Float vs Smartsheet: Which Is Better in 2026?

Float is a resource management and scheduling tool that gives teams a clear, visual answer to a deceptively hard question: who is working on what, when — and who actually has capacity for more. While task-focused project tools track the work itself, Float zooms out to the level of people and time, helping agencies, studios and professional services firms plan their team's workload, avoid overbooking and underutilization, and forecast capacity with confidence.

At its core is a beautifully clear scheduling interface where you assign people to projects and tasks across a timeline, instantly seeing everyone's allocation, availability and utilization. This makes it easy to balance workloads, spot who's overloaded or has free time, and plan upcoming work realistically. For service businesses where people's time is the product, this visibility is invaluable — it directly affects whether projects are delivered on time and whether the business is using its team efficiently and profitably.

Float complements scheduling with time tracking, so you can compare planned versus actual hours and improve future estimates, along with features for managing time off, roles, capacity and budgets. It integrates with popular project management, calendar and communication tools, slotting into existing workflows rather than replacing them. Reporting gives leaders insight into utilization and forecasting that supports better hiring and planning decisions. For agencies, consultancies and any team that needs to manage people's time across multiple projects, Float offers a focused, polished solution to a problem that general project tools handle poorly. By making resource planning visual and simple, it helps teams work at a sustainable pace, deliver reliably, and make smarter decisions about how they spend their most valuable resource — their people's time.

Smartsheet is a work management and project planning platform built around a familiar spreadsheet-like interface, scaled up with the power to manage projects, automate processes, and collaborate across teams and organisations. For the many people who are comfortable working in spreadsheets but need far more than a spreadsheet can offer — proper project tracking, automation, collaboration, and reporting — Smartsheet provides a powerful middle ground. It combines the familiarity of a grid with robust work management capabilities, making it accessible to business users while powerful enough for complex, large-scale work.

The platform lets teams plan and track work in a flexible grid that can also be viewed as Gantt charts, calendars, and card boards, so projects can be managed in whatever format suits them. On top of this it adds automation to handle repetitive processes and workflows, collaboration features so teams work together on the same data, dashboards and reporting for visibility, and the scale and governance that larger organisations require. This makes it suitable for managing everything from individual projects to large programs and operational processes across an enterprise, all in an interface that business users find approachable thanks to its spreadsheet roots.

Smartsheet is used by businesses and teams across many functions and industries, including large enterprises, that need flexible, scalable work and project management with a familiar feel. The value is power with familiarity: it gives people the comfortable, flexible spreadsheet-like experience they know, enhanced with serious project management, automation, collaboration, and reporting that scale to complex organisational needs. For teams managing significant projects, programs, and processes who want capability without an intimidating new paradigm, Smartsheet bridges the gap between simple spreadsheets and heavyweight project tools. By combining accessibility with enterprise-grade power, it has become a widely adopted platform for planning, tracking, and automating work across organisations of all sizes.