Hey everyone, new here and still getting my feet wet with different platforms. I'm a junior data analyst, and my team is starting to look at construction project management tools. We handle a lot of the reporting side, pulling schedule and cost data to visualize for stakeholders.
The main contenders seem to be Runway and Smartsheet. From my research, Smartsheet feels like a super-powered Excel with Gantt charts and forms, which seems great for the actual planning and tracking. Runway gets mentioned a lot for its dashboards and BI capabilities.
My question is about the day-to-day data flow. For those who've used both:
1. How easy is it to get data *out* for analysis? Say I need to join project schedule data from the tool with actual cost data from our ERP. With Smartsheet, can I easily connect to it via an API for a Python script? Does Runway have better built-in connectors?
2. For visualization, if I want to build a custom dashboard that isn't just the built-in widgets, which platform gives more flexibility? I'm comfortable with SQL and starting with Python libraries like Plotly.
I'm trying to figure out which one would be less of a headache for creating automated, recurring reports. Smartsheet's spreadsheet base is familiar, but I worry it might get messy. Runway's dashboard focus seems cleaner, but is it too rigid?
Thanks for any insights from the trenches!