not the user experience; it is the backend. Users should not have to navigate rows, interpret fields, or understand the underlying structure. They should open an app and see exactly what they need to do.

This app-building ability makes it uniquely valuable for certain operational use cases. Apps built with Glide can be branded and white-labeled so they will look more professional to external users. They are fully mobile-optimized, making them easy to use in the field or on a worksite. They also have strong visibility and privacy controls, so you can provide tools and collect data without exposing your entire spreadsheet.

A project manager could build their own project management tool or tools in Glide that are tailored to their unique needs. They could also build whatever other tools they need and integrate them into their business’s workflows. Glide is a good platform for building apps for project management, task tracking, request and intake forms, approval workflows, resource and capacity tracking, status dashboards, reporting, document and asset management, or client or vendor portals.

Smartsheet makes spreadsheets more powerful. Glide turns spreadsheet data into a usable product.

The user experience difference is bigger than the feature difference

On paper, both tools can support forms, automations, permissions, dashboards, and integrations. But feature-by-feature comparisons can be misleading because the experience of using those features is very different.

Smartsheet is strongest when the people using the system are comfortable managing work through structured views. Project managers, PMOs, marketing operations teams, and cross-functional managers often benefit from the ability to move between grid views, reports, dashboards, timeline views, automations, and portfolio-level reporting. For them, Smartsheet’s structure is a strength.

Glide is strongest when the people using it are more comfortable with an intuitive app interface. The interface can be shaped around a role, workflow, department, or use case. Admins can see dashboards and approvals. Employees can see assigned tasks. Customers can see only their own records. Managers can see rollups, summaries, and activity across the team.

This is especially important for businesses with frontline or non-technical users. A spreadsheet-like system works when the user’s job is to manage information. An app works better when the user’s job is to complete a process.

That is why Glide is often the better fit for internal tools, field operations apps, inventory systems, customer portals, lightweight CRMs, order management tools, inspection apps, and approval workflows. In those cases, the goal is not just to track work. The goal is to make the work easier to do.

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Glide has a stronger model for role-based operational apps

Security and permissions are one of the clearest places where Glide’s app-builder model becomes valuable. Smartsheet has strong enterprise controls, especially for larger organizations, but its collaboration model is still centered on workspaces, sheets, reports, dashboards, and sharing.

Glide gives app builders more direct control over the experience each user receives. Glide’s Row Owners feature restricts which rows a signed-in user can download or access, preventing users from seeing rows they do not own even through browser inspection tools. Glide also supports Roles, which can be used to create different experiences and permissions for different users.

That matters because many real business apps are not one-size-fits-all. A customer portal, vendor portal, employee directory, project tracker, CRM, or field operations app often needs different users to access different records and different screens. In Smartsheet, that usually means managing access to sheets, reports, dashboards, or premium features like Dynamic View. In Glide, it is part of the app model itself.

This is one reason Glide is often a more natural fit for external-facing and multi-role systems. It lets a business build a single app where different people safely experience different slices of the same underlying system.

Smartsheet is stronger for formal project and portfolio management

If the core problem is project management, portfolio reporting, cross-functional visibility, or standardized program execution, Smartsheet has a more mature native toolkit. Its Business plan includes a timeline view, workload tracking, unlimited automations, reports, and dashboards, while Enterprise and Advanced Work Management add more governance, security, portfolio, and premium features.

Smartsheet is also better when an organization wants a single work-management environment across many teams. A PMO can use Smartsheet to standardize project templates, roll up reporting, manage dependencies, and coordinate stakeholders. Marketing teams can use it for campaign planning and approvals. Enterprise teams can use premium modules for portfolio management, data movement, secure request management, and advanced integrations.

Glide can support project tracking, but it may take time to create software that is as comprehensive as Smartsheet at its most robust. If you need detailed data visualization or features like Gantt charts, you may be better off with Smartsheet.

Automation works differently in each platform

Smartsheet automation is useful for work management. Teams can use it for notifications, reminders, approvals, update requests, status changes, and other sheet-driven workflow rules. This is a good fit for processes where the main unit of work is a row in a sheet.

