In Smartsheet, a sheet is the foundation of your work — the vendor’s phrase, from its own glossary. Everything else is a view over sheets. That is a genuinely powerful idea and it is why Smartsheet is in tens of thousands of organizations: the grid is a universal solvent, and a portfolio office can model a portfolio on a Tuesday without asking anybody for a schema change.
Control Center industrializes that. A blueprint provisions projects from templates, and the rollup is documented plainly: profile data values from your project sheets are cell-linked to matching columns in the blueprint summary sheet, with an administrator creating each matching column by hand and picking a type that matches. So the portfolio is a sheet, and the portfolio’s contents are links to other sheets.
Now put that next to a second sentence from the same help center. Smartsheet documents that an approval request is not initiated when the trigger cell includes cross-sheet formulas or is linked to other cells.
Both statements are Smartsheet’s, on separate pages, and neither is a complaint. Put together they describe something a PMO should test during an evaluation rather than discover in month four: the values that roll up to the portfolio are the values an approval workflow will not fire on. There are ways around it — approve at the project sheet, drive a helper column — and each one is a thing somebody has to know, build, and keep working.
What the health color is
A red, yellow or green ball in Smartsheet is a symbols column, set by hand or by a formula the customer writes. In Control Center, the recommended practice is explicit: provide a place outside the summary section for project status text or RYG project health, and use a formula in the profile data to reference it.
We should be careful about how far that goes. It is documented guidance, not a statement that no computation is possible — a customer who writes a good formula gets a good derived status, and some do. What it means is narrower and still consequential: the health of a Smartsheet portfolio is whatever that organization’s formula says, maintained by that organization, with no shared definition across two companies both running Control Center. There is no wrong answer available, which is another way of saying there is no answer that travels.
The ceilings are published, and they are not where you expect
Smartsheet documents its limits better than most vendors in this review, which is a real virtue and makes an honest comparison possible. A sheet holds 20,000 rows, 400 columns and 500,000 cells. A blueprint summary can carry up to 500,000 inbound cell links, and Control Center documents its throughput frankly — auto-provisioning around forty projects an hour at the 95th percentile, global updates around thirty, archiving around ten.
The number that reshapes an architecture, though, is in the developer documentation. Bridge, and the Jira, Tableau, Power BI, Zapier and Google connectors, are listed as not supported for sheets with more than 5,000 rows or 200 columns. The sheet limit is twenty thousand rows. The integration ecosystem stops at five. A portfolio that grows into the sheet gradually grows out of its connectors, and nothing announces the crossing.
Two more things a buyer finds late
Resource Management is a second product, not a module. Smartsheet documents that its licenses are sold in separate amounts from Smartsheet licensed users, that only licensed users can track time, and that moving people between the two instances means exporting from one and inviting to the other. The capacity math it does is real — genuine full-time-equivalent and hours modeling, which BoardWalk does not attempt — and it lives in its own user directory.
And the audit trail has a shape worth checking against your retention policy: the activity log records who viewed, who was shared, and what changed, and each download is limited to 90 days of activity data. Smartsheet does not publish an overall retention window, so this is a question to ask rather than a gap to assert.
AI is generally available and gated by plan. Smart Assist and AI dashboards reach Pro; formula creation, data analysis, and text and summaries are Enterprise-only, each with its own administrator toggle. Pricing for Pro and Business is published per member per month; Control Center and Resource Management are add-ons with no list price shown.
The counter-argument
The strongest objection is that we have compared a platform to a product. Smartsheet is not trying to be an opinionated portfolio register; it is trying to be the substrate you build one on, and it says so — its platform page frames the pitch as understanding how your organization gets work done rather than managing tasks. Judged as a substrate, the flexibility is the feature and every constraint above is the price of the flexibility.
That is fair, and it is exactly the trade we declined. A register whose shape each customer defines cannot make a promise that survives leaving the building, because there is no shared definition to verify against. Ours can be checked by somebody who does not have an account and does not trust us: an exported receipt validates on its own. You cannot build that on a cell link, and you would not want to.
Choose Smartsheet if…
Choose Smartsheet if the portfolio you need does not exist yet and nobody agrees on its shape. The grid will let you model it this week, change it next week, and hand it to people who already know how to use a spreadsheet — and adoption is the single most underrated feature in this category. Control Center then turns the version you settled on into something provisionable, which is a genuine and hard-won capability.
Choose it also if you need real resource capacity math with full-time-equivalent and hours modeling, and are willing to buy and run Resource Management as the separate system it is. BoardWalk records named capacity and accepted allocations, and does not model this depth.
Come here instead if the register needs to mean the same thing in twelve months, to somebody who was not there when it was built — and if a claim about delivery has to be traceable to the requirement, the commit and the person who accepted it rather than to a formula in a column.