Smartsheet has been a staple of work management for over a decade. It brought structure to chaotic spreadsheets, gave project managers Gantt charts without Microsoft Project's price tag, and became the go-to collaboration hub for operations teams worldwide.
But the landscape has shifted, along with the demands on project management software. Smartsheet’s plans have priced out many collaborative teams. And teams today need flexibility to build the exact workflow they have, not adapt themselves to the workflow the software was designed around.
That's where Glide comes in.
Glide is a no-code app-building platform that lets teams turn their data into fully custom project management applications, without a single line of code. It's a fundamentally different approach to how project management software should work: built around your team, your data, and your process.
This article makes the case for why growing teams and organizations should seriously consider moving from Smartsheet to Glide, and how to think about that transition.
1. Cost: 2025 licensing changes made Smartsheet significantly more expensive
The number one reason teams cite for choosing Glide over Smartsheet is cost, especially as they scale.
In early 2025, Smartsheet overhauled its licensing model with the introduction of its User Subscription Model, and the changes were not team-friendly. Under the previous structure, users who didn't create sheets could collaborate for free. After the restructure, virtually all collaborating users, including internal staff who simply need to update a task or leave a comment, must become paid members.
Smartsheet effectively stopped offering widespread free collaboration, a feature that many teams had come to rely on as a core part of how they operated.
As one reviewer on Capterra noted, "Smartsheet has recently changed its licensing and is now really quite expensive for the number of users required, who don't necessarily need the full subscription." Another noted their collaboration was downgraded from collaborative features to viewer-only access, stripping away the benefits that made them choose the platform in the first place.
The pricing structure has also become more complex to manage. Smartsheet's 2025 licensing updates increase pressure on IT and procurement teams, as licensing is now tied directly to user classification and usage behavior. Mismanagement of roles, for example, misclassifying an internal staff member as a "Guest", can lead to unexpected up-charges at renewal. As teams grow, escalating costs aren't tied to the actual value the software delivers.
Glide doesn't penalize teams for letting more people access and interact with the tools they build. If you compare Business plans, Glide’s comes with 30 users already included in its $199 monthly plan and prices each additional user at $5, while Smartsheet’s Business plan costs $19 for every single user. That means a 60-person team would be paying $349 monthly on Glide but a whopping $1,140 for the same team on Smartsheet; an over 3x increase.
2. Visibility and privacy: Glide makes it easier to collaborate while preserving data privacy
When you work within a spreadsheet, like Smartsheet, all users have full visibility into the data in your sheet, and it can be hard to prevent accidental overwrites or unauthorized changes. Glide gives you much more granular control over who can see, edit, and share what information.
In Smartsheet, collaboration happens inside the sheet itself. Multiple people update rows, comment on tasks, attach files, manage timelines, and coordinate projects together. It works well when the work itself is fundamentally project management or process tracking.
In Glide, collaboration usually happens through a custom interface built for a specific role or workflow. Instead of asking warehouse staff, sales reps, or field technicians to work directly in a spreadsheet, you give them an app tailored to what they need to do. A salesperson might only see customer records and quote-generation buttons. A field employee might only see assigned jobs and barcode scanners. Managers might get dashboards and approvals.
Glide gives you sophisticated tools to control security, visibility, and permissions on a granular level. You can create one-way portals to collect or share specific information outside of your organization. You can also set roles for each user and control what they can see or access, so no sensitive information is shared or accidentally altered.
Smartsheet is a great collaborative tool between trusted internal teams or leaders. Glide is a better choice if you need more nuanced control and are sharing with a large group of employees or outside collaborators like clients, contractors, or customers.
Learn how RDG Planning & Design builds more efficient processes for architecture and design projects
Read their story3. Mobile accessibility: Glide was built to work on mobile
Walk onto any job site, warehouse floor, retail environment, or field service location and ask yourself: how many people are comfortably pulling up a Smartsheet grid on their phone? The honest answer is very few.
Smartsheet has a mobile app, but its experience is a compressed version of a desktop tool. It is functional, but not designed for the way field workers, technicians, sales reps, or operations staff want to interact with their data in the real world.
Glide was built intentionally for ease of use on mobile devices. Every app built on Glide is automatically optimized for both desktop and mobile breakpoints, ensuring a consistent, usable, and good-looking UX across devices. There's no additional work required.
This matters enormously for project management in the real world. When a team member in the field can pull up their task list, update a status, submit a photo of completed work, and log a note, the quality of project data improves. Having an interface that feels like a native app makes them more likely to log accurate data. Status updates get submitted promptly. Issues get flagged in real time. Project managers have an accurate view of progress rather than a spreadsheet that gets updated whenever someone remembers.
4. Flexible workflows: Smartsheet's rigid structure doesn’t match your needs
Smartsheet's familiar, spreadsheet-like interface is its greatest selling point, but also its biggest limitation. The grid format is comfortable for users comfortable in Excel. However, the more complex your project management needs become, the more you're forced to bend your workflow to fit Smartsheet's structure, rather than the other way around.
Real users have noted this ceiling repeatedly. One G2 reviewer observed that building more complex operational systems in Smartsheet requires significant workarounds that create technical debt over time. Another noted that the platform works reasonably well for linear project tracking but doesn't solve the broader operational challenges that teams face in practice.
Smartsheet is built to be a spreadsheet with project management features layered on top. Glide is built to be whatever you need it to be, using your data as its foundation. With Glide, you define the screens, the workflows, the logic, and the user experience. You're not confined to rows and columns.
