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SharePoint vs Smartsheet
March 19, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
58★
SharePoint's multi-purpose platform allows for managing and provisioning of intranet portals, extranets and websites, document management and file management, collaboration spaces, social networking tools, enterprise search, business intelligence tooling, process/information integration, and third-party developed solutions. SharePoint can also be used as a web application development platform.
28★
Smartsheet is an online project management and crowdsourcing tool. It allows owners of information to comprehensively involve contributors through authenticated access, publicly-accessible published sheets, or via embeddable survey forms. Functionality is focused on the ability to organize, share, and update tasks and files.
SharePoint and Smartsheet are two mighty tools in the ever-expanding digital cosmos of work, both designed to ensure that humans spend as little time actually working as possible while still appearing tremendously busy. They allow people to share documents, assign tasks, automate things they didn’t want to do in the first place and generally collaborate in a way that convinces management that productivity is happening. Both integrate with other applications, both have permissions settings complicated enough to lock yourself out of your own work and both are designed to stop just short of achieving sentience.
SharePoint, a creation of Microsoft from the distant land of 2001, was originally designed as a place for enterprises to store all their files in a vast, labyrinthine structure, ensuring that no document would ever be found twice by the same person. It thrives in corporate environments where someone, somewhere, has a deep understanding of its metadata capabilities—though no one has actually met this person. It integrates seamlessly (or at least, with an air of determined optimism) with other Microsoft products, allowing entire companies to shuffle files between OneDrive, Teams and mysterious internal portals that nobody can quite navigate.
Smartsheet, on the other hand, hails from 2006 and was created by a company that, astonishingly, named itself Smartsheet Inc., thus ensuring that no one would ever be confused about what it does. It resembles a spreadsheet that decided one day to break free from its Excel constraints and become something greater, like a caterpillar emerging as a butterfly that organizes projects. It’s simpler, friendlier and doesn’t require an IT department to befriend it. Where SharePoint is an intranet-driven fortress of document storage, Smartsheet is a breezy, task-tracking, work-execution playground where people can pretend they are keeping things perfectly under control—right up until the deadlines start flying at them like panicked pigeons.
See also: Top 10 Intranet Portals
SharePoint, a creation of Microsoft from the distant land of 2001, was originally designed as a place for enterprises to store all their files in a vast, labyrinthine structure, ensuring that no document would ever be found twice by the same person. It thrives in corporate environments where someone, somewhere, has a deep understanding of its metadata capabilities—though no one has actually met this person. It integrates seamlessly (or at least, with an air of determined optimism) with other Microsoft products, allowing entire companies to shuffle files between OneDrive, Teams and mysterious internal portals that nobody can quite navigate.
Smartsheet, on the other hand, hails from 2006 and was created by a company that, astonishingly, named itself Smartsheet Inc., thus ensuring that no one would ever be confused about what it does. It resembles a spreadsheet that decided one day to break free from its Excel constraints and become something greater, like a caterpillar emerging as a butterfly that organizes projects. It’s simpler, friendlier and doesn’t require an IT department to befriend it. Where SharePoint is an intranet-driven fortress of document storage, Smartsheet is a breezy, task-tracking, work-execution playground where people can pretend they are keeping things perfectly under control—right up until the deadlines start flying at them like panicked pigeons.
See also: Top 10 Intranet Portals
