OrgNice

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance your organization’s roster already lives in a Google Sheet — someone built it at some point, and it’s been the source of truth ever since. (If you haven’t built that Sheet yet, our guide to turning a Google Sheet into a staff directory walks through it.) You’re looking for a staff directory because that Sheet has hit its ceiling: you need a way for the rest of the org to find and reach the right person — and often, to see who that person reports to, and who reports to them — searchable and shareable, without going through you every time someone asks “Who manages customer relations in Poland?” or “Who’s the committee head for Sports Facilities?” It needs to live somewhere people will actually think to check, not three clicks and a “request access” prompt into a spreadsheet.

Most people search for this as an “employee directory,” and the two terms get used interchangeably — but “staff” is the more accurate word for what’s actually needed here, on purpose. It’s only worth having if it can include everyone who actually needs to be in it — not just payroll employees, but whoever your organization actually depends on: contractors, temp staff, volunteers, committee members, board members, auditors, customer contacts, anyone your business needs people to be able to find. A directory that only covers salaried headcount isn’t solving the problem you actually have, no matter how polished it looks.

And the tradeoff nobody puts on the pricing page: do you want to spend thousands of dollars, or hours upon hours of your own time, to get there — and does getting there mean staying on the Sheet you already have, or leaving it behind for something new? This post compares what people actually reach for — DIY and bought, Sheets-native and not — and what each one really costs once you count everyone you need findable.

Staff directory features

Before comparing tools, it’s worth being specific about what a staff directory actually needs to do.

Searchable, embeddable, shareable

Search by name, role, department, location, or any other field you track — not Ctrl+F across a spreadsheet tab. Information should be visible at a glance, too: color-coding or layout that surfaces the common conditions your team actually looks for (who’s remote, who’s a contractor, which department someone’s in), not just a wall of rows you have to read one at a time. Embeddable somewhere people already are, like an intranet, a wiki, or a Google Site, instead of a link nobody bookmarks. And shareable with people outside your core team who don’t have, and shouldn’t get, a company login — a client, a contractor between engagements, a new board member before onboarding is finished.

Profiles

Contact details, a photo, department, location, working pattern — plus whatever else your organization actually tracks, not just the fields a vendor decided to support.

Reporting hierarchy

People don’t just look someone up — they often want to see who that person reports to, and who reports to them. Some directories are a flat list; better ones generate a full, navigable hierarchy from the same data, which functions as an org chart living inside every profile. (We compared tools for building a standalone org chart from a Google Sheet in an earlier post, if hierarchy — not lookup — is your primary need.)

Role-based field visibility

Some directories carry information not everyone should see — compensation, a personal phone number, performance notes. If yours does, you may want control over who sees which fields, based on their role, not just who can open the directory at all. Not every team needs this, but if you do, it’s worth confirming a tool actually supports it before you’re relying on it.

Worth distinguishing two different things that both get called “field control.” One is true role-based visibility — different viewers see different fields, enforced by the tool, like Sift’s Restricted Attributes. The other is simpler: choosing once, at setup, which fields from your source data appear in the directory at all, the same for every viewer. That second version is weaker — it can’t show compensation to managers and hide it from everyone else — but it’s still a real, useful control: a sensitive column can stay in your Sheet, feeding whatever else uses it, without ever being pulled into the directory in the first place.

Finding the tool that’s right for you

That’s the feature list — most of it close to universal, some of it (like role-based field visibility) more situational depending on what your roster contains. None of it tells you which tool to pick on its own, because the tools in this post cover that list in different ways, at very different costs. What actually separates them comes down to three things specific to your situation, and everything below is organized around evaluating tools against those, tested hands-on wherever we reasonably could and clearly marked where we couldn’t.

Three things that determine which tool is actually right for you

Who’s actually in your directory. If it’s strictly payroll employees, most HR platforms and directory tools will fit fine. The moment you need contractors, volunteers, board members, or committee members in the same searchable list as employees — people who don’t have a company email address and never will — the field narrows fast, because most HR-adjacent software is built around payroll identity, not “anyone affiliated with the org.”

How you’re charged, and at what headcount it starts to hurt. Per-seat pricing is the norm among the dedicated tools in this category, and it looks perfectly reasonable on a homepage priced for 20–50 people. It stops looking reasonable once you’re counting every volunteer and board member as a billable seat — and it’s worth doing that math before signing up, not after. (“Adding it up across what we actually reviewed,” later in this post, runs that math with real numbers for a 123-person org.)

Whether your Sheet stays the source of truth. Some tools import your data once and then diverge from it — the Sheet keeps changing, the directory doesn’t, and you’re back to two versions of the truth. Others read the Sheet live. This still matters, but it’s the third question, not the first.

There’s an onboarding cost hiding inside this one, too. If the Sheet stays the source of truth, whoever already updates it keeps doing exactly what they do today — the directory is just a new way of viewing the same process. If a tool needs its own import and its own data entry going forward, you’re not just buying software, you’re retraining everyone who maintains that data and everyone who used to just open the spreadsheet to look someone up, on a new place to work and a new place to check.

Why cost is the real story in this category

Per-seat pricing assumes your directory headcount tracks your payroll headcount, one to one. For any organization with contractors, seasonal staff, volunteers, or a board, that assumption is wrong from day one, and more wrong as the org grows. (“Adding it up across what we actually reviewed” works through exactly this, comparing a per-seat tool’s real bill against OrgNice’s flat price for the same extended-workforce headcount.)

