Clarity vs SmartSuite Comparison

Why choose Clarity

• Higher Scalability score (9/10 vs 7/10)
• Better fit for enterprise (9/10 vs 7/10)

Why choose SmartSuite

• Higher Cost score (6/10 vs 2/10)
• Higher Ease of Use score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Better fit for small business (6/10 vs 1/10)
• Better fit for mid-market (8/10 vs 4/10)

Clarity

Pros

• Deep financial governance, including chargebacks, multi-currency tracking, CapEx/OpEx categorization and audit trails, suits regulated industries.
• Reviewers report that it scales from small teams to tens of thousands of users.
• Roadmaps and investment hierarchies roll projects up into programs and portfolios, and reviewers name these as the most valuable features.
• Blueprints, business rules and configurable grids let administrators shape it to the organization's processes.
• Analysts recognize it in strategic portfolio management, with Broadcom reporting a Leader placement in the Forrester Wave for Q2 2024.

Cons

• No public pricing, and reviewers mention licensing complexity and rising costs after Broadcom acquired CA.
• Implementations can take months and often require consultants.
• Users often find the interface unintuitive and the Jaspersoft-based reporting hard to use.
• Jira and SAP integrations are described as difficult and sometimes unreliable for real-time tracking.
• Reviewers say it is less suited to agile delivery out of the box and point to Broadcom's separate Rally product for agile work.

SmartSuite

Pros

• The same records can be shown as grid, Kanban, Gantt, timeline, calendar, map and dashboard views without duplicating data.
• Its compliance coverage is unusually strong for the category, with ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA and GDPR audits plus a choice of US or EU data residency.
• Read-only users, commenters and form submitters are free, which lowers the cost of involving stakeholders.
• It ships more than 200 templates and an AI solution builder to speed up setup.
• Reviewers describe the support team as responsive.

Cons

• Team, Professional and Enterprise carry 3-, 5- and 25-seat minimums, and there is no free plan.
• The Team plan allows only 5,000 records per solution, and automation runs plus API calls are hard-capped each month.
• SAML SSO and SCIM are available only on Enterprise and Signature plans.
• There is no team chat or whiteboard, and external access is limited to read-only shared views.
• Reviewers say complex workflows and large data imports take real setup effort, and there are no native desktop apps.