Wisegrid gives your whole team a shared work surface at a price you can actually budget: $19 per editor per month, every feature included, no Enterprise tier you have to unlock for SSO or portfolio rollups. View-only collaborators stay free and are never auto-converted into a billable seat. Adding an editor is a deliberate $19 seat you choose, so there are no surprise true-ups and no quarterly invoice you didn't see coming.
7-day free trial, no credit card required. Every feature from day one, and a one-click Smartsheet import whenever you're ready. See the full comparison.
Smartsheet's User Subscription Model converts any user with editor permissions into a billable seat: editing an item triggers provisional membership, which auto-converts to a paid seat at the next true-up unless an admin downgrades.1
Wisegrid never auto-converts a viewer into a paid seat. View-only collaborators are always free, and editors are a deliberate $19 choice with every feature included. The number on your invoice only changes when you choose to add an editor.
Why did my Smartsheet bill go up? The true-up mechanics, explained →
Smartsheet caps every sheet at 500,000 cells.2 When you hit it, the only fix is to split the sheet, which then runs into Smartsheet's cross-sheet-reference limits.
Wisegrid raises the ceiling to 1,000,000 cells per sheet (twice the room) and warns you with in-product capacity meters before you ever hit a wall.
On Smartsheet, when two people edit at the same time, the last save wins: the cell shows the last saved change, with no live warning that someone's work was about to be replaced.3
Wisegrid catches the conflict at the row level: it tells you when a teammate has saved changes and lets you choose, instead of silently overwriting.
On Smartsheet, removing the branding from a form's footer is a paid upgrade: "Only Business and Enterprise users can turn it off to remove Smartsheet branding from the form footer," and "The option is enabled by default for other plan types."8 So a public form you send your own customers shows a line you didn't choose.
On Wisegrid an unbranded form is just how forms work: your logo, your colors, no "powered by" line, off by default. It's never sold back to you as an upgrade.
The walls aren't just capacity. Smartsheet's own pricing page draws hard seat lines around its plans, and small teams pay for them in both directions.
Smartsheet Pro is sold for "1-10 Members."9 Hire your eleventh person and Pro is over: you're moving to Business. And there's no retreat, because "The Pro plan is only available to new customers."9 Once you leave, you can't come back.
Wisegrid has no member tiers at all. Ten editors or forty, it's the same one plan; editor eleven never forces you onto a pricier tier.
Smartsheet Business requires "3+ Members."9 A two-person team that needs a Business feature buys a third seat for nobody.
Wisegrid has no seat minimum. Pay for exactly the editors you have, and add more only when a real person fills them.
On Smartsheet, the activity log requires a Business plan or above, and even then "Owners, Admins, and Editors must be paid users to view and export the activity log."10 Seeing who changed what is a paid seat, per person who wants to look.
Wisegrid's activity log is included, and anyone who can open the sheet can see its history. Knowing who changed what isn't an upsell.
If you've ever exported a Smartsheet sheet to Excel, you already know the sinking feeling: half of what made it work didn't come with it. That's not a bug in your export. It's documented behavior in Smartsheet's own help center.5
We don't export your sheet to a spreadsheet and back. We import it directly. Your formulas come over as live formulas, your attachments and structure come with them, and your column types stay the types you built.
And because the #1 migration fear is "what did it silently break?", the importer shows you exactly which formulas (if any) need a second look, so nothing changes behind your back.
Import from SmartsheetThe reason a Smartsheet export feels like a trap is the attachments: they're listed among the items "excluded from exports,"5 and the backup that does include files is weekly and gated to higher plans. We refuse to play that game. From any sheet's File menu, one Export Bundle (.zip) downloads the whole sheet as Excel plus every row attachment (foldered by row, with a manifest.csv) in a single click, on every plan. Get all your data out, attachments and all, whenever you want. No "request a backup," no plan gate, no leaving the files behind.
Here's the part nobody warns you about: the more your sheet grows, the less Smartsheet it gets. Push a sheet past 500,000 cells and you land in "large-scale sheets," a mode where, in Smartsheet's own words, "Not all Smartsheet capabilities are supported at this level of scale at this time."4 Succeeding on the platform is exactly what triggers the downgrade.
And it's walled off besides: large-scale sheets are "available to Enterprise plans only," aren't automatically activated, and an admin has to "explicitly opt-in" per sheet.4
On that large-scale sheet, Smartsheet's documentation lists Grid view, Reports, Mobile apps, the public API, Search, and Proofs among the capabilities that stop working, and forms can't be authored while most automations are disabled.4 So crossing the wall on Smartsheet means giving up the features you rely on.
And the usual escape hatch folds back on itself. The standard fix for the 500,000-cell wall is to split the sheet and stitch the pieces together with cross-sheet references, but Smartsheet caps those at 100 per sheet,6 and your hierarchy rollups don't survive the split: the CHILDREN, PARENT, and ANCESTORS functions return an #UNSUPPORTED CROSS-SHEET FORMULA error the moment they reference another sheet.7 So the very move meant to beat the cell wall quietly breaks the roll-up totals you split the sheet to keep.
Wisegrid never downgrades you for growing. 1,000,000 cells is the normal sheet, on the one plan, with every feature working. No Enterprise gate, no per-sheet opt-in, no list of things that stop working once your sheet gets big.
Teams running the same project again and again (client onboarding, construction jobs, store openings) get pushed toward Smartsheet Control Center. Here is what its own documentation says about the deal, and what Wisegrid ships instead: blueprints, approval-gated intake, and portfolio rollups, self-serve and included.
