Smartsheet Alternative
Still planning in Smartsheets? There’s a better way to run your business.
Smartsheet organises the work. Forest connects it to your strategy, your budget, and every team delivering it.
Why COOs choose Forest over Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a powerful grid-based work management tool. It tracks projects, manages tasks, and gives teams a shared view of what’s happening. But it was built as a spreadsheet replacement, not a strategic planning platform. There are no objectives, no scenario planning, no financial forecasting, and no capacity intelligence. Every quarter, someone still has to manually reconcile what the grids say against what the strategy requires.
Where Forest goes further
Forest is what comes after the spreadsheet. A living connected plan that ties strategy to execution, budget to delivery, and capacity to commitment, always current, never assembled manually.
From grid to strategy
Smartsheet tracks work in rows and columns. Forest connects work to strategic objectives, financial plans, and team capacity, so leadership always has a live view of what the business is committed to and what it costs.
Budget planning built in
Smartsheet has no budget forecasting, no variance analysis, and no ROI re-forecasting. Forest ties every initiative to budget planning from day one, so spend is visible in real time, not discovered at month end.
Live in days, not months
No implementation fees, no configuration overhead. Forest’s guided onboarding gets your strategy, capacity, and financial plan connected from day one, without the spreadsheet migration projects that Smartsheet replacements typically require.
Compare Forest vs Smartsheet
Every capability, side by side, so you can make the right decision.
| Capability | Forest | Smartsheet |
|---|
Strategic planning
| Strategic objectives & themes |  | |
| Scenario planning | | |
| Issue-to-strategy mapping | | — |
| Initiative & roadmap management | | — |
| Timeline & Gantt view | | — |
| OKR support | | — |
| One platform subscription | | — |
Capacity & resources
| Cross-team capacity planning | | — |
| Resource-to-strategy alignment | | — |
| Capacity heatmaps | | — |
| Employment type management | | — |
| Predictive demand modelling | | — |
Financial planning
| Live budget forecasting | | |
| Budget variance analysis | | |
| Multi-currency | | |
| Real-time re-forecasting | | — |
Governance
| Initiative review & approval workflow | | — |
| Full decision audit trail | | — |
AI
| Agentic AI planning | Soon | |
Platform
| No implementation fees | | — |
| Guided onboarding | | — |
| Unlimited free viewers | | — |
| SSO / SAML | | |
| API access | | |
Great businesses don’t run on disconnected plans
Discover how Forest connects strategy, capacity, and finance into one living platform, and what that means for the way you lead.