Smartsheet used ENGAGE 2026 to show it has finished years of deferred work on the Smartsheet core platform, including a rebuilt Table View, 100,000-row sheets, and a consumption-based pricing model. Futurum sees these fixes as a retention move that matters more competitively than the company’s AI announcements.
What Is Covered in This Article:
- Smartsheet used ENGAGE 2026 to show it has completed long-promised core platform work, including Table View, sheets that support 100,000 rows, and new Gantt and reports views.
- CEO Rajeev Singh acknowledged customer criticism of the prior pricing model and introduced consumption-based pricing built on a base fee and flexible credits.
- Futurum survey data show buyers rejecting per-seat pricing for core software but preferring it for AI, a split that a single credit pool does not fully address.
- The core platform fixes work first as a retention play against monday.com, Asana, Microsoft, and ServiceNow.
- Governance, scale, and the Execution Graph now carry Smartsheet’s differentiation as it moves into agentic AI.
The News: At its ENGAGE 2026 conference in Seattle on November 4, Smartsheet devoted a large part of its opening keynote to work that has little to do with AI: finishing features customers waited years for, raising scale limits, and replacing a pricing model customers had pushed back on. Chief Product and Technology Officer Pratima Arora said Smartsheet has shipped more than 150 new features across the platform over the past year, including a rebuilt Table View, new Gantt and reports views, and sheets that support up to 100,000 rows, which are now live.
CEO Rajeev Singh introduced a consumption-based pricing model made up of a base fee and flexible credits, with overage protection for early adopters and an admin view of usage by user, capability, and plan.
Smartsheet also announced natural-language integration and automation building in Smart Assist, a central console for managing workflows, Advanced Portfolios, and data classification and security event streaming for Safeguard customers, alongside the launch of its standalone vsActual planning product.
Are Smartsheet Core Platform Fixes Its Real ENGAGE News?
Analyst Take: The Smartsheet core platform news from ENGAGE 2026 deserves more attention than it will get. Most coverage of the event will focus on vsActual and agents, but for Smartsheet’s installed base the most consequential announcements were the fixes: a finished Table View, 100,000-row sheets, rebuilt views, simpler integrations, and a pricing model that stops counting seats. Singh framed all of this as promises kept, and the framing is accurate. It is also an admission that its core product had fallen behind customer expectations.
Paying Down Years of Deferred Work
Singh reminded the audience that one of his three ambitions a year ago was to build “a culture that kept its promises.” Arora’s segment made the backlog explicit. Arora described integrations that broke “when you change a column name” and automations built one rule at a time, and she said customers had told Smartsheet both were “very slow and fragile.” Table View, which Smartsheet first previewed in 2024 as a high-scale grid in early access, is now finished and includes top requests from the user community. Sheets now hold 100,000 rows, and Arora said Smartsheet is extending that scale to formulas and automations across the platform.
None of the Smartsheet core platform work is glamorous, but it addresses the reasons power users and PMOs have looked at alternatives. Row limits and performance at scale have been the main friction point when a Smartsheet deployment grows from a team tool into a system of record for a portfolio. A 100,000-row ceiling and a faster grid remove an objection that surfaces in competitive evaluations, and they are a prerequisite for the agentic workflows Smartsheet now wants to run across many sheets at once. An agent that reads 17 project sheets is only useful if those sheets load and calculate quickly.
Pricing Was the Bigger Repair
The most important Smartsheet core platform fix is commercial. Singh said on stage that customer feedback on the prior pricing model “was direct, and in my mind, it was very clear and it was really fair.” He listed the complaints: admins spending time managing users instead of doing work, paying a full seat for someone who opens the software once or twice, and no reliable view of usage to prevent surprise bills. The new model, a base fee plus flexible credits that cover AI, automations, and API activity, answers each complaint, and overage protection for early movers lowers the risk of switching. Customers who are not ready can stay on existing plans.
