Spodus vs Smartsheet
A grid that looks like a spreadsheet is still a spreadsheet.
Smartsheet is work management in a familiar grid, and the familiarity is the appeal.
Spodus- Starting price
- Per licensed member, see smartsheet.com
- Quoted per seat — one rate at any size
- Plan banded by member count
- Pro to 10, Business 3+, Enterprise 10+
- Not offered
- Free read-only seats
- Included
- Not offered
- Grid, gantt & resource management
- Included
- Board, table, calendar
What sets us apart
Smartsheet does one job. Spodus does five.
Everything you'd bolt onto Smartsheet, and pay for separately, is already in one Spodus seat.
Smartsheet
The work management tool
- Priced per licensed member, with unlimited no-cost read-only and contributor seats alongside them.
- Plans banded by member count: Pro caps at 10, Business needs 3 or more, Enterprise 10 or more.
- Sheets, grids and gantt, not a pipeline with stages or an invoice with a balance.
- Business functions live elsewhere, so the CRM and the invoicing are still separate bills.
Spodus
The whole suite, one seat
- Quoted per seat, one rate at any size, for everyone who signs in, with no read-only tier to reason about.
- Records, not rows. A deal has a stage and a value; an invoice has a balance and a due date.
- Five finished products, CRM, finance, HR, support and a shared inbox.
- One customer record carrying the deal, the invoice and the ticket together.
What the bill is counted by
Check the member count, not the rate.
Smartsheet charges per licensed member and adds read-only seats at no cost, and each tier sets its own member floor or ceiling.
Smartsheet figures are their own published prices as of August 2026.
A Spodus bill has one meter.
- Seats, and only seats: the people you give a login.
- Not contacts, not the customers in your portal, not payroll headcount.
- No packs, no bands. The eleventh person is one more seat.
- One rate covers all five products. A plan sets limits and controls, never which products you get.
The argument
Why teams switch.
Three arguments for moving off Smartsheet, the row-by-row table behind them, and one argument against.
- 01
Rows do not have behaviour
A sheet can hold a column called balance. It cannot recalculate it when a payment is recorded, or reopen an invoice when a credit note is issued.
- 02
No plan that expires at ten members
Smartsheet's Pro plan caps at ten licensed members and the tiers above set their own minimums. Every self-serve Spodus plan runs to fifty people, and moving up buys capability rather than headroom.
- 03
Five products, not five more sheets
The CRM, the invoicing, the help desk and the HR you would build as sheets are finished products here, sharing one customer record.
Side by side.
Row by row, with Smartsheet’s own published plans in the right-hand column.
| Spodus | Smartsheet | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Quoted per seat — one rate at any size | Per licensed member, see smartsheet.com |
| Plan banded by member count | Pro to 10, Business 3+, Enterprise 10+ | |
| Free read-only seats | ||
| Grid, gantt & resource management | Board, table, calendar | |
| Records with real behaviour | Rows in a sheet | |
| Purpose-built CRM | ||
| Invoicing & finance | ||
| HR & people | ||
| Help desk | ||
| Shared inbox |
Smartsheet plans and pricing reflect publicly listed information as of August 2026. Spodus is priced per seat; customers in the support portal are free.
The honest part
Being fair about it.
Where Smartsheet fits better: large structured project portfolios, resource management, and the governance and controls a big organisation needs across hundreds of sheets.
Can Spodus replace Smartsheet?
For customer-facing work, yes: records, tasks, and board, table and calendar views over everything. For large project portfolios, gantt planning and resource management, no. Those are Smartsheet's core and are not in Spodus.
Is there a free read-only seat?
In Smartsheet yes, in Spodus no — every Spodus login counts, and we would rather say so than fudge it. The trade is what the seats buy and how they are counted: Smartsheet charges per licensed member on top of its tier floors, Spodus is one bill for all five products: a CRM, invoicing, a help desk, HR and team chat.
Can we import our sheets?
Yes. Export to CSV and import onto the matching Spodus records, with your columns mapped to fields.
Head to head
Compare Spodus with the rest of your stack.
The same side-by-side, for the other tools a Spodus seat replaces.
Trade Smartsheet for the whole suite.
Start today, or bring your own data to a demo and see it there.
