Plane vs SmartSuite
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Plane is climbing the enterprise ladder — custom roles and granular permissions — while bolting Plane AI into the editor.
Plane is on a roughly fortnightly cloud changelog cadence. Two structural moves stand out. The April 25 release redesigned the permissions system into a two-layer access model with per-resource overrides, a new Workspace Admin role, and custom roles for Enterprise. The May 15 release deepened the data and AI surface: PQL in Dashboards, URL-based media embeds in the editor, Gantt for Teamspace, customer requests on work items, bulk-copy across projects, and Plane AI editing pages. The changelog source duplicates each release into multiple scraped entries.
Plane is moving up-market in two coordinated directions: enterprise-grade access control (custom roles, granular permissions, soon almost certainly audit logs and SCIM) and a data/AI analyst layer grafted onto the tracker (PQL as the query language for dashboards and work-item search, Plane AI taking write-actions). The intent looks like a head-on competitive position against Linear and Jira at the enterprise tier rather than the friendlier-alternative role Plane occupied earlier.
Expect SCIM, SAML refinements, or admin audit logs to follow the custom-roles redesign as the rest of the enterprise checklist. On the AI side, Plane AI write-actions extend from pages to work items themselves — bulk edits, generated descriptions, or automation rules driven from the chat.
SmartSuite is rewiring its core primitives for ITSM, GRC, and structured service-desk work.
Two dense release waves in early and mid May target a clear set of buyers: service desks, governance/risk/compliance teams, and PMO operators. Forms got a major upgrade — multi-page flows, a review step, table-display linked records, and a new Internal mode for authenticated in-app submissions. Around it, SmartSuite added a first-class Team field through to automations, dynamic-value URLs, cross-Solution calendar roll-ups, Solution-level restore, and a manual stop on AI Field Agents.
The product is moving past its general no-code positioning toward becoming the work platform of choice for structured operational teams. Internal Forms, the Team field across automations, and Solution-level governance features are exactly the surface a buyer evaluating ServiceNow alternatives or a lightweight GRC platform looks for. The AI Field Agent work continues but is taking a back seat to the operational plumbing that lets larger, more regulated teams adopt SmartSuite without bolt-ons.
Expect deeper SLA, approval workflow, and audit primitives next — the natural follow-ons once Team and Internal Forms are in place. A native service-portal experience or richer ITSM-flavoured templates would not be surprising in the next quarter.
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