Businesses strive to be efficient in their operations to attain improved productivity, increased production output, and eliminate time-consuming administration tasks. Increased efficiency also enables businesses not to rely on expensive machinery, external suppliers, or stop-gap employees.
Project management tools play a crucial role in ensuring that your business is efficient. The right project management tools can convert your team into an unstoppable machine for productivity and efficiency, and these tools include Smartsheet and Jira.
Smartsheet is designed for work management with robust features that do more than just project planning. Jira is more of a software development tool that can be connected with multiple valuable tools to meet the needs of your business.
In this article, we shall compare the features and functionality of Smartsheet and Jira to help you determine the perfect software for your current business needs. So, let’s get straight to it!
Smartsheet vs Jira – What Are they?
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a modern work management tool that manages projects, automates business processes, and helps you scale up to enterprise-level portfolios and programs. The tool is equipped with custom solutions to fit your work needs regardless of scale.
Smartsheet’s notable features include multiple views, activity logs, budget tracking, resource management, mobile access, and strategic planning.
The best thing about Smartsheet is that it integrates with software you are already using and is trusted by experts to move beyond best practices to ensure that all you do is safe and secure.
Since 2005, the platform has helped teams and individuals become high achievers by creating innovative work management solutions, positively impacting their communities, and mobilizing a diverse and passionate global team.
Smartsheet serves small businesses, non-profit organizations, and about 80% of the Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
It is a game-changing software redefining the possibilities of empowering people to do more in work management. The value-driven tool operates on a core belief that great work experience can inspire, transform, and move the world to greater heights.
Smartsheet has over 3,000 employees, and while it’s headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, the tool serves customers in 190 countries. Smartsheet also believes that security, reliability, and privacy are foundational in protecting customer data.
Jira
Jira is the number one solution for agile teams. It is commonly referred to as a bug and issue-tracking software, but it does more. It is home to agile work management solutions, which power collaboration across teams.
This platform offers various products and purpose-built deployment options for software, business, IT, Ops teams, and more.
With Jira, your team can plan, assign, track, manage work, and report on everything, including customer support efforts. Jira has templates and solutions crafted for every team to ensure that work moves transparently across an organization.
Jira is also a robust project management tool with features for task management, automation, calendar, reporting, roadmaps, dashboards, and mobile access.
Jira was developed by Atlassian and is ideal for software development, so this might not be a tool if you are not into information technology. Jira can help you move fast, stay aligned, and build better.
Work becomes more manageable and visible when it all happens in one place. Thanks to Jira, collaboration is now made more accessible.
It provides templates to give you a head start but allows you to customize them as you grow as the tool adapts to your work and not the other way around.
Jira believes in open relationships. As a result, it integrates with the tools you are already using and helps you stay focused on codes and aligning business. The software is trusted by over 100,000 companies and is built for teams of one to 20,000 agile members.
It has the best features for privacy and security, and it’s all you need for every step of your project management journey while letting you scale up without friction.
Smartsheet vs Jira – Getting Started
Smartsheet
Your first time using Smartsheet can be overwhelming. The best thing is that you can learn how to use the tool through various learning paths available using a learning style that best suits your preferences.
You can start your Smartsheet journey through its learning center, complete with learning tracks. These learning tracks are further broken down into help articles, webinars, user experience, and more.
The Smartsheet community is also an excellent resource for exploring and troubleshooting issues whenever they arise. It is possible that someone else has had a similar experience, making it easy to find a solution.
If you don’t see a solution immediately, ask your fellow users to answer it. You can also learn more about the tool through events and various webinars on its events page. You’ll find a blend of free webinars, Q&A sessions, and paid instructor-led pieces of training on the events page.
The Smartsheet solution center is packed with templates and tools you need to move faster, drive innovation, and achieve more.
YouTube can also be a great source of information when getting started with Smartsheet, as it’s always packed with helpful videos and tutorials for learning something new.
Jira
It is easy to learn how to use the tool, as the first thing to notice on the tool is how everything is exceptionally laid down.
The platform is kind enough to provide a sidebar on your right labeled “quick start” to help you learn how to use the software faster. Jira gives you options on the issues you wish to see as pop-ups, which ones to read, complete tutorials, and which to watch a video.
The tool offers a course for new users called “Get started with Jira.” The self-paced course combines the Jira software basics and is an excellent opportunity to learn critical concepts such as issues, boards, and projects.
You will also learn how to organize and manage your work with Jira. While the course is aimed at helping you learn the basics of the Jira software, it also lets you understand the basics of other Jira products.
The Jira software guides and tutorials are made of all you need to know about buying, using, and customizing the software to suit your project management needs.
Smartsheet vs Jira – Features
Smartsheet
Dashboards
Smartsheet dashboards enable you, your stakeholders, and your leadership to have a robust and real-time view of the status of critical trends, top KPIs, and summary reports.