In practice, that pushes teams into a real buying decision earlier than the problem justifies — and it doesn’t always deliver what it was bought for. The per-seat bill for adding volunteers and board members often stops being defensible, or the platform was never built to hold a non-payroll identity at all, so the directory ends up payroll-only anyway, just in nicer software. Google Sheets can stay the system of record well past the 30–50 employee mark where manual spreadsheet upkeep tends to start straining [source: taito.ai/blog/hr-in-google-sheets-templates, checked 2026-08-29], as long as something else handles search, sharing, and access control on top of it without charging per head. That’s the gap OrgNice sits in: keep the Sheet as the source of truth for as long as it works, and only pay more when you actually need more.

Summary rankings

Best overall, if your roster lives in Google Sheets and you want to keep it there: OrgNice — flat pricing that doesn’t move as headcount, contractors, or board members grow.
Best Google Sheets template as a starting point: Lattice — the strongest field set of any template tested, though it’s gated behind a signup form. OrgNice’s free template is the no-signup alternative, built for an extended workforce from the start. Either way, you’re still choosing a spreadsheet, not a directory: no search, no shareable view, no live sync to anything.
Want to build it yourself? Softr wins this one: the most complete result in hands-on testing, with confirmed live two-way sync against your own Sheet and a self-editable, write-back profile — the one genuine differentiator in this whole category (one caveat: it wrote its own column into the source Sheet unprompted during setup). Its pricing isn’t flat per-seat, but it isn’t headcount-free either — tiered across “Team” and “Client” users with real caps, landing around $330–400/month (annual) for an extended-workforce org of 100+ people; worth noting, a contractor or volunteer on a personal email counts as the cheaper “Client” tier rather than “Team,” a rare case of the pricing actually working in this post’s favor. Runners-up: AppSheet if you’re already on Google Workspace, also with genuine two-way sync — but only if connected directly to the Sheet, not through its “database” option, which behaves like a one-time import instead; Glide’s template is the most polished-looking of the three, but real live sync sits behind a paid-only feature that never got confirmed working in testing; WeWeb, ToolJet, and Retool weren’t tested hands-on and skew toward developers. How well each one actually keeps syncing with your Sheet afterward varies a lot underneath, worth confirming yourself rather than assuming it from the pitch. Or build on Smartsheet instead — a separate work-management platform with real automations and a genuinely different pricing model (free, unlimited Contributor seats), though what was actually tested there was a one-time import, not an ongoing sync, on top of the whole thing being a migration off Sheets rather than a layer added on top of it.
Want to buy dedicated directory or HR-adjacent software instead? GoProfiles if recognition and engagement matter as much as the directory — it’s really an engagement platform with a directory and org chart bundled in. Sift if you want the purest directory/org-chart tool tested here, at pure per-seat pricing, tested hands-on. Pingboard (now part of Workleap) is worth knowing about, not recommending — it’s now priced like a full HRIS without functioning like one.
Need a full HRIS, not just a directory? BambooHR — the right buy if you also need payroll, benefits, and performance review workflows; a lot of platform to purchase just so people can find each other.