“Prior to Glide, we had been using spreadsheets to collect project finance information. We'd send spreadsheets out to our client. We'd get 50, 60, or 70 of these spreadsheets back, and we'd have to recombine all of that data.”
Ron Heims
Director of Practice Innovation, RDG Planning & Design
5. Customizable apps: Glide lets you build the exact tool your project needs
The single most powerful reason to move to Glide is also the simplest: with Glide, you stop adapting your project to your software and start building software that adapts to your project.
Smartsheet gives you sheets, views, and reports. You can customize the fields and the automations, but the fundamental structure is fixed. If your project management process doesn't naturally fit a grid, you're making compromises.
Glide gives you a canvas. It provides over 40 pre-built components, such as charts, tables, lists, forms, maps, progress indicators, and media galleries, that you can assemble into screens using a drag-and-drop builder. On top of that, you can add powerful AI functionality and automated workflows to each of them. You can build:
- A task management dashboard with role-based views so executives see a high-level progress overview, while project managers see granular task status
- A field team app where workers check in, upload photos, submit forms, and update job status on their smartphones.
- A client portal where stakeholders can view project milestones, submit change requests, and access documents, with access controlled precisely to what they're allowed to see
- A resource planning tool that tracks team availability, links to active projects, and sends automated notifications when timelines are at risk
- A project intake system where requests come in through a form, get routed to the right team, and automatically generate a task record
None of this requires a developer. It requires someone with a good understanding of the project process and a few hours with Glide's builder. In fact, experienced Glide users report building fully functional project trackers in under two hours. You can also use an existing Project Management template as a starting point that you can customize immediately without starting from scratch. It already includes features for task tracking, progress visualization, team assignments, and deadline management.
BW: Workplace Experts runs a 9-figure construction company on a suite of 24 Glide apps
Read their story6. Better user adoption: Glide’s user-friendlyness makes team adoption easy
Here's a truth that Smartsheet veterans know well: rolling out Smartsheet across a team is hard. It's especially hard for teams with mixed technical comfort levels, frontline workers with limited desk time, or stakeholders who have no patience for learning a new interface.
Multiple reviewers have flagged adoption as a persistent challenge. One noted that the interface doesn't adapt well to different working styles, leading to inconsistent adoption across teams. Another shared that their rollout required mandatory training sessions, Smartsheet certification, and over ten hours of commitment from every user, and with most still struggled with basic proficiency.
Glide's adoption curve is fundamentally different because end users aren't using Glide. Instead, they're using the app you built for them. You design the interface to match their mental model, their vocabulary, and their workflow. A field technician doesn't log into Glide; they open their "Site Manager" app and see exactly the screens relevant to their day. A project coordinator doesn't navigate Smartsheet's views; they open "Project HQ" and see their queue.
In Smartsheet, the software is the product. In Glide, your app is the product, and you get to define what it looks like, what it does, and how intuitive it is for your team.
7. Relational data: Glide functions as a relational database and tool
One of Smartsheet's most persistent technical frustrations is its handling of data relationships. Because the platform is fundamentally spreadsheet-based, relating data across sheets, for example, pulling project names from one sheet when creating a task in another, requires manual VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH formulas. Smartsheet is simply not built to be a relational database.
This becomes a real problem at scale. As your project management system grows to include more projects, more teams, more cross-references between resources, tasks, milestones, and deliverables, the limitations of a flat-file architecture compound. Sheets proliferate. Formulas break. Data goes stale.
Glide’s native data layer, Glide Big Tables, is relational. You’re also able to connect to different relational databases such as Airtable and various SQL databases as your data source. Within Glide, you can define relationships between tables, pull related data across entities, and build interfaces that navigate these relationships naturally. A task can be linked to a project, a team member, a client, a budget line, and a set of documents, and your app can display and navigate all of these connections without complex formulas or manual data entry.
For organizations managing multi-project portfolios, multi-department programs, or complex delivery processes, this architectural difference is significant.
When Smartsheet Still Makes Sense
This article makes a strong case for Glide, but it’s just as important to acknowledge where Smartsheet remains the better choice.
If your organization's primary need is enterprise Gantt chart management with deep dependency tracking, baseline comparison, and portfolio-level timeline reporting, Smartsheet's mature project management features are still hard to match. If you require FedRAMP authorization for government work or operate in a highly regulated environment with specific compliance requirements, Smartsheet's compliance certifications may be prerequisites. And if your team is deeply embedded in Salesforce or Jira workflows, Smartsheet's native integrations with these platforms are more mature than Glide's current offering.
Compare Glide vs. Smartsheet in more detail here.
Migrating to Glide is faster than you think
Smartsheet is undoubtably a strong project management tool. But when you need interfaces their people will actually use, tools that adapt to their process rather than constraining it, and pricing plans that don’t penalize team collaboration, Glide is a better choice.
The prospect of migrating from an established tool to a new platform can be challenging, but the speed and ease of building and adopting new Glide apps are among its strongest advantages. Because Glide connects directly to Google Sheets, Airtable, Excel, and SQL databases, your existing project data doesn't need to be recreated from scratch. You import it, connect it to a Glide app, and start building your interface on top of data that already exists.
You don’t need to know coding or hire a team of engineers to create your Glide interfaces. Instead, you build what you need with a visual interface and get a working prototype in a few hours, or a sophisticated project management system in a few days.
Glide also offers a professional services option, Glide Solutions, which partners teams with vetted agency experts who can deliver a custom-built project management app in as little as four weeks. For organizations that want a fully tailored solution without investing internal resources in the build, this path makes migration from Smartsheet straightforward and fast.
