Smartsheet alternative
A Smartsheet alternative built for projects, not spreadsheets
Keep the clarity of structured tracking. Gain a purpose-built PMO system where schedules recalculate, capacity comes from real availability, actuals update costs, and every project rolls into live portfolio reporting.
- Native capacity and financials
- 14-day free trial
- Human migration guidance
Beyond spreadsheet-driven projects
A portfolio is a network of decisions, not a collection of sheets
Smartsheet's grid is familiar and flexible. But a PMO also needs to know how one change affects dates, people, budgets, risks, and priorities across every project.
The familiar strength
Flexible grid-based tracking
Rows, columns, formulas, and views make structured work easy to capture and organize.
Celoxis
A connected project model
Schedules, assignments, actuals, costs, risks, and portfolio KPIs update from the same live data.
Where scale adds friction
The links become the system
As sheets, formulas, reports, and add-ons multiply, maintaining the connections becomes ongoing PMO work.
Purpose-built PMO depth
Manage delivery with more than rows, columns, and formulas
Celoxis gives each project control its own behavior and intelligence, while keeping every control connected to the wider portfolio.
- 01
Schedules that recalculate
Build task hierarchies, dependencies, constraints, critical paths, multiple calendars, baselines, and inter-project dependencies in a true scheduling engine.
- 02
Capacity based on reality
Calculate demand and availability from live assignments, work calendars, roles, holidays, leave, and commitments across every active project.
- 03
Time and expenses in context
Capture actual hours, billable and non-billable expenses, receipts, and approvals against the same projects, tasks, and budgets.
- 04
Financials, not cost columns
Track budgets, planned and actual costs, revenue, billing, cash flow, profit, and margin using a native project financial model.
- 05
Risks and governance built in
Run risk registers, issues, requests, changes, and other governance processes through configurable workflow apps with rules and escalations.
- 06
Portfolio reporting without roll-up work
Create drill-down dashboards, trend reports, and scheduled reports across projects, portfolios, resources, financials, and custom fields.
Connected by design
Change one plan. See every impact.
When a task moves in Celoxis, the scheduling engine recalculates dependent work and critical paths. Resource demand changes with the assignments. Time and expenses update actual costs. Risks and project health flow into portfolio reporting.
Your PMO spends less time checking formulas, links, and roll-ups, and more time deciding what to do next.
- A task movesBuild finishes Oct 24Build now finishes Oct 31
- Schedule and critical path recalculateLaunch planned for Nov 07Launch moves to Nov 14, successors updated
- Resource demand shiftsSR fully booked in weeks 2 and 3SR over-allocated in week 4, flagged
- Costs and forecast updateBudget health: on trackCost forecast revised, budget health at risk
- Portfolio reporting reflects it18 projects on trackHealth rolls up to leadership dashboards, no manual roll-up
One project model. Every downstream view stays current.
The practical difference
Ask what updates automatically
The real comparison is not whether both products can display the data. It is how much work your PMO must do to keep the data connected and trustworthy.
Both setups can display the data. The difference is how much your PMO has to maintain by hand to keep it connected and trustworthy.
A task slips. What changes?
Dates, formulas, links, and reports may need review.
Successors, critical path, forecast dates, workload, and portfolio reports recalculate.
Can we accept new work?
Capacity is assembled from separate views and maintained availability data.
Live assignments and calendars show demand, availability, and over-allocation across projects.
Are we within budget?
Cost fields and formulas must be designed, connected, and maintained.
Budgets, time, expenses, cost, revenue, forecast, and margin share one financial model.
What needs leadership attention?
Status must be consolidated into a portfolio view.
Live project health, risks, milestones, financials, and capacity roll up automatically.
Can leaders trust the report?
Confidence depends on every source sheet and link being current.
Leaders drill from portfolio KPIs to the underlying project, task, cost, or risk.
- Updates automatically from live data
- Needs manual upkeep to stay current
Guided migration
Bring the work. Leave the spreadsheet architecture behind.
Celoxis helps map your existing projects, fields, workflows, roles, and reports into a purpose-built PMO setup. You keep the business knowledge in your sheets without carrying forward every workaround used to connect them.
Bring one Smartsheet project to the demo and see how the move would work on your own data.
Where Celoxis fits
Enterprise control, without the enterprise implementation
Every category of tool trades something away. Task tools trade depth, desktop schedulers trade breadth, legacy PPM trades adoption. Celoxis is built for the quadrant where control and usability meet.
Fast, but shallow
- Great for team tasks, boards and collaboration
- Limited capacity, resource and financial visibility
- Struggle to scale across teams and portfolios
Work gets managed. The business does not.
The execution control zone
Execution Control- Scheduling
- Resources
- Financials
- Governance
- Portfolio
- Insights
Enterprise-grade control with team-friendly adoption.
Precise, but isolated
- Excellent single-project scheduling depth
- One plan at a time: no live portfolio or capacity view
- Financials, reporting and intake handled in other tools
Every plan is accurate. The portfolio is still assembled by hand.
Powerful, but painful
- Strong governance, portfolio and financial control
- Heavy administration and long deployment cycles
- Low team adoption slows execution
You pay for control in complexity and change effort.
Only one quadrant gives you enterprise control without slowing the people doing the work.
Celoxis connects portfolio control directly to how work gets done.
Execution OS
This is not generic productivity. This is execution control.
The delivery lifecycle
One system from the first request to the reported outcome
Scheduling is one stage of nine. Celoxis carries the same plan, the same numbers and the same people through all of them, so nothing is re-entered at a handover.