The dashboards enable you to rapidly adapt to the changing working conditions and identify market trends that use easy widgets to display charts, live data, and critical metrics.
You can customize your dashboard to communicate and share what matters the most. Smartsheet dashboards are ideal for tracking your portfolio health, KPI and revenue, and monitoring your financial performance.
Integrations
Smartsheet integrates with the application for customer support, business intelligence, chat, payroll, and mobile app creation. These integrations include AppSheet, Rippling, Tableau, Microsoft Teams, Zendesk, and most of your favorite cloud tools.
Smartsheet’s integrations get your work done in context and without switching from one app to another. While you can do more with integrations, some integrations may require purchasing eligible Smartsheet Enterprise and Business plans.
Integrations also improve team decision-making and collaboration, get alerts, and send crucial communication to keep your team informed.
Work Insights
Smartsheet gives you intelligent insights to help you make better decisions about your work. Its insights help you uncover and visualize key trends, activities, and bottlenecks.
This feature enables Smartsheet to automatically analyze your sheet data based on the filters you select and easily understand beautiful visualizations of critical trends.
Through work insights, you can share visualizations and key data to keep your stakeholders aligned.
WorkApps
WorkApps is a feature that helps you build intuitive web and mobile apps to streamline your business and simplify collaboration without using code. The feature enables you to unify your solution by directly creating apps from your sheets, forms, dashboards, reports, and more.
Once you create the app, you can tailor its experience for your team based on their roles and ability to work together from the same underlying datasets. With Smartsheet, you can build and launch an app in minutes and scale up your apps to a multi-security Smartsheet platform.
Automation
Smartsheet helps you implement simple yet powerful automated workflows in minutes. It enables you to automate repetitive tasks by sending requests, alerts, approvals, and updates.
Automation empowers your business to own workflows by combining conditional paths and multiple actions in the most intuitive visual editor. You can set up recurring workflows including daily deadline reminders and weekly status requests.
Jira
Roadmaps
Roadmaps help you plan smarter and communicate better with your team. They help keep your team and the organization in sync and stay on target to achieve your goals.
Roadmaps enable you to view important initiatives and plan and track progress on the bigger picture across multiple teams. With roadmaps, you can track dependencies across projects, teams, and initiatives and get ahead of blockers across the organization.
Reports and Insights
Reporting in Jira software means delivering value to your customers using real-time insights at your fingertips. Through this feature, Jira helps you and your team to make data-driven decisions with agile dashboards, agile reports, and more.
Jira reports help you improve delivery and performance. Reports offer critical insights for Kanban, scrum, and all agile methodologies.
This platform offers reporting in different formats. You can find your project reports on its home screen and add or arrange gadgets in dashboards.
Project Flexibility
Jira offers project flexibility through anatomy and structure for your company or team-managed projects to fit around workflows. You’ll also enjoy Jira’s flexibility through its customizable workflows that map any work style.
The power of the Jira software, plus its flexibility, extends with apps and integrations. There are over 3,000 apps and integrations that you can explore with the tool. Browse through Jira’s category pages to discover more useful apps you may not have heard of.
Open DevOps
Vendors hardly deliver all your team needs to do DevOps. Additionally, using multiple solutions can be messy.
Also Read: Best Open-source Trello Alternatives
The best thing about using the Jira software as your central source of truth for your DevOps practices is that it can lead to unlocking the extensibility of an open and diverse toolchain that enables easy coordination.
Regardless of how your team works, Jira’s open DevOps integrates with your existing tools and the new tools you’ll eventually acquire.
User-Friendliness
Jira is incredibly user-friendly and is ideal for beginners and veterans. It features a laid-out interface that allows you to quickly jump from one board to function and code. You’ll also like its tutorials to help get you started within minutes.
Smartsheet vs Jira – Customer Support
Smartsheet
Smartsheet offers customer support in various categories. It has global 24-hour phone support, which is limited to specific plan types.
The standard support package includes 24/7 global phone support and full access to Smartsheet eLearning content. This package is ideal for newbies and experienced Smartsheet users.
Other categories for Smartsheet’s customer support include the professional support package and Pro Desk. Professional support includes one-on-one coaching sessions with Pro Desk, 24/7 global phone support, and the Smartsheet University eLearning community.
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Jira
Jira has a portal and help center where you can raise requests and get information. It also has a support and troubleshooting tools plugin to help you create a support request with the Atlassian team.
Jira customer support is bundled with the standard, premium, and enterprise plans. Its free plan gives you access to self-help resources, while the premium package gives you access to 24/7 help on high-impact issues and fast response times.
The enterprise plan gives you access to 24/7 help on all your technical issues, a dedicated senior support team, and phone support.