Quick comparison

Tool	Reads your Sheet live?	Pricing model	Ballpark cost for this post’s 123-person org	Free tier	Includes contractors/volunteers by default	Embeddable	Reporting hierarchy / org chart	Role-based field visibility
OrgNice	Yes	Flat, per project	$25/mo	Yes (Basic)	Yes	Yes	Yes — one of three built-in views, generated from the same Sheet	No — but you choose once, at setup, which Sheet columns appear in the directory at all, so a sensitive column can just stay out
Template.net / Vertex42 / Lattice / OrgNice’s free template	N/A (it is the sheet)	Free	$0	Yes	Depends how you set it up	No	No — a reporting-relationship column at best, not a navigable hierarchy	Not practical — Sheets’ protected ranges aren’t built for this
Smartsheet	No — tested as a one-time import, not an ongoing sync	Per-Member seat, $9–19/month tiered; Contributor (viewer) seats free and unlimited	$9–57+/mo — one Member on the cheapest tier can run the whole roster; real self-serve via dynamic forms pushes it to the Business floor	No confirmed free Member tier — Contributor seats are free	Yes — free Contributor seats, unlimited headcount	Forms can be embedded; the directory itself — not tested	No — Table and Board views only, no hierarchy view tested	Not tested
Softr	Yes, confirmed hands-on, two-way	Tiered by “Team”/“Client” user counts across four paid tiers plus free; ~$330–400/mo for 100+ people	~$330–400/mo	Yes	Yes — but counted as the cheaper “Client” tier, not free	Not tested	No — not part of the template tested	Page-level only, hand-built and hand-maintained — not enforced by the platform
AppSheet	Yes, confirmed hands-on, two-way — but only if connected directly to the Sheet, not via its “database” option	$5–20/user/month tiered, often included free in qualifying Google Workspace editions	Unclear — depends whether every viewer counts as a billable app user, not confirmed; could be near-$0 if already included in your Workspace edition	Yes — free prototyping tier (10 test users)	Yes, in principle (no domain filtering found) — but priced per app user	Not tested	No — not part of the template tested	No field-level control found; row-filtering by condition is available instead
Glide	Not confirmed working — live sync needs a paid “Workflows” feature that stalled in testing	Free / $25 Solo / $125 Team / custom Enterprise, with confusing credit and team-member caps	Not a per-head number — a flat tier price capped by credits/team-member limits, not multiplied by headcount	Yes, but live sync unusable on it	Unknown — access controls couldn’t be located outside the AI-chat interface	Not tested	Template preview showed “reporting navigation” — not independently verified beyond the preview	Unknown, same reason
WeWeb / ToolJet / Retool	Not tested hands-on	Not tested hands-on	Not tested — no pricing established	Not tested hands-on	Not tested hands-on	Not tested hands-on	Not tested hands-on	Not tested hands-on
GoProfiles	No — syncs from Google Workspace; CSV import is a one-time pull for anything else, and only maps basic fields + reporting structure	Free tier, then $2–$4/user/month tiered, 25-user minimum on paid plans	≈$246/mo (Basic tier) — only if all 123 actually make it in	Yes	Not by default — CSV import silently skips rows whose email domain doesn’t match your Workspace domain; adding those domains under Settings does fix it, but that’s a paid-tier feature	Limited	Yes, tested hands-on — but clearly lower quality than a dedicated org-chart tool	N/A
Sift	No — confirmed hands-on: Google Workspace, CSV import, or Workday only, no live sync	$330–$590/month for a 123-person org, tiered, paid annually (live estimate, 2026-09-01)	$330–590/mo — Sift’s own live estimate for this exact headcount	No	No, confirmed hands-on — rows without an email can be listed but can’t be invited	Not tested	Yes, confirmed hands-on (basic org chart); department/team-specific charts and dotted-line relationships are published claims, not independently verified	Yes, confirmed hands-on — “Restricted Attributes” on individual fields
Pingboard (Workleap)	No — imports/syncs, not Sheets-native	Quote-based, HRIS-tier — roughly $5,000+/year territory, not tested hands-on	≈$417/mo (~$5,000/year) — org-level quote, not seat-driven, so this doesn’t really move with the 123-person mix	No	Partial	Yes	Likely — org charts were Pingboard’s original product before the Workleap acquisition; not independently confirmed in its current form	Yes — view/edit permissions per custom field
BambooHR	No — full HRIS system of record	$10–25/employee/month, published range, add-ons at the higher end [bamboohr.com/pricing]	≈$1,230–3,075/mo ($10–25 × 123)	No	No — built around payroll employees	Limited	Included as part of the platform, per BambooHR’s own marketing; not independently confirmed here	Yes — Access Levels control which fields each role sees

“Not tested” means exactly that — not confirmed hands-on in this post’s own research, not a claim the feature doesn’t exist. Pricing pages and free-tier terms also change; treat this table as a snapshot from testing, not a live feed. The ballpark-cost column uses the same 123-person org (90 employees, 25 contractors, 8 board members) as the “Adding it up” section below — that section is where the reasoning behind these numbers actually lives.

Free Google Sheets templates: Template.net, Vertex42, Lattice, and our own free template

Starting free, in a Google Sheet, is genuinely the right instinct — it costs nothing, scales to however many rows you throw at it, and everyone already knows how to use it. But “there’s a free template for this” turned out to be less true, and less consistent, than we expected once we actually went looking. Quality varies a lot between these, so they’re worth judging individually rather than as one interchangeable category — every template below was actually opened, filled in, and used, not just skimmed off a landing page.

Worth a specific warning while you’re searching yourself: “Google Sheets template” in a page title or URL doesn’t always mean there’s an actual Sheets file behind it. Smartsheet’s directory template, further down this post, lives entirely inside Smartsheet’s own platform despite the name overlap. Softr’s page titled “Google Sheets Employee Directory Template” is the same pattern from a different angle — it’s a Softr app template that defaults to Softr’s own database, with Google Sheets offered as one of several optional data sources rather than a Sheets file that ships with it. Neither is dishonest, exactly, but neither is what the name implies either.

Template.net — We went looking for an actual employee roster / staff directory template and came up empty; what Template.net has is a huge catalog across every document category imaginable, and search inside it is sub-optimal enough that finding a genuine fit for this specific need wasn’t realistic in a reasonable amount of time.

Honest take: Not really a contender for this use case. Worth knowing it’s not there, so nobody else has to go looking.

Vertex42 — Has an actual Staff Directory template, offered as both an Excel and a Google Sheets download. Worth noting the URL itself: it lives at /ExcelTemplates/contact-list.html, not anything staff- or employee-directory-specific — a small tell for what’s inside. The Google Sheets download itself was a rough start: it triggered a Google error claiming a Terms of Service violation. We fell back to the Excel download instead (trivially convertible to a Google Sheet). Once open, it turned out to be a fairly bare-bones contact list:

No Title or Department field — the closest equivalent is a generic “Category” column
No employment type or status (nothing to mark someone as a contractor, volunteer, or otherwise not a standard employee)
No ID field
No start date
No location field

Honest take: A weak starting point for exactly the audience this post is written for — modern, hybrid, distributed organizations with an extended workforce. It’s an Excel file, so nothing stops you from adding every one of those columns yourself, but as a ready-made template it doesn’t do the one job a template is supposed to do: save you from building the structure from scratch.