Stage 01 · Demand intake
Every request enters one funnel
Project, change and service requests arrive through dynamic forms with conditional logic, so intake is structured from the first field instead of scattered across email and spreadsheets.
- Dynamic request forms
- Conditional logic
- Automated routing
Go beyond spreadsheets
The capabilities that appear once you manage a portfolio
Pick a capability to see what it covers and the real Celoxis screen your teams will work in.
Project Management
From tracking requests to profits and everything in between
Plan portfolios, sequence demand, and run projects end-to-end with real critical-path scheduling that adjusts as reality shifts.
Resource Management
Right people, right work, real-time capacity
Allocate people by availability, demand, and skills, and optimize utilization with accurate, real-time workload charts.
Financial Management
Real-time budgets, margins, and profitability
Get real-time visibility into budgets, spend, receivables, and profitability across every project and portfolio.
Dashboards & Reporting
360° insight, fully customizable
Consolidate real-time insight across projects and teams with super-powerful, fully customizable dashboards and reports.
Risk & Issue Management
See what puts delivery at risk - early
Track risks, issues, and project health from one place, with RAG indicators and automatic alerts the moment anything slips.
Workflow Automation
Your processes, running alongside your projects
Track business processes alongside projects with built-in workflow apps - or build your own with custom fields, routing rules, and escalation policies.
AI Project Intelligence
Meet LEX - decisions, earlier
More than an assistant. LEX analyzes your live project data to deliver real-time insight, actionable solutions, and recommendations from plain-English commands.
Switching
A switch you can run in phases
Existing project data comes across, the Microsoft tools your teams already work in stay connected, and onboarding is guided, not left to your team.
Smartsheet migration
Your existing projects are the starting point
Bring project data in with import tools, keep working alongside Microsoft 365, and connect the rest of your delivery stack through 400+ integrations and the REST API.
- Import tools for existing project data, including Excel
- Microsoft 365 and Okta single sign-on
- Jira, Azure DevOps and QuickBooks for teams already on them
- REST API, webhooks and Zapier for everything else
Excel
Microsoft 365Plans, resources and financials in one platform- 01
Evaluate
Trial with a real project
Start the 14-day trial with sample data, then bring in one of your own projects. Judge the platform on work you recognize, not a demo dataset.
- 02
Configure
Match your own process
Set up portfolios, custom fields, security roles, rate cards and approval workflow so governance follows the process you already have.
- 03
Onboard
Get the PMO live first
Guided onboarding and data migration bring the PMO across, with templates and reports in place before the wider rollout.
- 04
Roll out
Add teams in phases
Move portfolio by portfolio, keeping Smartsheet available while the transition runs. Nothing has to move on one date.
Cloud or on-premise. Your choice.
Run Celoxis in our secure managed cloud, or host it on your own servers when data residency and internal governance decide the answer.
Celoxis Cloud
- Enterprise-grade infrastructure, performance & redundancy
- Encryption, automated backups & role-based access
- Done-for-you setup - live in weeks, not quarters
- Always on the latest release, zero maintenance
On-Premise
- Host on your own physical or private-cloud servers
- Full control over data residency & governance
- One-time perpetual license, transferable seats
- Ideal for regulated, defense & security-first environments
Customer proof
Rated by the reviewers enterprise buyers check first
A consistent top ranker across the major software review platforms, and used to run mission-critical portfolios worldwide.
G2
Capterra
Gartner
Celoxis gives us real-time project status without depending on project managers to self-report. That visibility changed how we run our PMO.
Excellent features and genuinely responsive support. The reporting and dashboards give us the depth we need to manage global implementation projects.
Celoxis was built to run real projects. It changed how we work - our decision-making, resourcing, and reporting are all in one place now.
Frequently asked questions
Questions Smartsheet users ask
01Is Celoxis a true Smartsheet alternative?
Yes, particularly for PMOs and project teams that have outgrown spreadsheet-driven tracking. Celoxis combines scheduling, resource capacity, time and expenses, financials, risks, workflows, and portfolio reporting in one connected product.
02Will users lose the clarity of a grid?
No. Celoxis provides structured, familiar views for project data while adding purpose-built Gantt, Kanban, workload, financial, dashboard, and portfolio views. Teams use the view that fits the decision without breaking the underlying project model.
03Does Celoxis provide native resource and capacity planning?
Yes. Capacity planning and cross-project workload management are built in. Celoxis uses actual assignments, calendars, leave, availability, and roles to calculate utilization and future demand.
04Can Celoxis track budgets, costs, and actual hours?
Yes. Budgets, planned hours, timesheets, expenses, costs, revenue, billing, forecasts, profit, and margin are connected to the project plan and available for cross-project reporting.
05Can we model our existing approval and governance processes?
Yes. Configurable workflow apps can model risks, issues, requests, change control, defects, and other business processes using custom fields, routing, rules, notifications, and escalations.
06Can Celoxis help us move from Smartsheet?
Yes. Celoxis provides import tools and human onboarding guidance to map your project data, workflows, roles, and reports into a connected PMO setup.
- ★★★★★4.6/5 on G2
- 500+ organizations, including NASA, Tesla & the Fortune 500
Bring one Smartsheet project
and one report your PMO maintains manually.
We will show how the plan, capacity, time, costs, risks, and portfolio reporting work as one connected system in Celoxis.
- 14-day free trial
- No credit card required
- All features included
- Import your existing plan