Glide’s automation model is more app-native. Glide Workflows can be triggered by app interactions, schedules, incoming email, webhooks, and manual workflow triggers. App interaction workflows can run when a user presses a button or checks a box; schedule workflows can run in the background; webhook workflows can receive external POST requests; and email workflows can start when an email is received at a generated address.

The difference is not just capability. It is context. In Smartsheet, automation usually surrounds the sheet. In Glide, automation is embedded directly into the app experience. A user clicks a button, submits a form, scans an item, or completes a step, and the workflow runs from inside the tool they are already using.

For businesses trying to turn manual processes into guided systems, Glide’s model is often more intuitive. The automation is not something users need to understand. It is simply what the app does next.

Mobile use is one of Glide’s biggest advantages

Smartsheet has mobile apps, and for many project management or approval use cases, they are useful. But the mobile experience is still connected to the Smartsheet work-management model. Users are often interacting with sheets, forms, reports, dashboards, or WorkApps.

Glide is much more naturally suited to mobile operational work because the interface is designed like an app from the beginning. A Glide app can be used by field teams, warehouse staff, sales reps, event staff, technicians, inspectors, or managers who need to move quickly through a process without opening a dense spreadsheet-style tool.

This is one of the most practical reasons to choose Glide. If users are mostly desk-based managers, Smartsheet may be comfortable. If users are on phones, in the field, in warehouses, visiting customers, managing events, or collecting data on-site, Glide’s app-first experience is usually the better fit.

Pricing scales fast in Smartsheet for Enterprise features and seats

Smartsheet pricing is more traditional at the lower tiers. Its Pro plan is listed at $9 per member per month billed annually, while Business is listed at $19 per member per month billed annually. Enterprise and Advanced Work Management use custom pricing. The important detail is that many of Smartsheet’s more advanced capabilities sit in Enterprise, Advanced Work Management, or add-ons. Dynamic View starts at $125 per month, and Data Shuttle starts at $100 per month, according to Smartsheet’s pricing page.

That means Smartsheet can look inexpensive at first, especially for small teams, but the cost picture changes when a company needs premium features. Smartsheet's premium applications, like Dynamic View, Control Center, DataMesh, Bridge, and WorkApps, are priced separately from the base plans and can add 20–50% to total contract value. For mid-market and enterprise buyers, total annual contract values typically range from $15,000 to $250,000+.

Glide’s pricing is more tied to building and running apps. With Smartsheet, teams end up paying for bloat and features they don’t need. Glide is much more affordable at scale, and your apps have only the features your team will actually use.

Smartsheet has strong enterprise compliance

For large regulated organizations, Smartsheet has a clear advantage in compliance breadth. Smartsheet Gov has FedRAMP Moderate authorization and DoD Impact Level 4 provisional authorization, and Smartsheet describes the Gov environment as a platform built for government agencies on AWS GovCloud. Smartsheet also offers enterprise controls and compliance-oriented packaging that will matter to large IT and procurement teams.

Glide has also invested in security. Glide is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant as well as following FedRAMP, ISO 27001, PCI, and GDPR. It uses multiple security layers, including open-source tools, automated vulnerability scans, intrusion detection on our infrastructure, and independent penetration tests and security audits. You also have more controls around access and visibility at the individual app level.

However, if you are a government agency, a heavily regulated enterprise, or a healthcare organization with strict compliance requirements, Smartsheet may be easier to approve.

Build a better operations system with Glide

The cleanest way to choose between Glide and Smartsheet is to ask what kind of problem you are solving. If you need a standard project management solution and are happy with spreadsheets, Smartsheet is a strong platform. If you need adaptability, customization, and tools that help streamline operations (without the Enterprise expenses), Glide is the solution for you,

Glide isn’t just a better spreadsheet; it’s a tool that helps you craft the software you use for work every day. If you’re ready to start building, head to Glide University to learn or find a Glide Expert or Agency to build you something specialized to your business, quickly.