Lattice — Gated behind a signup form, which makes it a little more friction to try than Template.net or Vertex42, though that’s not surprising given it’s explicit lead-gen for Lattice’s own platform (worth knowing, separately: Lattice is reportedly sunsetting its own HRIS product). It’s also not a one-click copy — there’s no /copy link, so you have to duplicate the Google Sheet yourself once you’re in. Despite all that, the template itself is genuinely strong and well thought out, which tracks with it coming from a company that actually builds HR software for a living.

Honest take: The best of the templates covered here. Solid personal-info fields, a good set of work-identity fields (title, department, level, team), and real employment data alongside them. It also carries a fair amount of sensitive data — likely a reflection of its HRIS origins — including things like compensation, which is a real problem for a plain Google Sheet: there’s no way to show some columns to some viewers and hide them from others, so a directory built straight on this template isn’t something you can widely share as-is. It also offers no assistance with data entry — no dropdown to pick a manager from an existing list, no ID generation — so it’s on you to avoid typos and mismatches as the roster grows. Taken together: a genuinely good starting structure, and a template that specifically benefits from adding something like OrgNice on top when you’re ready to actually share it — both for the searchable/shareable/embeddable gap all these templates have, and for keeping the sensitive fields out of what gets shown.

OrgNice’s free template — Free, no email signup required, same as Template.net and Vertex42 and unlike Lattice’s gated version. It comes with built-in instructions for extending it, and the OrgNice directory demo shows this exact template both as a plain Google Sheet and rendered through OrgNice, so you can see what the jump from spreadsheet to directory actually looks like before committing to either.

Honest take: A strong starting point, and built specifically for this post’s audience — distributed, remote, extended workforces — with location, availability, and employee type included from the start. It also offers real data-entry assistance the other templates skip entirely: new rows get an auto-generated ID, and the reporting-relationship field is a picker rather than free text, so a typo can’t quietly break your hierarchy. The gap, and it’s a real one: no compensation, no emergency contacts, and not much else in the way of sensitive personal fields — extend it yourself if your org needs those tracked alongside everything else. Unsurprisingly, it’s the one template here built with OrgNice specifically in mind, and the instructions in the sheet walk you through that step directly when you’re ready for it.

Picking a starting template

Want the most complete field set out of the box, and don’t mind a signup gate? → Lattice.
Want zero friction — no signup, built for an extended workforce, real data-entry safeguards? → OrgNice’s free template.
Already have Vertex42 open, or just need something today? → Usable, but budget time to add the fields it’s missing.
Starting from Template.net? → Don’t bother — there’s no real staff directory template there to find.

None of that changes the underlying ceiling, though. Whichever one you pick — even the strongest of the four — you’re choosing a data structure, not a directory. No search past Ctrl+F. No view you can hand someone without also handing them edit access to everything. No way to embed it anywhere people will actually see it. No role-based field visibility, so anything sensitive is visible to everyone who can open the file at all. That’s not a knock on any one template — it’s the ceiling every plain Google Sheet hits, no matter how well the columns are designed. Everything from here on is about what you do once you’ve hit it.

Smartsheet

Worth being precise about what this actually is, because “Smartsheet template” sounds like it belongs in the free-template category above and it doesn’t. Smartsheet is its own separate work-management platform — its own grid, its own file format, its own app at app.smartsheet.com — not a Google Sheets template. The “Employee Info Directory” template Smartsheet publishes opens inside that platform and requires a Smartsheet account to use; it’s not a file you download into a Sheet you already have. Adopting it is a migration, not a layer added on top of your existing roster — worth weighing against the onboarding-cost point raised earlier.

What makes it a serious contender anyway is the pricing model, which is genuinely different from the strict per-seat tools later in this post. Smartsheet has two relevant seat types: Members are paid, full-access users who can create and edit sheets, build dashboards, and set up automations. Contributors are free and unlimited on paid plans — they can view anything shared with them, comment, upload attachments, submit forms, and respond to update requests, but they can’t create new items or edit sheet content directly [source: Smartsheet’s own Contributor-seat announcement, checked 2026-09-01 — this specifically confirms form submission and update requests as Contributor-level permissions, not just a general “seat types” page].

On annual billing, Member pricing runs three tiers: Pro at $9/member/month, capped at 10 Members total — you can’t add more Member seats on this tier even if you wanted to; Business at $19/member/month, with a 3-Member minimum, so the effective floor is $57/month even if only one person actually needs a Member seat; and Enterprise, custom-priced, alongside an “Enterprise Flexible” option with a 10-Member minimum that lets you pick which features you’re paying for [source: smartsheet.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-02]. Two feature-gates worth knowing about specifically: conditional logic in the form builder — showing or hiding fields based on earlier answers — is Business and up, not available on Pro; and WorkApps, Smartsheet’s tool for building a more polished, purpose-built interface on top of a sheet, is Enterprise-only. Both matter for how the WorkApps caveat and the forms discussion later in this section should actually be read.

In practice, that means the person (or small team) actually maintaining the roster needs a paid Member seat — cheap on Pro specifically, at $9/month per Member, for up to 10 of them — while everyone else who just needs to look someone up, including contractors, volunteers, and board members, can be a free Contributor, at any headcount. That’s a meaningfully better economic model for an extended workforce than paying per person in the directory. The real limitation: a Contributor can’t edit their own row directly. Self-service profile updates would need either a Member seat or Smartsheet’s update-request form workflow as a workaround, not a direct edit — and if that self-serve plan leans on dynamic form logic specifically, that pushes the whole setup onto Business, at a $57/month floor rather than Pro’s $9.

