Byoxon vs. Smartsheet: Rates, Costs and Utilization Without the Build

This article compares Byoxon (BoB) and Smartsheet for professional services teams that need to see team rates, costs and utilization without building the reporting themselves. It covers current 2026 pricing for both products, explains which Smartsheet capabilities sit in the separately sold Resource Management add-on, and shows what the build-versus-buy choice costs in maintenance rather than licence fees.

Smartsheet is one of the most capable work platforms on the market. It began as a spreadsheet you could share and automate, and it grew into something closer to a relational database with a grid on the front. Large organisations run serious portfolio programmes on it.

That flexibility is the reason people choose it, and it is also the reason this comparison exists. Smartsheet gives you the parts to model team rates, costs and utilization. It does not ship that model already assembled. Someone on your team assembles it, then keeps it working.

Byoxon starts from the other end. Its product, BeOnBoard (BoB), ships a fixed data model for people, rates, time and projects, and reports profit and loss from it directly. You lose the freedom to reshape the schema. You gain a margin number on day one.

This comparison covers pricing, the data model, and where the Resource Management add-on changes the picture. The goal is to help you pick the right model for your team, not to argue that one product is universally better.

Byoxon vs Smartsheet at a glance

Capability	BoB (Byoxon)	Smartsheet
Entry price	$34.95/user/month (1–10 users)	$9/member/month (Pro, billed annually)
Mid tier	$32.95 (11–49), $29.95 (50–199)	$19/member/month (Business, billed annually)
Top tier	$24.95/user/month (200+ users)	Enterprise and Advanced Work Management, both quote-only
Free plan	Up to 5 users, no feature limitations	None published; 30-day free trial, no card required
Seat minimums	None published	Pro 1–10 members; Business 3+; Enterprise 10+
Free collaborators	Not published as a separate class	Unlimited free Contributors and Guests
Time tracking	Included on every tier	In the Resource Management add-on
Workload / capacity view	Included	Workload tracking on Business and Enterprise
Per-person cost and bill rates	Built into the employee record	Build in sheets, or buy Resource Management
Utilization reporting	Standard report	Pre-built in Resource Management
Budget and expense reports	Included	Pre-built in Resource Management
Project P&L	Included on every tier, real time	Assemble from Time + Fees, Budget and Expense reports, or from your own sheets
Invoicing	Included	Not a native module
CRM / deal pipeline	Built-in, with pipeline stages	Build as a sheet, or integrate a CRM
HR, PTO, recruitment	Employee profiles, PTO requests, recruitment, vendor management	Build as sheets, or integrate
Best fit	Services teams that want margin visibility without building it	Teams that want to shape their own model and have someone to maintain it

Prices above come from each vendor’s own pricing page in September 2026. Smartsheet Pro is also sold at $12 per member per month on monthly billing, and Business at $24. Confirm current figures before you buy.

Where Smartsheet is the better choice

Take this part seriously before reading the rest. Smartsheet wins on several dimensions, and several of them matter more than margin reporting for some teams.

• Smartsheet costs far less per seat. Twelve people on Business pay $228 per month on annual billing. The same twelve on Byoxon pay $395.40. That gap is real and it is not small.
• Unlimited free Contributors and Guests is a genuine advantage. If forty people need to view work, comment and submit forms, and only eight need to build, Smartsheet charges you for eight. Most per-user platforms, Byoxon included, do not publish that split.
• Smartsheet models anything. Byoxon models services delivery. If your work does not look like billable projects with people on rates, Byoxon’s fixed schema will fight you and Smartsheet’s blank grid will not.
• Smartsheet scales to portfolio programmes. Control Center, Dynamic View, DataMesh, Data Shuttle and Bridge exist because very large organisations needed them. Byoxon does not compete at that level.

If your requirement is a flexible work platform and you have someone who enjoys building in it, Smartsheet is a strong buy. Read on only if the sections below describe problems you actually have.

An automated relational database for rates, costs and utilization

Here is the angle in one sentence. Both products end up holding the same three facts — what a person costs, what a person bills, and where their hours went. The difference is who builds the relationships between those facts, and who repairs them afterwards.

What building this in Smartsheet involves

Smartsheet is a database in the useful sense: sheets hold typed columns, and formulas can reach across sheets. A competent builder can absolutely produce a utilization and margin dashboard in it. The work usually looks like this.

1. A rate card sheet, one row per person, holding a cost rate and a bill rate.
2. An hours sheet, one row per entry, with the person, the project and the hours.
3. Cross-sheet formulas on the hours sheet that look up each person’s two rates and multiply out cost and revenue.
4. A capacity figure per person per week, so that utilization has a denominator.
5. Rollup reports grouped by project and by person, then dashboard widgets over those reports.
6. A way to keep copies in step when a rate changes, which in practice means cell links, or the DataMesh add-on.

None of that is exotic. The cost is not the build; it is the ownership. Every new project, every rate revision, every person who moves teams touches a formula somebody wrote and nobody documented. When that person leaves, the dashboard keeps rendering and quietly stops being right.

What Byoxon does with the same inputs

In BeOnBoard the relationships are the product. A person record already carries a cost rate and a bill rate. A time entry already points at a person and a project. Because those references exist in the schema, revenue and cost resolve on the entry itself, and utilization, project margin and the profit-and-loss dashboard read from the same place.

