Everyone's running around chasing the same feature checklists, screaming about Gantt charts and automations, and completely missing the forest for the trees. When a Fortune 500 engineering org starts talking about "guest access," the conversation immediately needs to shift from features to liabilities. Both Wrike and Smartsheet will happily sell you their enterprise tiers and promise the world, but the devil is in the contractual details and the long-term operational lock-in.
Let's cut through the sales deck. You're not just picking a project management UI. You're choosing a governance model, a data silo, and a future migration nightmare. For an engineering organization of that scale, guest access isn't a convenience feature—it's a massive security and compliance surface area. How do you define a "guest"? Is it a contractor from another firm? A client from a joint venture? A regulator? Each of those has wildly different implications for data sovereignty, audit trails, and intellectual property control. Both platforms offer guest roles, but the granularity of permissions and the ability to audit *exactly* what a guest saw or did is where they start to diverge, and where you need to dig into the security whitepapers they don't advertise on the pricing page.
On the total cost of ownership front, which no sales rep will ever calculate for you, consider this: every external guest you onboard is a user who will create data dependencies, custom fields, and automations specific to *their* workflow. In five years, when you inevitably re-evaluate the platform (or when your CISO mandates a shift due to a new compliance regime), you will find that your "core" system is utterly entangled with hundreds of external entities. The cost of untangling that, both in data migration and in re-training a global engineering org, will dwarf the annual subscription fee. Smartsheet, with its spreadsheet metaphor, often leads to more brittle, user-built "applications" that are harder to decompose. Wrike's structure can become equally convoluted, but through different means.
My advice is to start the evaluation backwards. Don't look at the shiny demo. First, pull the security and compliance documentation for both platforms' *enterprise* tiers. Second, draft your most complex guest access scenario—think a contractor who needs to view specific assets, comment on tasks, but never see financials or other projects—and make them build it live in a proof-of-concept. Third, and most critically, get their data export specifications *today*. If they can't give you a clean, relational dump of all data, including historical logs and user permissions, walk away immediately. You are not buying a tool; you are renting a data prison.
Just my two cents
Skeptic by default