Smartsheet vs Jira – Pricing
Smartsheet
Smartsheet offers flexible pricing plans to grow your business. It has three plans, and you can choose to either be billed monthly or yearly.
The Pro Plan costs $7 per user and serves a maximum of 10 users with unlimited viewers. The Business Plan at $25 per user serves a minimum of three users and unlimited editors.
If you run an organization with processes at scale with enterprise-grade controls, I recommend that you contact the team for custom prices through the Enterprise plan.
Jira
You can use Jira for free if you have a small team of 10 to help you work efficiently. But suppose you have a growing team with the objective of building more together.
In that case, I recommend purchasing one of its paid plans, including the Standard plan at $7.75 per user, the Premium plan at $15.25 per user, or request a custom quote for the Enterprise plan.
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Smartsheet vs Jira – Similarities and Differences
Similarities
Both Jira and Smartsheet are known project management solutions with ample features to empower your team to manage projects, automate workflows, track work, build new solutions, and facilitate smoother project management for businesses.
They offer mobile apps for iOS and Android devices, enabling project managers and team members to work from anywhere.
Smartsheet and Jira are good at task management. The Smartsheet task management feature allows you to assign and monitor tasks in various ways. Jira allows you to manage tasks through scrum boards, roadmaps, and Kanban boards, which can be viewed by all team members so that everyone is informed on what is happening.
Both Jira and Smartsheet offer reporting capabilities. Smartsheet lets you compile information from various sheets and select data you wish to display through reports.
Jira reports are a collection of essential project management data. Jira reports include time-tracking reports, burn-down charts, and workload reports.
Differences
Smartsheet differs from Jira because it is a work management solution that manages tasks and the work pipeline.
On the other hand, Jira is a software development solution that focuses on industry-specific features such as robust issue and bug tracking, making it a top management tool for developers and software companies.
Smartsheet combines familiarity spreadsheets with communication, visual timeline management, and automated workflows.
Smartsheet has customization tools, including changeable column types and conditional formatting, which makes Smartsheet ideal for data handling and storage. Jira is mainly used for issue management and project planning.
Smartsheet is primarily used for project planning and project collaboration. It is easy to use and has an activity log tool to help you stay informed on details of all that is happening with your project.
On the other hand, Jira has much more to offer regarding reports and integrations. Its broader integration possibility enables the tool to integrate with over 3,000 business platforms for team communication, remote support, visual collaboration, time tracking, and video conferencing.
Jira is best for complex functions like project management, bug tracking, and scrum and Kanban software development. Smartsheet is more than a productivity tool with the power to help your organization achieve more.
Smartsheet has an intuitive interface ideal for users who spend more time working on spreadsheets. It has unique features, such as a client portal, budget management, and cost-to-completion tracking, which are unavailable on the Jira platform.
Smartsheet vs Jira – Pros and Cons
Smartsheet Pros
- Smartsheet is an excellent solution that lets you plan, automate, track, and report on projects.
- Everyone involved in a project can see what is required to keep the project on track with an overview of all projects, which increases transparency and accountability.
- Smartsheet gives you real-time project visibility to help you make informed decisions.
- The tool can point out bottlenecks and delays before they become a problem.
- Smartsheet brings together functional teams regardless of their location.
- It makes teams more productive, with reduced planning time and more time for action.
Smartsheet Cons
- Smartsheet does not have any integrated form of time tracking.
- Sometimes viewing rows on your mobile app does not align properly when scrolling, and you cannot consider changes in real-time.
Jira Pros
- Jira is an excellent tool for issue management. Jira was initially created as a bug-tracking tool and excelled in that area.
- Jira is highly customizable. Whether you want to use it as a project management tool, task management tool, or issue tracking solution, it can be customized to fit various requirements. You can also customize reports, workflows, and scrum boards.
- Jira integrates with multiple third-party software to make your work easier. You can enhance the tool’s functionality by choosing from over 3,000 apps in the Atlassian Marketplace.
- The tool is ideal for different types of users, including project managers, developers, engineers, and non-technical professionals, among others.
Jira Cons
- Its interface can be confusing, and it might take time to learn how it works, making it hard to manage tasks.
- It is difficult to set up and complicated to use.
Final Words: Smartsheet vs Jira – Which is Better?
It’s no doubt that Smartsheet and Jira have robust features to facilitate smoother project management for your business.
Jira is a great fit for software development teams looking to track every step of software development or agile teams who need to track bugs.
Smartsheet has an excellent selection of features to keep you informed on what is happening with your projects.
Since both tools are good at their job, I recommend that you choose a tool based on your business needs.
If you are not sure as to whether the tool will work for you, opt for their free trial versions and only purchase the tool when certain that it will cater to your needs.
