A Smartsheet alternative without per-user, per-month pricing
Smartsheet turns a spreadsheet into a project tool with Gantt and resourcing add-ons billed per user. shadow-planner is a Smartsheet alternative built the other way round — Gantt and resource utilisation are the core, not an upgrade, for €4,99 once.
Smartsheet's pitch is familiar to anyone who has planned in Excel: keep the grid you know, add Gantt views, automation and resource management on top. It's a capable, enterprise-grade tool, and organisations that live in spreadsheets get a lot out of it. But the things that make a plan a plan — dependency-aware timelines, capacity vs. allocation, portfolio roll-ups — often sit in higher tiers, priced per user per month, and the resourcing features specifically are frequently a paid add-on rather than something everyone gets.
shadow-planner starts from the opposite direction. It isn't a spreadsheet with project features bolted on; it's a desktop planning tool where the Gantt chart, resource utilisation and portfolio view are the product, included from the free tier, with a €4,99 one-time purchase to remove the free tier's project and employee limits — no per-seat licensing at all.
Side by side
| shadow-planner | Smartsheet | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Planning and controlling: timelines, capacity, scenarios | Spreadsheet-style work management with project add-ons |
| Pricing | Free tier; €4,99 one-time, no per-seat fee | Free trial; paid plans priced per user per month, higher tiers for resource management |
| Where data lives | Locally on your machine (SQLite) | Smartsheet's cloud |
| Collaboration | Single-user desktop app; share via export (XLSX / CSV / JSON) | Real-time multi-user sheets, comments, automation workflows |
| Gantt / timeline | Core feature, with finish-to-start dependencies and cascade preview | Gantt view built on the sheet, dependency tracking included |
| Resource utilisation | Weekly capacity vs. allocation, cost roll-ups from daily rates, included at every tier | Resource management is a separate, higher-tier capability |
| What-if scenarios | Isolated scenarios, snapshots, templates | Not a concept; duplicate sheets manually |
| AI | Chat assistant over your data + planning agent; bring your own model (local Ollama or cloud key) | Smartsheet AI features on eligible plans |
| Offline | Fully | Requires connectivity |
Who should switch
- People who never wanted a spreadsheet. If you've been fighting Smartsheet's grid to get a clean Gantt and a capacity view, shadow-planner gives you both natively, with no formula-wrangling.
- Solo PMs and small teams who don't need multi-user sheet editing and would rather pay €4,99 once than a recurring per-seat bill for resourcing features.
- Anyone who wants what-if planning. Duplicating a Smartsheet to model an alternative plan is manual and easy to get out of sync; shadow-planner's scenarios are isolated by design.
- Teams with data-residency concerns. Everything lives in a local SQLite file; nothing has to sync to a vendor's cloud.
Who should stay
- You depend on Smartsheet as a shared, real-time workspace where a wider team edits the same sheet, runs automations, and builds dashboards across many projects.
- Your organisation has standardised on Smartsheet for cross-department reporting, forms-based intake, or integrations (Slack, Jira, Microsoft 365) that shadow-planner doesn't replicate.
- You need heavy grid-style bulk editing — thousands of rows, complex formulas — which is Smartsheet's home turf, not shadow-planner's.
Some teams run both: shadow-planner for the PM doing the actual timeline and capacity planning, Smartsheet for the wider team's shared reporting surface. Export to Excel makes handing numbers across straightforward. See how the resource utilisation view compares, or how the AI planning agent drafts a plan from a brief instead of a blank sheet.
Install shadow-planner for free — Gantt, utilisation and the AI assistant are all in the free tier.