Tested hands-on. The “Use Template” path for the Employee Info Directory took several attempts before it actually loaded — real friction, worth knowing going in, though it did eventually work. Getting there mattered less than expected, though: the template itself turned out to be too basic for a meaningful roster — the practical path is building your own sheet from scratch or importing an existing one, not starting from what Smartsheet publishes. Importing the Google Sheet directly is what was actually tested: Smartsheet does real auto-discovery on import, correctly identifying the ID column and the header row on its own, though there’s no full auto-mapping the way OrgNice’s or AppSheet’s is — getting everything else set up still took real time. A few rough edges along the way: the Import button itself was positioned off-screen, a plain UI bug; row order didn’t survive the import, with everything re-sorted by ID instead of keeping the original sequence; and the profile-image links already in the source Sheet didn’t come through — Smartsheet supports uploading an image directly into a cell, a real capability Google Sheets doesn’t match as cleanly, but it won’t automatically pull in an externally-linked image, so photos referenced by URL in the original Sheet need to be uploaded into each cell.

Two views come built in: Table, which behaves like a real spreadsheet with search and filtering out of the box, and Board, a swimlane/card view. Board view’s default grouping wasn’t a reasonable choice — it picked Email as the swimlane field rather than something like Department or Employee Type — and switching that grouping to a different column wasn’t obvious in testing. The reason turns out to be a real, specific constraint rather than a bug: Board view can only group by a single-select dropdown column, not a plain text or contact-type column [source: Smartsheet Community, checked 2026-09-01] — so a column imported from Google Sheets as plain text (Department, say) has to be explicitly converted to a single-select dropdown before it’s even eligible to group by, which isn’t obvious from the UI in the moment. Search inside Board view didn’t seem to work at all, for reasons that weren’t clear. Adding fields to the card display itself was easy, at least. Conditional formatting is available for visual color-coding, but rules have to be entered one at a time rather than in bulk, and — a real inconsistency in testing — rules that were set up didn’t apply in Table view, only in Board.

Smartsheet also has a form builder for adding new entries, and forms can be embedded elsewhere so people can submit one without needing access to the underlying sheet at all. The experience feels bolted on rather than integrated, though — closer to a separate Google-Forms-style tool than a native part of the product — and submitting one just appends a row to the sheet. One tier-gate worth knowing about specifically here: conditional logic in the form builder — showing or hiding fields based on an earlier answer — is a Business-and-up feature, not available on Pro, so a more dynamic form for something like distinguishing employee vs. contractor fields would mean paying the $57/month Business floor rather than Pro’s $9. This is where the Member/Contributor split above actually matters in practice: per Smartsheet’s own documentation, a Contributor — the free seat — can fill out forms and respond to update requests, which would make genuine self-serve possible at zero per-person cost, matching this post’s interest in a low-cost path for an extended workforce. That’s Smartsheet’s own stated permission model, though, not something confirmed hands-on in this testing. Automations — notifications, reminders, and similar — are a real, useful built-in feature neither a plain Sheet nor a static template has. Worth flagging plainly: this testing didn’t cover everything Smartsheet offers — WorkApps, its tool for assembling a more polished, purpose-built interface on top of a sheet, wasn’t explored, and it’s plausible that changes what a finished directory built on Smartsheet actually looks like. It’s gated to the Enterprise tier, though, so evaluating it means a custom quote, not something reachable on Pro or Business.

Honest take: Smartsheet is a mature, widely-used work-management platform — genuinely successful software, not a shaky or half-built one — and that shows in the parts that matter: real automations, real conditional formatting, multiple views, and forms that all work together as an integrated whole once they’re set up. Testing an employee-directory build on top of it surfaced some real rough edges specific to that particular use case, though: a published Employee Info Directory template that took several tries just to load and is too basic to use for a real roster once you’re in it, a default swimlane choice (Email) that wasn’t obviously changeable — it turns out Board view can only group by a single-select dropdown column, a real constraint rather than a bug, just not a discoverable one in the moment — formatting rules that didn’t apply everywhere, and image links that don’t survive an import. None of that reflects on Smartsheet as a platform generally — it’s what you run into bending a general-purpose work-management tool into an employee directory, which isn’t the job it was built for. In practice this means building your own sheet or importing an existing one rather than starting from Smartsheet’s own template — closer to the DIY app-builder category earlier in this post than a ready-made directory, just built on a spreadsheet instead of an app builder, and that setup adds up to real hours of configuration rather than the fast start this post is generally looking for. The Member/Contributor pricing split is still the most genuinely compelling thing about Smartsheet for this post’s audience: free viewers at any headcount is a real answer to the extended-workforce problem. The Member side of that is genuinely cheap to start — $9/month per Member on Pro, for up to 10 of them — but it doesn’t stay that way once you need what makes the self-serve story actually work: dynamic form logic requires stepping up to Business, at a $57/month floor, and WorkApps, the polished interface layer, is Enterprise-only and custom-priced. So the real entry price depends heavily on how far into Smartsheet’s feature set the plan actually needs to reach, not just the headline $9. Worth saying plainly: this covers Table and Board views, forms, and automations, but not WorkApps, which is specifically Smartsheet’s tool for building a more polished interface on top of a sheet and sits behind that Enterprise gate — a directory assembled that way could look meaningfully different from what’s described here, but only for orgs already looking at Enterprise-level spend. Go in expecting a spreadsheet-and-forms toolkit you assemble yourself rather than a directory that’s ready out of the box — a fair trade for a platform this capable, just a different one than the purpose-built tools elsewhere in this post.