Change a rate and every downstream figure follows, because there is no copy to re-point. Add a project and it appears in the P&L, because nothing had to be wired. That is the whole trade: you give up schema freedom, and you stop maintaining formulas.

If you want to see the shape of that reporting before committing, the project cost management and employee timesheet pages walk through the same data from the delivery side.

Pricing compared

Smartsheet publishes two plans and quotes the other two. Pro is $9 per member per month on annual billing, or $12 monthly, and caps at ten members. Business is $19 annually, or $24 monthly, with a three-member minimum. Enterprise starts at ten members and is quote-only. Advanced Work Management is also quote-only.

Byoxon publishes one volume rate card: $34.95 per user per month for one to ten users, $32.95 for eleven to forty-nine, $29.95 for fifty to one hundred and ninety-nine, and $24.95 for two hundred and above. A free plan covers up to five users with no feature limitations.

The complication is the add-on. Timesheets, capacity planning, skill-based assignments and the pre-built Time + Fees, Expense, Budget and Utilization reports are Resource Management features, and Smartsheet’s own FAQ says you upgrade to Resource Management to get them. Smartsheet does not publish a price for it. So a like-for-like total is a published number plus a quote.

Be clear about the direction of that gap. Smartsheet’s base licence is roughly 42 percent cheaper per seat than Byoxon’s at twelve users. Even if Resource Management closed the gap entirely, which we cannot claim because the price is not public, Smartsheet would still be the cheaper platform for teams that only need work management.

Resource Management: the add-on that closes part of the gap

It would be dishonest to write this comparison as though Smartsheet has no answer for time and money. It has one, and it is good.

Resource Management by Smartsheet provides time tracking, capacity planning, skill-based assignments, scenario planning, and a set of pre-built reports that Smartsheet names as Time + Fees, Expense, Budget and Utilization. If you buy it, you are no longer building the rate-and-hours model by hand for those specific reports. That is a real product doing real work.

Three things still separate it from Byoxon’s approach, and they are about packaging rather than absence.

• It is a second purchase and a second surface. Your project sheets live in Smartsheet; the time and fee data lives in Resource Management. Teams who want one system get two.
• Its price is not published. You cannot budget the comparison from the website. Byoxon’s figure is on the page.
• It stops at delivery. Smartsheet does not market a native invoicing module, a CRM pipeline, or HR and PTO records. Byoxon carries all three in the same subscription, so a won deal, the hours against it, the invoice and the person’s time off all sit in one database.

If you want to sanity-check the arithmetic on your own team before talking to anyone, the free time tracking calculator takes rates and hours and returns the cost figure directly.

Which one fits your team

Choose Smartsheet if your work does not fit a fixed services schema, if a large share of your people only need to view and comment, if you already have an internal builder who owns the model, or if you need portfolio tooling at Control Center scale.

Choose Byoxon if your work is billable projects staffed by people on rates, if nobody on the team wants to own a formula estate, and if you want the pipeline, the timesheet, the invoice and the margin in one subscription with a published price.

For a different point on the same spectrum, the Byoxon vs ClickUp comparison covers another flexible platform where margin is assembled from custom fields, and Byoxon vs Kantata covers the enterprise PSA end.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Smartsheet cost in 2026?

Smartsheet publishes Pro at $9 per member per month billed annually, or $12 billed monthly, for one to ten members with unlimited free Contributors. Business is $19 annually, or $24 monthly, with a three-member minimum. Enterprise starts at ten members and Advanced Work Management is for large portfolios; both are quote-only. Smartsheet offers a 30-day free trial with no credit card.

Does Smartsheet have time tracking?

Not in the core plans. Smartsheet’s own FAQ states that workload tracking is included in Business and Enterprise, and that capacity planning, time tracking, skill-based assignments and reporting require an upgrade to Resource Management. Resource Management is sold separately and Smartsheet does not publish its price.

Can Smartsheet calculate project profitability?

Yes, by two routes. You can build it in core Smartsheet with rate sheets and cross-sheet formulas feeding a dashboard, or you can buy Resource Management and use its pre-built Time + Fees, Budget and Expense reports. Neither route gives you a profit-and-loss statement out of the box the way Byoxon does, and the first route makes you the owner of the formulas.

Is Byoxon more expensive than Smartsheet?

On published seat price, clearly yes. Byoxon starts at $34.95 per user per month against $9 for Smartsheet Pro. The comparison narrows once you match capabilities, because the Smartsheet configuration that reports time, fees and utilization adds Resource Management at a quoted price. We cannot tell you where the two totals cross, because that quote is not public.

Does Smartsheet include a CRM or invoicing?

Smartsheet does not market native CRM or invoicing modules. Both are commonly built as sheets or handled by integrated tools. Byoxon includes a CRM with pipeline stages and deal tracking, plus invoicing, in the same subscription as its time and financial modules.

The bottom line

Smartsheet is an excellent platform for teams that want to shape their own model, and it is much cheaper per seat. If you have a builder and your work does not fit a fixed schema, buy it without apology.

Byoxon answers a narrower question: what is the margin on this project, right now, without anyone maintaining a formula estate to find out. The rates, the costs and the utilization are already related to each other, and the CRM, invoicing and HR records sit alongside them.

Run your own numbers on both. If your current margin figure depends on a spreadsheet that one person understands, that dependency is what Byoxon removes.

Start free with up to 5 users — no feature limits. Load one live project into BeOnBoard and compare its margin figure against the one you maintain today.