Recently, the demand for project management applications by businesses has broadened far beyond the gigantic Google Sheets, and other alternatives such as Smartsheet and Clickup are gaining traction. In an industry that Google Sheets once pioneered and led, the competition posed by these alternatives has become extremely fierce as people are coming to realise these two products are more powerful than Google Sheets in terms of features.

Not only this, businesses are beginning to prefer Smartsheet and Clickup for their greater reliability and less invasive policies, which have been considerably accentuated by the recent unearthing of the true colours of Google Sheets’s policies. The use of such applications is a vital part of business practices today, as research shows that at least one project management office (PMO) is now present in 89% of organizations, with 50 % having multiple PMOs.

Rising Demand For Alternatives

The recent reveal of how Google Sheets´s policies actually operate in practice has led to a surge in demand for alternatives to their products. Two of these have been explored below, in addition to their powerful features that have allured users away from Google Suite.

Best Project Management Software:

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a “software as a service” (SaaS) project management tool that builds on an orthodox “spreadsheet” method of managing tasks and other business responsibilities with added functionality in terms of time tracking, resource planning and workflow automations. What really sets Smartsheet apart from other software in its category is its customer resource management (CRM) capabilities, which combined with its robust budget tracking features, set it in a league of its own.

Smartsheet is also able to integrate more than 70 external applications, including Slack, Asana, Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams. This enables its users to tailor their program most effectively in order to meet their business needs. These are just some of the features that make this product more powerful for business use than Google Sheets.

In addition to this, training led by instructors is available for Smartsheet users as an add-on for all plans for ClickUp enterprise plan subscribers so that they can be onboard assistance. Its native pivot app facilitates the generation of roll-up sheets and charts using report data by its users. On top of this, its EMR/EHR feature is excellent for providing users with a single location for storing patients’ records, test results, and a list of medications to ensure continuous treatment plans.

Smartsheet business and enterprise plans include unlimited guests with editing rights while the unlimited guests of ClickUp’s business and enterprise plans only have viewing rights.

ClickUp

In comparison, ClickUp is a cloud-based project management software that also offers powerful resource, work and project management tools in addition to planning and collaboration capabilities. This innovative software supplies its users with entry to a myriad of external apps that can be integrated into the system to improve its functionality and potential.

Some of these third party applications include Trello, Asana, Dropbox, Salesforce, Slack and Microsoft Teams. The inclusion of this ability to access such services was built in to ensure that users have all the tools they could possibly need in their daily operations.

ClickUp offers a number of impressive features, such as its social media integration, which facilitates the management of social media accounts within the program by its users. Not only this, ClickUp also includes a native messaging application that its users can utilise to immediately link with coworkers for improved connectivity whilst working.

Concerns Surrounding Google’s Policies

A key driver in the demand for these alternatives to Google Sheets is the recent reveal of the reality of how Google's policies work in relation to its titular product. Concerns began to arise surrounding Sheets when businesses were shut out from their collaborations seemingly without reason.

Google One, the paid service behind Google's Cloud Storage, was recorded by many as disabling access to specific Sheets without providing a reason. Users were merely informed that the sheet was in violation of Google's policies and thus it was no longer able to be accessed by users.

Google provides an otherwise excellent service, but its handling, and the mere occurrence of this matter, caused many to consider alternatives that could be more reliable. Furthermore, users who contacted Google hoping to find a reason why their sheets were locked were simply met with a callous response to read their forums to discover the grounds, as Google would not provide specific reasons.

The lesson this should teach businesses is that they should take disaster prevention in relation to the use of these services more seriously. Moreover, it is beginning to be understood that giving too much power to large tech companies such as Google (by, for example, relying purely on their Sheets service for the functioning of a business) is a mistake that can evidently result in being locked out of an ecosystem seemingly at random.

Concluding Statement

In conclusion, it is a positive thing that Google's policies are creating demand for smaller entities providing similar functions. Making use of these smaller entities represents a positive step forward as it allows businesses to implement disaster prevention efforts that will mitigate the possibility of being locked out of their ability to work without reason. This, on top of the many alluring, powerful features of these smaller applications, is why many are beginning to make use of such less controlling services.

Industry publications such as The Digital Project Manager have gone to great lengths to provide articles on these topics, such as comparing Smartsheet and Clickup, to ensure that businesses are best equipped to choose the optimal service for them.