No-code app builders: Softr, Glide, AppSheet, WeWeb, ToolJet / Retool

This category can genuinely do what a purpose-built directory does — read a Google Sheet, render searchable profiles, control who sees what — because you’re building that app yourself on top of a general-purpose platform rather than buying it pre-built.

A fair warning on scope, up front: these are general-purpose app builders, not five-minute setups. A real, finished directory — multiple pages, navigation, custom styling, role-based views — is realistically a multi-day build in any of them, and testing that thoroughly across five different tools isn’t a reasonable bar for a blog post. So each one below is tested inside a fixed time box instead: connect a real Google Sheet and get to one working, searchable list view — name, title, department, a search box — in 45–60 minutes, nothing more. What’s reported is exactly how far that got in that window, not what’s theoretically possible with more time on the clock. If a tool looks unfinished below, that’s often the time box talking, not a hard ceiling on the platform — but “what you get in about an hour” is itself a useful number if you’re the one about to spend real time on one of these.

Softr — Pricing is genuinely complex: builders, “Team” users, and “Client” users are all counted and priced separately across four paid tiers plus a free one, and working out a real monthly number means knowing your exact feature needs and where you’ll hit those caps — not something worth guessing precisely here. Full grid at softr.io/pricing. One thing worth knowing going in: “Team” isn’t about role, it’s whether an app user’s email shares a builder’s business domain — a contractor or volunteer on a personal Gmail address counts as a “Client” user instead, regardless of how central they are to the org, which is the exact payroll-shaped-assumption problem this post is about, showing up inside a tool that isn’t priced strictly per-seat. As a rough ballpark for an extended-workforce org of 100+ people: Business-tier territory, roughly $330–400/month (annual-billed) depending how far past the included limits you land. The trial runs 7 days, and it’s not obvious from Softr’s own site which of the four tiers it’s actually a trial of — it doesn’t map cleanly to any one published plan, and looks more like its own separate, possibly custom tier. Worth knowing before pointing a reader to it as a clean “try before you buy”: what you get in the trial may not be what you’d actually be paying for afterward.

Tested hands-on with a real Google Sheet, using Softr’s own Employee Directory Template. Permissions aren’t scoped to a single sheet — connecting Google gives Softr read-write access to your whole Drive. The template is really a handful of independently-wired pages (directory list, department view, profile pages) rather than one shared data model: nothing auto-maps, every page’s columns need matching by hand, and a page like Departments ships as a bare grid with no column mapping built in at all. Softr does flag mismatched columns with small validation markers, which helped (one open snag: the first data row didn’t render, and the cause wasn’t obvious even after some digging). About an hour of tinkering — matching the time-boxed scope above — got to a working basic directory: photos, details, search. Going further, like linking a profile to its supervisor’s own page, looked doable but needed real additional time, not a quick toggle. The standout: making a profile page self-editable, with edits writing back to the actual Google Sheet, was straightforward — genuinely useful functionality a static template or a bought seat doesn’t hand you. Sync is confirmed live in both directions, tested directly: a change made in the Sheet shows up in the app, and an edit made in the app writes back to the Sheet. One thing worth flagging plainly: connecting the Sheet didn’t just read from it — Softr added its own column to the original spreadsheet, unprompted and not called out anywhere in the setup flow. Worth knowing before pointing Softr at a Sheet other people, formulas, or scripts also depend on. The rougher edge: switching the data source from Softr’s own database to Google Sheets synced existing users, but broke login until one was manually re-added to the right group, and some settings kept pointing at the old database users.

On role-based access specifically: it’s page-level, not field-level. You can build separate versions of a page for different groups — a Manager view with compensation shown, an Employee view without — but that’s a workaround you build and maintain yourself, not something the platform enforces. The mechanism itself is inherently error-prone, not buggy: nothing about it stops the same sensitive field from ending up on the wrong version by mistake, and it’s a real ongoing maintenance burden on top of that — every change to that field means updating both versions by hand, indefinitely.

Honest take: A decent, genuinely workable experience once you’re past the learning curve, but the real shape here is a handful of independently-wired pages, not one directory with a shared data model — every mapping, layout, and broken link after a Sheet change is on you to fix. Role-based visibility is the same story in miniature: buildable, but hand-maintained and easy to get subtly wrong, not something the platform guarantees. Softr writing its own column into the source Sheet without asking is a real trust issue for this post’s audience specifically — the whole premise here is that the Sheet stays yours, and a tool quietly restructuring it undercuts that, even if the column itself is harmless. The write-back editable profile is the one feature here that’s a genuine differentiator for this whole category.

Glide — Four tiers under the “GlideOS” branding: Free, Solo $25/mo, Team $125/mo (Glide’s recommended tier), and a custom Enterprise plan [source: glideapps.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-01]. Full detail at glideapps.com/pricing.

