A Smartsheet Alternative for Jira Teams: Retire the Sync

A lot of Jira teams quietly run two tools to plan one body of work. The work lives in Jira. The Gantt chart lives in Smartsheet. A connector ties them together, and someone keeps that connector alive. If that describes your setup, this post is about whether you still need the second tool, and how to drop it without losing the timeline your stakeholders rely on.

To be upfront: Smartsheet is a capable, broad platform, and this is not a “Smartsheet is bad” article. It’s a narrower question. If the only reason Smartsheet sits next to your Jira instance is the Gantt view, you’re paying a real tax for it — and there’s a native way to get the same view inside Jira.

Why Jira teams reach for Smartsheet in the first place

Jira’s built-in timeline is fine for a single team’s roadmap, but it runs out of road quickly for real project planning. Teams turn to Smartsheet because it offers:

• A proper Gantt with all four dependency types, not just Finish-to-Start
• A critical path so you can see what’s actually driving the end date
• Baselines to compare the plan you committed to against where you are now
• A presentation-grade timeline that a sponsor or PMO can read without a Jira login

Those are legitimate needs. The problem isn’t that teams want them. It’s the machinery required to get them when the work lives in Jira.

The real cost: the sync, not the sticker price

The per-seat license is the obvious cost. The expensive one is the sync.

To put Jira work into a Smartsheet Gantt, you connect the two, usually with Smartsheet’s Jira connector or a third-party integration. That gives you a pipeline to own:

• Mapping. Which projects sync, and which Jira fields map to which Smartsheet columns. Every new field or workflow change is another mapping to maintain.
• Latency. The Smartsheet view is a copy of Jira as of the last refresh. Reschedule a task in Jira and the Gantt your stakeholders see is wrong until the next sync runs.
• Reconciliation. Sooner or later “the Gantt says something different from Jira” becomes a recurring meeting. Now you’re debugging a pipeline instead of managing a project.

You also pay twice in licenses. Smartsheet bills per user (roughly $9/user/month on Pro and around $19/user/month on Business, typically annual with seat minimums). To show a timeline to people who only need to look at it, you buy them Smartsheet seats on top of the Jira seats they already have.

What “replacing the Gantt layer” actually means

You don’t need to replace Smartsheet the platform. You need to replace the one job it’s doing for your Jira work: drawing Jira issues on a dependency-aware timeline.

Simple Gantt does that job inside Jira. Instead of syncing a copy out, it reads your Jira issues directly through a JQL query, so the timeline is your Jira data:

• No connector to maintain. Point a Gantt project at a JQL query and you’re done in minutes.
• No stale snapshot. Move a date in Jira and the chart reflects it. Move it on the chart and it writes back to the issue. One source of truth.
• No second seat. Viewers see the Gantt with the Jira access they already have. It’s free to get started.
• No data leaving Atlassian. Built on Forge, it runs on Atlassian infrastructure and inherits your Jira permissions and data residency — there’s no copy of your plan in a third-party SaaS, because there’s no copy at all.

On the planning features themselves, it’s a real Gantt, not a stripped-down one: all four dependency types, a critical path, milestones, and up to ten baselines for variance tracking. On top of that, a project health dashboard gives you a 0-100 risk score that Smartsheet only matches if you build the dashboards yourself.

When you should keep Smartsheet

Switching tools to save money you’re still spending elsewhere is a bad trade, so here’s the honest boundary. Keep Smartsheet if you use it as a platform, not a chart:

• You plan work that doesn’t live in Jira: marketing calendars, operations trackers, cross-department intake.
• You depend on Smartsheet grids, forms, automation, proofing, or roll-up dashboards.
• You run portfolio management across many teams (Control Center and the like).

Simple Gantt replaces the Jira Gantt layer, full stop. If your team genuinely lives in Smartsheet’s broader capabilities, it’s not a one-to-one swap, and we won’t pretend otherwise.

How to make the switch

If the Gantt-on-Jira layer is the only thing tying you to Smartsheet, retiring it is straightforward:

1. Install Simple Gantt from the Atlassian Marketplace. One click, no configuration.
2. Create a Gantt project pointed at the same Jira issues your Smartsheet sync was pulling, using a JQL query.
3. Recreate your dependencies (all four types are supported).
4. Save a baseline so you’re tracking variance from day one.
5. Run both side by side for a sprint to confirm the native view covers everything your synced sheet did — then turn off the connector and reclaim the seats.

Your Jira data never changes; Simple Gantt just reads the issues you already have. For the full breakdown of where each tool fits, see the Simple Gantt vs Smartsheet comparison.