Smartsheet vs Leantime
Choose Leantime when the priority is self-hosted, open-source project management centered on goals, tasks, timelines, and team knowledge—especially for non-project managers or neurodivergent-friendly workflows. Choose Smartsheet when you need the target platform’s broader documented scope, including portfolio delivery, workflow automation, resource planning, digital asset management, and no-code applications. The key
Decision guide
The practical reasons to choose either option, based on documented capabilities.
Choose Leantime if
- Teams wanting self-hosted project management with direct control over deployment and code
- Non-project managers using goals, milestones, tasks, Kanban, Gantt, calendar, or sprint workflows
- Teams seeking project dashboards, reports, status updates, wikis, discussions, and time tracking in one project-focused system
Stay with Smartsheet if
- Workflow automation is a core requirement; the supplied Leantime material does not document equivalent automation coverage
- Resource allocation across projects is required; Leantime documents time tracking and timesheets, but not comparable resource-planning coverage
- Digital asset management or no-code work applications are required; neither capability is documented for Leantime in the supplied sources society's concerns around certain technologies
Deployment and operations
Leantime is self-hostable, primarily written in PHP, and licensed under AGPLv3, with an exception allowing differently licensed plugins in /app/Plugins. Production installation supports a local stack or an official Docker image. The documented local requirements include PHP 8.2+, MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.6+, and Apache or Nginx; IIS may require changes. Operators must maintain database and file backups during manual updates, persist MySQL storage for Docker updates, and pull and rebuild the new
Feature fit
What Leantime covers
- Project planning and delivery tracking
- Task and milestone management
- Dashboards and reporting
- Team discussions and shared project knowledge
- Application connectivity through integrations or API
What’s different or missing
- Comparable workflow-automation coverage
- Comparable resource-allocation planning
- No-code work applications
- Digital asset management
- Documented Smartsheet import or migration tooling
Project snapshot
- GitHub stars
- 11,357
- Contributors
- 193
- Language
- PHP
- Last commit
- Aug 15, 2026
- Latest release
- Jul 8, 2026
Categories: Workflow Automation, Customer Relationship Management, Project Management, Task Management, Knowledge Management, Digital Whiteboards, Document Collaboration, DevOps, Calendars & Scheduling, Business Intelligence
Sources and editorial review9 linked sources
Public documentation supports this comparison. Automation assists collection and classification; editorial standards and corrections remain the responsibility of Kris.
Leantime is an open source project management system for non-project managers.
readme · github.comTask management via kanban boards, gantt, table, list and calendar views.
readme · github.comProject Dashboards, reports & status updates.
readme · github.comIntegrates with Slack, Mattermost, Discord.
readme · github.comThere are two main ways to install LeanTime for production... install all needed pieces locally... or use the officially supported Docker image.
readme · github.comTask management via<br>kanban boards, gantt, table, list and calendar views | Project Dashboards, reports & status updates | Wikis / Docs
shared feature · github.comThere are two main ways to install LeanTime for production. The first of which is to install all needed pieces of the system locally. The second is to use the officially supported Docker image.
deployment · github.comLeantime is licensed under AGPLv3. This file forms part of the Leantime Software for which the following exception is added: Plugins within the `/app/Plugins` directory which may contain plugins licensed under other licenses including our enterprise license.
deployment · github.comPlease note: We currently only support the official Leantime docker compose and standard installations. We only offer support for the most recent version.
deployment · github.com