Tested hands-on, using Glide’s AI-assisted app builder and its Employee Directory template — the roughest experience of anything tested in this section. Google Sheets isn’t a native, direct integration here: connecting one goes through Composio, a third-party connector platform, which means granting Drive permissions to a system other than the one actually logged into, on top of Glide’s own permission request — and what was requested was broad, full Drive access rather than access scoped to the one sheet being connected. The AI assistant picked the sheet, but the result was Glide downloading it as a static Excel attachment inside the project, not a live connection — a real sign the integration is bolted on rather than built in. The first sync attempt then failed outright. The AI recovered and offered a genuine choice — import once, or sync — and choosing sync produced a promising-sounding response about the Sheet becoming the live roster source. It then stalled for over 15 minutes before reporting that a feature called “Workflows” wasn’t available, falling back to manual refresh instead of the live sync it had just described — Workflows turns out to be included on every paid plan, scaling from a limited number on the entry paid tier up to unlimited on the higher ones, but not on Free. In practice, that means the one feature this post actually cares about — the Sheet staying live — can’t be evaluated on Glide’s free tier at all; you’d need to already be paying before you could confirm it works the way you need. The AI builder is a reasonable idea in concept but was extremely slow throughout, and some of its changes landed in the project configuration with no obvious way to find or verify them by looking directly — worth being specific about why: opening the project outside the AI chat shows only six sections (Data, Integrations, Workflows, Secrets, Chats, Attachments), with nothing that looks like a Pages or layout editor. The AI chat appears to be the only real interface for actually building the app; there’s no obvious way to go find and adjust what it did by hand. An “upgrade to keep going” prompt showed up partway through, and the free tier’s AI-builder credits did run out fast — Glide’s own pricing page lists the Free tier as having only “Limited Credits” (an unspecified amount) [source: glideapps.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-01]. Separately, and confusingly: the same pricing page shows a “Team members: 2” cap on both the Free tier and the paid Solo tier — it’s not obvious from the page whether that’s collaborators building the app or something else, and it’s worth knowing it apparently doesn’t increase just by upgrading from Free to Solo. Given how much time this had already taken, testing stopped there rather than continuing to force it.

What the pre-built Employee Directory template’s own preview showed, separate from the AI-builder detour, was genuinely good: a polished UI, reporting navigation, profile pages, search, card views, filters, and add/edit — everything a working directory needs, at least on Glide’s own sample data. Access control wasn’t evaluated, and isn’t expected to be: the same problem applies as everywhere else in this entry — outside the AI chat there’s no settings panel, Pages editor, or anything else to go looking in, so there’s no obvious way to even find role-based or field-level controls, let alone confirm whether they exist. Left as a genuine “we don’t know” rather than a claim either way.

Honest take: The template itself is the most polished thing seen in this section so far — genuinely close to a finished product, not a rough starting point. But getting there with a real Google Sheet as the live source was the worst experience of any tool tested here: permissions granted to a third-party connector on top of Glide’s own, a failed sync, a 15-plus-minute stall before being told live sync needed a feature (Workflows) that’s paid-plan-only and wasn’t flagged up front, and AI-builder credits that ran out fast enough on the free tier to cut testing short on their own. The pricing model doesn’t help — “credits,” “updates,” and a “team members” cap that seemingly doesn’t move between Free and Solo are a lot of different meters to reconcile before you even know what a real month would cost. And there’s no obvious way to work around any of this by hand: the project view outside the AI chat is six sections deep (Data, Integrations, Workflows, Secrets, Chats, Attachments) with nothing resembling a Pages or layout editor — the AI chat isn’t just the fastest way to build here, it looks like the only way, which is a real dependency to take on for something you’ll need to maintain indefinitely. For this post’s audience specifically — teams who want their Sheet to stay the actual source of truth — that’s a serious problem, not a minor rough edge: the one capability that matters most here can’t even be evaluated for free, since live sync needs a paid plan before you can confirm it works the way you need.

AppSheet — Starter $5/user/month, Core $10/user/month, Enterprise Plus $20/user/month, with a free prototyping tier (up to 10 test users) [source: about.appsheet.com/pricing, checked 2026-08-29]. Worth knowing before pricing this out: many Google Workspace editions — Business Starter and up, most Enterprise and Frontline tiers — include AppSheet Core at no extra cost by default, as long as the Workspace domain is verified [source: Google Workspace Updates, July 2023 — worth a live re-check against your specific edition before relying on it]. If your org’s already on Workspace, this may effectively be free before you even look at the paid tiers.

Tested hands-on with a real Google Sheet, using AppSheet’s own directory template. Because it’s a Google product, granting Drive access felt lower-stakes than with a third-party tool — the same consent flow already trusted for everything else in Workspace. Connecting the template to a Sheet was genuinely straightforward: cards, detail views, and navigation populated immediately, without the page-by-page manual mapping Softr required — a real central data model, not a set of independently-wired pages. Connecting a second, personal Google Sheet was just as easy, and every page updated. A few real snags, though: image fields weren’t obvious to set up; the web preview kept showing stale data after edits until the app was explicitly saved (the mobile and tablet previews — AppSheet ships all three, not just mobile — updated correctly the whole time); and search was present but returned results that didn’t visibly match what was typed, with no obvious explanation. About an hour of tinkering reached a basic working directory — cards, details, search — though the result looked plain and unpolished throughout, not just on the web view. One thing that needed a second pass to get right: the first attempt used AppSheet’s “database” option, which turned out to behave like a one-time import — edits didn’t write back to the Sheet. Connecting the app directly to the Google Sheet itself, instead, fixed that: sync works both ways, tested — changes made in the Sheet show up in the app, and edits made in the app write back to the Sheet. No field-level visibility control turned up while designing pages, but row-filtering by condition is available — a different capability (which records show, not which columns are visible).

