Smartsheet Limitations That Hit Growing Teams Hard

Smartsheet sits in an interesting spot. It looks like a spreadsheet, acts like a project management tool, and markets itself as an enterprise work management platform. For teams that need Gantt charts, resource tracking, and structured project plans, it genuinely delivers. The interface is familiar enough that spreadsheet-trained teams can pick it up quickly.

But Smartsheet was built around the concept of sheets — structured spreadsheets with project management features bolted on. When growing businesses push it beyond project tracking into complex workflows, cross-department reporting, or fine-grained access control, the cracks show up fast.

Pricing Adds Up Quickly

Smartsheet’s pricing is per-user, and the tiers create a familiar squeeze:

• Pro — US$9/user/month (billed annually), limited to 10 users
• Business — US$32/user/month (billed annually), minimum 3 users
• Enterprise — custom pricing

The Pro plan’s 10-user cap means any growing team is forced onto Business. A team of 25 on Business pays US$800/month — US$9,600/year. A team of 60 pays US$23,040/year. And you need Business for features growing teams consider baseline: activity log, document builder, unlimited automations, and workload tracking.

The real cost issue is that Smartsheet charges per user regardless of usage. The project manager who lives in Smartsheet all day and the executive who checks a dashboard once a week pay the same rate.

Automation Workflows Are Rigid

Smartsheet offers built-in automations triggered by row changes, dates, or approval requests. For simple scenarios, they work fine. But the engine has real constraints:

• No complex branching — logic is limited to simple if/then conditions on a single field. Multi-condition routing requires chaining fragile automations together.
• No loops or iteration — each automation acts on individual rows. Batch operations require workarounds.
• Limited cross-sheet actions — automations can move rows between sheets but can’t update fields in related sheets or trigger actions across workspaces.
• No error handling — if an automation fails, there’s no retry logic, no fallback, and no detailed error reporting.
• Action limits on lower plans — Pro limits you to 250 actions per month. A single busy automation burns through that in days.

Teams that need real workflow automation end up connecting Smartsheet to Zapier, Power Automate, or Make — adding cost, complexity, and another point of failure.

Reporting Doesn’t Answer Business Questions

Smartsheet’s reporting is functional for project-level visibility — you can pull data from multiple sheets and display charts on dashboards. For “how many tasks are overdue across all projects?” it’s adequate.

For actual business reporting, it falls short:

• No cross-workspace aggregation — reporting across multiple workspaces requires manual consolidation
• No calculated fields in reports — all formulas must exist in the source sheet, cluttering your working sheets
• Limited chart types — basic bar, pie, and line charts only. Data-heavy teams are forced to export to Excel or a BI tool
• Dashboards are static — no drill-down, no dynamic filtering, no interactivity

Permissions Create Awkward Trade-Offs

Smartsheet’s permissions work at the sheet and workspace level — view-only, editor, or admin. The granularity stops there:

• No row-level permissions — everyone with sheet access sees every row. The workaround is separate sheets per team, which fragments your data.
• No column-level restrictions — you can lock a column to prevent editing, but can’t hide it. Cost data, margins, and salary information are visible to anyone who can see the sheet.
• Form responses are all-or-nothing — you can’t restrict form access by user or role without external tools.

For a small project team, this works. For an organisation with contractors, department heads, and external clients, it forces uncomfortable compromises.

The Sheet-Based Architecture Hits a Ceiling

Smartsheet’s fundamental unit is the sheet, and this creates structural problems at scale:

• 500,000 cell limit per sheet — a sheet with 40 columns hits this at 12,500 rows. Add formula columns and you’re at the limit sooner.
• No relational data — sheets can reference others via cross-sheet formulas, but there’s no proper linking between records. Every sheet is essentially a flat table.
• Cross-sheet formulas are brittle — they reference specific ranges. If someone restructures a source sheet, formulas break silently.
• No transactional integrity — if an automation copies a row to Sheet B and updates Sheet C, and the second step fails, you end up with inconsistent data.

When Smartsheet Is Still the Right Call

Smartsheet remains strong for:

• Traditional project management — Gantt charts, critical path analysis, resource scheduling. This is what it was built for, and it does it well.
• Teams coming from Excel — the spreadsheet-like interface means almost zero learning curve
• Simple programme management — tracking 5-10 projects with status dashboards for leadership
• Government and compliance-heavy industries — strong compliance certifications and structured formatting suit regulated workflows

Planning Your Next Move

Keep what works. If your project managers love Smartsheet’s Gantt charts, don’t rip it out. Focus on the operational processes where the limitations cause the most pain.

Quantify the workarounds. How many hours per week does your team spend exporting data, building manual reports, or maintaining duplicate sheets for permissions? That’s your real cost.

Think beyond the category. Switching to Monday.com or Asana might solve one problem while introducing new ones. If your needs have outgrown project management tools entirely, the answer might be something purpose-built.

Migrate incrementally. Move the most painful process first. The goal isn’t to replace Smartsheet overnight — it’s to move the processes that have outgrown it while keeping the ones that still fit.

Smartsheet is excellent at showing teams how their projects and operations actually work. Every sheet you’ve built, every formula you’ve written, every workaround you’ve created — that’s a specification for what your next system needs to do. You haven’t wasted time. You’ve mapped your operations, and now you can build something that actually matches them.