Stride vs Smartsheet — when grid-style PM stops being enough for engineering work.

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-meets-PM tool used widely for project portfolios in non-software organizations. Stride is built specifically for software delivery — story types, sprint cadence, AI on delivery artifacts, code-side integrations — none of which Smartsheet attempts.

Stride is best for

Engineering teams shipping software who need delivery-specific tooling and AI on PRDs, stories, tests, defects.

Smartsheet is best for

Mixed-discipline enterprises (marketing + ops + IT + engineering on the same dashboards) needing PPM-scale resource leveling.

Where Stride wins

Built-in software delivery primitives — sprints, story points, velocity, capacity planning, defect lifecycle, release notes. Smartsheet treats these as custom-cell content.
GitHub / GitLab / Bitbucket two-way integration. Smartsheet has no native code integration.
AI writes acceptance criteria, test cases, ADRs from delivery context. Smartsheet has AI but applied to spreadsheet-style data (summaries, formulas).
Procurement-friendly per-seat pricing with the AI included. Smartsheet Advance add-ons (Control Center, Data Shuttle, Bridge) push effective per-user cost into the $50-$80 range for software-style use.

Where Smartsheet wins

Smartsheet scales to enterprise PPM (Program/Project/Portfolio Management) with resource leveling, capacity planning across hundreds of projects, and financial roll-ups. Stride is built for engineering teams, not enterprise PPM.
Smartsheet integrates with 100+ third-party apps via the Smartsheet platform (Bridge, Data Shuttle). The integration breadth for non-engineering workflows is unmatched.
Familiar spreadsheet UX for finance, ops, and PM teams. Engineers may find it natural too, but the structure-vs-flexibility tradeoff favors Smartsheet when the work is mixed-discipline.

Feature comparison

Feature	Stride	Smartsheet
Software delivery primitives (story / epic / bug / spike)		Via custom columns
Sprint planning + velocity		Manual
GitHub / GitLab two-way sync
AI on delivery artifacts		Smartsheet AI for spreadsheet data
PPM resource leveling at scale
Per-user pricing (effective)	$29/seat/mo	$25-$80 depending on add-ons

Smartsheet Business at $25/user looks comparable to Stride Pro at $29 — until you add Smartsheet Advance ($30-$50/user) or Control Center ($55+/user) for the PPM features most enterprise customers actually buy. Like-for-like software-delivery deployment of Stride typically costs less than a Smartsheet PPM deployment for the same team size.

Frequently asked

Can I import from Smartsheet?

CSV/Excel export from Smartsheet → Stride CSV import works for rows + columns. Sheet-specific features (formulas, cross-sheet references, automations) don't round-trip; those features have no Stride equivalent.

What about Smartsheet Dashboards?

Stride has reporting dashboards for sprint metrics, defect trends, DORA metrics, and team capacity. Smartsheet's dashboards are more flexible (any column, any visualization) but less software-delivery-specific.

Does Stride do resource leveling across multiple projects?

Stride supports capacity tracking per team and per engineer across multiple projects. Full Smartsheet-style PPM resource leveling (matrix view of all engineers across all projects with capacity heatmap) is on roadmap, not shipped.

See it for yourself

Start at $5/seat/month. Load the sample project in 5 seconds and explore every module before committing your team.

Get started