Futurum’s research suggests the direction is right for core software. In Futurum’s 2H 2026 Enterprise Software Decision-Makers Survey (published August 2026), buyers who name pricing as a top purchase criterion ranked per-seat pricing last for core software, at 12.6%, behind consumption-based (28.9%) and outcome-based (22.2%) models. The same buyers ranked per-seat pricing first (42.3%) for generative AI billed separately, because they want a predictable line item for a cost they cannot yet model. Smartsheet’s credit model puts core usage and AI actions in one pool. Overage protection hides that mismatch for now. Once it ends, Smartsheet will need to give budget owners a firm cap on AI consumption, or the buyers who welcomed the end of seat counting will start pushing back on credit burn.
What the Fixes Mean Competitively
Fixing the Smartsheet core platform is a retention move before it is a growth move. Futurum’s analysis of October 2026 spending-intent data (published October 19, 2026) found that about 53% of respondents replacing long-tail and departmental application vendors cited cost and ROI as a reason, and the replacement rate among those vendors rose from 8.5% to 10.4% over two years. Smartsheet sat squarely in that exposure after last year’s pricing backlash. Removing the pricing complaints and shipping overdue features takes away the easiest reasons for a CIO to consolidate work management onto Microsoft or ServiceNow.
monday.com and Asana spent much of the past two years building AI platforms, and monday.com has shifted its own AI monetization toward consumption-based credits. Smartsheet spent much of the same period on catch-up work. It arrives at the agentic phase with a cleaner core but without a head start on AI features. Its differentiation now rests on what rivals find harder to match: enterprise governance (sensitivity labels, security event streaming to tools such as Splunk and Microsoft Sentinel, and ISO/IEC 42001 certification for AI management), scale for large portfolio deployments, and 20 years of workflow history feeding its Execution Graph.
Where I differ from the on-stage narrative is on what the fixes are for. Smartsheet presents the core platform work as the foundation for AI. The more immediate competitive value is that it makes Smartsheet easier to keep. vsActual is built to sit on top of Asana, Jira, monday.com, and ServiceNow, and Singh told the audience “you don’t need Smartsheet to use it.” That is a sensible way to reach CFOs and COOs, but it also means Smartsheet’s own work management product has to win on its merits in accounts where vsActual reads data from competitors. Had the core stayed slow and seat-priced, vsActual would have given customers a way to keep Smartsheet’s planning layer while moving day-to-day work to a rival. The fixes make that trade less attractive.
Singh described the old Smartsheet as one where the company and the product “were exactly the same thing,” with a ceiling on both. A multi-product company needs a core product that holds its customers while new products reach new buyers. Shipping 150 features in a year shows the engineering organization can execute under new ownership. Customers will now judge the Smartsheet core platform on whether Table View performance holds in their largest accounts, whether credit consumption stays predictable, and whether the next round of promised features arrives on time. Singh has tied his credibility to keeping promises. ENGAGE 2027 will show whether that commitment is held for a second year.
What to Watch:
- Whether credit consumption stays predictable after early-adopter overage protection ends, and whether Smartsheet adds a capped or budgetable option for AI usage.
- How quickly customers move from seat-based plans to the consumption model, and whether renewal conversations get easier as a result.
- Whether 100,000-row sheets and the new Table View perform at scale in large enterprise deployments, and how fast that scale reaches formulas and automations.
- How monday.com, Asana, and Microsoft respond on pricing flexibility and governance, particularly in CIO-led consolidation reviews.
- Whether vsActual pulls customers deeper into Smartsheet or makes it easier for them to run work in competing tools while keeping only the planning layer.
See the complete press release on Smartsheet’s vsActual launch and ENGAGE 2026 announcements on the Smartsheet website.
Sources
Declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process: This content has been generated with the support of artificial intelligence technologies. Due to the fast pace of content creation and the continuous evolution of data and information, The Futurum Group and its analysts strive to ensure the accuracy and factual integrity of the information presented. However, the opinions and interpretations expressed in this content reflect those of the individual author/analyst. The Futurum Group makes no guarantees regarding the completeness, accuracy, or reliability of any information contained herein. Readers are encouraged to verify facts independently and consult relevant sources for further clarification.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
