monday.com AI vs Smartsheet: pricing, features and which to choose

monday.com AI is the AI layer inside monday.com, a work-management platform made by monday.com Ltd., founded in 2012 and listed on NASDAQ as MNDY. Its first AI Assistant announcement came in April 2023, with a beta planned for May, and the company described the product as an open platform for third-party AI applications. monday.com now reports more than 250,000 customers and about 3,200 employees. The product is aimed at teams that want AI alongside boards, workflows, CRM, development, or service work, rather than a standalone chatbot. Its current catalog includes AI blocks, Sidekick, AI Workflows, AI Notetaker, monday agents, and monday vibe. The platform also offers a Models API with OpenAI-compatible endpoints, provider routing, fallbacks, budgets, and spend tracking, while using models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Sentence Transformers.

monday.com AI combines work management with AI tools that act on boards, workflows and related business data. A typical workflow starts with a natural-language request: AI can generate tasks, draft or rephrase CRM emails, summarize text, build formulas, or run an agent against a configured process. Sidekick handles roughly 10 to 150 credits per message depending on complexity, while AI Notetaker uses 120 credits per meeting hour. Teams can also create AI workflows, specialized agents, custom apps through monday vibe, and monitor consumption through AI governance, with alerts at 80% and 100%. The platform’s Models API adds OpenAI-compatible chat, embeddings, image and audio endpoints, plus model fallbacks, spend tracking and budgets. It draws from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Sentence Transformers, while monday.com says customer inputs and outputs are not used for model training.

monday.com AI is less a standalone assistant than an AI layer inside monday.com’s broader work operating system, and that breadth is its main advantage and constraint. Unlike Asana AI Studio, which offers explicit Basic, Plus, and Pro credit tiers and lets users choose named partner models such as Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5.2, monday.com uses shared credit buckets across its AI work platform and does not permit customer-supplied models or API keys. Slack AI is stronger for conversation search, recaps, and Slackbot inside team communications, while monday.com reaches further into boards, workflows, CRM, development, and service work. Costs also rise quickly: paid plans start at $9 per seat monthly when billed annually, while AI credits begin at 1,000 for $10, and AI is unavailable to free accounts. Teams wanting configurable work management with integrated automation should pick monday.com AI.

Smartsheet was founded in 2005 in Bellevue, Washington, and built its business on a familiar idea: project tracking that looks like a spreadsheet but adds dependencies, automations, forms and reports. It grew into an enterprise platform used for portfolio management, resource planning and operations at large companies. In January 2025 Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners completed an $8.4 billion deal to take Smartsheet private. In November 2025 it announced Intelligent Work Management, its push to combine AI, data and people across the platform. Smartsheet also owns Brandfolder for digital asset management and sells a Gov edition for US public sector customers.

Work lives in sheets with rows, columns, cell formulas, cross-sheet formulas and dependencies, viewed as grids, Gantt charts, boards, calendars, tables or timelines. Reports roll up rows across sheets, and dashboards show charts and metrics. Forms collect requests, and automations send alerts, request approvals, assign people and move rows on triggers. Higher plans add workload tracking, baselines, proofing, document builder, portfolios and scenario planning. Advanced Work Management bundles Control Center for portfolio rollout, Dynamic View for secure request intake, Data Shuttle for importing data, DataMesh and connectors to Jira, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. Free contributors can edit shared sheets without a paid seat.

Smartsheet's strength is structured project and portfolio work at scale, with strong governance and a familiar grid. Its drawbacks are a dated interface next to newer tools, many key features behind add-ons or Enterprise, and per-member costs that add up. Monday.com and Asana offer friendlier interfaces and their own AI agents. Airtable suits teams building database-driven apps. Microsoft Project and Planner fit Microsoft 365 shops, while Wrike and ClickUp compete on all-in-one features. Choose Smartsheet if your organization runs projects and portfolios in spreadsheets today and wants enterprise controls and AI help without leaving that format.