Control Center is a "premium capability" available on "Business, Enterprise, Advanced Work Management" plans, and "You must be a paid user" to access it.11 Its pricing isn't published anywhere: the marketplace page routes you to "Contact our team," alongside links to Smartsheet Professional Services.12
Wisegrid blueprints are self-serve and included. Saving, provisioning, profile fields, export, import, and form intake with an owner approval queue are all part of the plan. Portfolio rollups across up to 200 projects are included too. No add-on, no sales call, no services engagement to get started.
A Control Center blueprint is built from live folders of sheets in your account, including a config sheet its own FAQ warns about: "It's key that you never edit, add info, or remove anything directly in the config sheet unless you receive direct instructions to do so while troubleshooting."13 One wrong edit in the wrong sheet is a support ticket.
A Wisegrid blueprint is an immutable saved version, not a folder of live sheets. Editing your source project can't corrupt it, and there is no untouchable config sheet. It also exports as a JSON file you own, portable enough to re-import into another account.
Smartsheet's own Global Updates FAQ asks "Can Global Updates be undone?" and answers: "No."14 A bad push to your whole portfolio is permanent; the documented remedy is to adjust the template and run another update.
Honest contrast: Wisegrid's fleet updates aren't shipped yet (they're in build, and our feature page says so plainly). The rest of the loop is live: approval-gated intake, portfolio rollups across up to 200 projects, and the foundation built to do fleet updates safely, immutable blueprint versions plus a registry of exactly what each instance received. We'd rather tell you that than sell you an undo that doesn't exist.
The only Smartsheet number we publish is the one from their own documentation. Everything we haven't independently verified stays marked, not guessed.
1 Smartsheet's User Subscription Model: editing an item "triggers provisional membership because editing goes beyond what the Contributor seat type allows," reviewed quarterly (annual plans) or monthly before auto-billing unless an admin downgrades (Smartsheet User Subscription Model administrator documentation).
2 Smartsheet limits each sheet to 500,000 cells: "A sheet cannot exceed a total of 500,000 cells" (Smartsheet API documentation). Wisegrid raises that to 1,000,000.
3 Smartsheet's documented save behavior is last-write-wins: "When two people change information in the same cell roughly simultaneously, the cell displays the last saved change" (Smartsheet help documentation).
4 Smartsheet large-scale sheets are "available to Enterprise plans only," and "Not all Smartsheet capabilities are supported at this level of scale at this time" (Smartsheet large-scale sheets documentation).
5 Smartsheet's own export to Excel / Google Sheets: "Formulas aren't preserved"; Groupings, Summary rows, and Attachments are "excluded from exports"; for dropdown, contact list, checkbox, and symbol columns "Only text values are exported"; and "Exporting a Gantt chart to Excel exports only the task list it's based on" (Smartsheet export documentation).
6 Smartsheet caps cross-sheet references per sheet: "A sheet can include no more than 100 distinct cross-sheet references" (Smartsheet cross-sheet references documentation).
7 Smartsheet's hierarchy functions don't work across sheets: CHILDREN, PARENT, and ANCESTORS return the "#UNSUPPORTED CROSS-SHEET FORMULA" error when they reference another sheet (Smartsheet formula error messages documentation).
8 Smartsheet form-footer branding: "Only Business and Enterprise users can turn it off to remove Smartsheet branding from the form footer, confirmation footer, and mobile web form. The option is enabled by default for other plan types" (Smartsheet form display and submission options documentation).
9 Smartsheet's published plan seat lines: Pro is "1-10 Members," Business is "3+ Members," and "The Pro plan is only available to new customers" (Smartsheet pricing page).
10 Smartsheet's activity log requires a Business plan or above, and "Owners, Admins, and Editors must be paid users to view and export the activity log" (Smartsheet activity log documentation).
11 Smartsheet Control Center is a "premium capability," listed for "Business, Enterprise, Advanced Work Management" plans, and "You must be a paid user to access Smartsheet Control Center" (Smartsheet Control Center overview). Its pricing is not published; we therefore cite none.
12 Smartsheet's Control Center marketplace page offers "Contact our team" rather than a listed price, and links to Smartsheet Professional Services (Smartsheet Control Center marketplace page).
13 Smartsheet Control Center FAQ: "It's key that you never edit, add info, or remove anything directly in the config sheet unless you receive direct instructions to do so while troubleshooting any issues with your blueprint" (Smartsheet Control Center FAQ).
14 Smartsheet Control Center Global Updates FAQ: "Can Global Updates be undone?" "No. You can adjust the template report in the blueprint source folder and run the Global Update again" (Smartsheet Global Updates FAQ).
Smartsheet's hard cap is 500,000 cells per sheet.2 Wisegrid doubles it to 1,000,000, and our in-product capacity meters warn you at 80% so you see the wall coming instead of hitting it mid-quarter. No forced sheet-splitting, no broken cross-sheet rollups.
Paste your Smartsheet API token and we'll mirror your workspaces, sheets, formulas, and attachments, then show you exactly which (if any) formulas need a second look. It's all included in the one plan.
Bring your Smartsheet workspaces over and pick up exactly where you left off, with twice the headroom and a bill that won't surprise you. Your team already knows how to use it: same grid, same formulas, same forms. Nothing new to learn Monday morning.
Want the long version? Read the full Wisegrid vs Smartsheet comparison →
Planning the move itself? Start with how to get off Smartsheet, weigh the field in choosing a Smartsheet alternative, or go straight to exporting Smartsheet to Excel.