We're excited to announce the availability of the Contributor seat, a new seat type for how customers access Smartsheet. This new seat type provides customers with more options in how they purchase and who has access and can interact with various types of content, delivering even more value to existing and future customers.
Alongside this news, we are also sharing a preview of two new additions to the many capabilities already released to provide IT and operations leaders the control, security, and scalability that enterprise-grade work management demands.
More value and collaboration. No additional cost.
The new Contributor seat allows customers to respond to update requests, fill out forms, and interact with shared views, and now also includes commenting and attachments on all user model plans at no additional cost. Commenting and attachments keep projects moving through status updates, file sharing, feedback loops and they're now available to every user with a free Contributor seat.
The Contributor seat replaces the previous Viewer seat type. Smartsheet users will transition over to this new seat type automatically and at no additional cost starting this week. This update will not cause any disruption to user workflows and does not require System Admin action.
One of the top requests from customers on the user model was that they wanted to expand collaboration access to project stakeholders, reviewers, or cross-functional contributors but unpredictable costs were a concern. We believe the Contributor seat directly addresses that by including meaningful collaboration actions on the free license tier. Companies can now extend access to more users with confidence, while only paying for elevated access when needed.
We believe the Contributor seat is the market's best free user licensing value. Most collaborative work management platforms limit free users to passive viewing or restrict basic collaboration behind a paywall (for example, users that need to leave feedback require a paid license), the new Smartsheet Contributor seat is different and allows genuine participation on critical workflows. That gives customers a clearer framework for seat allocation and in turn organizations get more value from their existing Smartsheet investment.
“Smartsheet has knocked it out of the park in making recent changes to their licensing model, listening to feedback and successfully pivoting to resolve previous tensions.”
– IT Leader in the consumer goods industry
The Contributor seat is about expanding access for everyone in the organization. The next two capabilities, the new Enterprise Plan Manager and Creator Controls, are built for the IT and governance leaders responsible for managing that access at scale. Here's what's coming.
Enterprise-scale governance with the New Enterprise Plan Manager
For organizations running multiple Smartsheet plans — across business units, subsidiaries, regions, or acquired entities — governance complexity multiplies quickly. Managing access policies, security configurations and license costs across separate plans has historically meant duplicated effort and complexity.
The New Enterprise Plan Manager (EPM) takes the headache out of managing enterprise governance. It enables IT and operations admins to govern access and security policies across multiple Smartsheet plans from a single management layer, without requiring labor intensive plan consolidation. For large enterprises with distinct organizational units that each need some flexibility in their own Smartsheet environment, or the ability to retain separate billing, this is a game changer.
The governance value is clear: consistent policy enforcement across plans, reduced administrative overhead, and unified management of the Smartsheet footprint. Additionally, EPM allows organizations that have a user in multiple plans to manage work on each of those plans while paying just once for their Member seat.
Enterprise Plan Manager is currently in limited release and will be broadly available in May 2026. Combined with the Contributor seat's free collaboration tier and the Admin approval controls for paid seat upgrades released last year, the new Enterprise Plan Manager extends a governance stack built for the scale and complexity inherent in many enterprise IT organizations.
Creator Controls for better security and governance
For CIOs and IT leaders in regulated industries controlling who can create and manage sheets, reports and dashboards on a Smartsheet plan is equally critical.
To address this, we are building Creator Controls: a new governance capability that lets Admins decide who can create new assets within Smartsheet. Admins determine which users are authorized to create sheets, reports, dashboards, and other assets while everyone else in the plan operates within the boundaries of their seat level permissions.
When paired with the Contributor seat, this creates a governance structure that maps directly to enterprise security requirements. Free Contributor seats cover the broad collaboration base — commenting, attaching, responding — while Creator Controls ensure that new solution creation and asset proliferation remain tightly governed. For organizations managing compliance obligations, audit readiness, or data residency requirements, this combination puts IT teams in full control of their Smartsheet environment and reduces potential attack vectors. Creator Controls will be available over the next few months.
Our ongoing commitment to customer value
The Contributor seat is one part of a broader set of improvements we have made in direct response to our customer's feedback over the past several months. These include new Admin approval controls for greater cost predictability, a redesigned Seat Management page in Admin Center, an ITSM API solution for organizations managing licenses at scale, and Seat request for streamlined user seat management.
Each of these updates reflects the same approach: we are listening, and we are building a platform that delivers ever increasing value to our customers. For more information on the Contributor seat and updates on upcoming governance features, visit the product release news page.