Honest take: The template works well and gives a genuinely quick path to a working directory, backed by a real central data model rather than a pile of disconnected pages — a real edge over Softr in this section. Live, two-way sync with the Sheet is confirmed and genuinely works, as long as the app is connected directly to the Sheet rather than through AppSheet’s “database” option, which behaves more like a one-time import. But the end result is underwhelming: the UI is basic throughout, not just on the web view, and the cards and layouts don’t look polished even once the data’s wired up correctly — this reads more like a functional prototype than something to hand the whole org and call a finished directory. The preview behavior is confusing enough to cost real time until you know the trick (save before judging what’s live), and full costing takes some digging. Its strongest argument is the price, not the result: for an org already on Google Workspace, Core-tier AppSheet may already be included — worth checking your own plan before assuming this is a new line item at all.

WeWeb, ToolJet, and Retool weren’t tested hands-on — the same time constraints that shaped this whole section applied here, and all three skew furthest from this post’s actual reader. WeWeb is a front-end builder built around a real backend (Xano, Supabase, Postgres) rather than Sheets itself; ToolJet and Retool are internal-tools platforms aimed at developers, not the HR or ops person who’d actually keep a staff directory running day to day. All three are legitimate DIY options in the same category as Softr, AppSheet, and Glide above, and worth judging on the same questions if you go looking: how fast you can get to something usable, how much complexity that buys as your needs grow, how much flexibility it actually gives you, how polished the result looks without extra work, whether the Google Sheets connection is genuinely live or just a one-time import, and what it costs once builder seats and any separate end-user access are both counted. Which of those matters most is specific to your situation — this post can’t tell you the answer for these three the way it can for the tools tested above.

Is building your own worth it?

Set the cost question aside for a moment and this is genuinely the most capable category in this post — you can build exactly the experience and visualization your organization needs, not whatever an off-the-shelf vendor decided to support. If you have an unusual or esoteric requirement that no packaged directory tool handles, this is generally the way to go, and it’s a real strength, not just a consolation prize — but “generally” is doing real work in that sentence. Whether you can actually build the specific thing you have in mind depends entirely on the platform, and testing in this section found that range running from genuinely straightforward to outright blocked: AppSheet connected to a live Sheet in minutes; Softr let you build role-based visibility, but only as a hand-maintained workaround with real, structural room for error, not something the platform enforces; Glide’s live sync — arguably the single most basic requirement for this post’s audience — turned out to need a paid plan just to attempt, let alone verify. “You can build anything here” is the pitch. Whether you actually can, on the specific platform and tier you’re evaluating, is a real question worth testing yourself before assuming yes.

We didn’t walk away from this section with one clear winner, and that’s worth saying plainly rather than forcing a pick that the testing doesn’t support — each of the three had a real strength and a real failure mode, and which matters more depends on what you actually need. If pressed to choose one for a real project anyway: Softr. The manual page-wiring was tedious, but it was the one that got furthest to something genuinely usable without hitting a hard wall along the way.

The cost question doesn’t go away, though, and it cuts both ways. You end up with exactly what you built — nothing more — and people consistently underestimate how much effort goes into building, testing, and maintaining that, even with AI doing a lot of the assembly work now. Role-based field visibility is a good example of the pattern: yes, you can build it — hide compensation from everyone but managers, say — but you’re the one designing and maintaining those rules, on top of everything else the app needs, and getting that logic subtly wrong is exactly the kind of mistake that’s easy to make and expensive to discover late. Every edge case, every new field, every “can we also show X” request is now your team’s problem to solve, indefinitely. If you have a real, specific use case that justifies a highly customized directory, this is definitely your path. If “people can find each other” is the whole requirement, it’s a lot of ongoing ownership for something the next category down solves out of the box.

None of this requires you personally to be the one building it, either — a real option here is to program-manage the work and hand the actual build and upkeep to IT or another technical hire, rather than doing it yourself. Whether that’s worth it depends on your specific situation: the cost doesn’t disappear just because someone else is paying it, it just moves from your own hours to a line item or a colleague’s time, and “we have engineering capacity to spare for this” is a real answer for some organizations and not remotely true for most. Our honest opinion, having gone through all of this: for an employee directory specifically, a DIY build is overkill and ends up expensive — in cash if you hire it out, in ongoing hours if you don’t — barring a handful of genuinely unusual cases. Most organizations don’t need a custom-built app here; they need people to find each other, and that’s a solved problem elsewhere in this post without taking on a build-and-maintain commitment at all.

Dedicated directory / HR-adjacent software

GoProfiles — Worth being precise about what this actually is: an employee engagement and recognition platform — profiles, org chart, peer recognition, culture features — that happens to include a directory, not a directory tool that happens to include extras. Pricing: Free tier, then Basic at $2/user/month (25-user minimum, so a $50/mo floor), Pro at $4/user/month (50-user minimum, $200/mo floor), Enterprise custom [source: goprofiles.io/product/pricing, checked 2026-09-01].

Tested hands-on, on the free tier. GoProfiles isn’t Google Sheets–native: the real integration is Google Workspace, syncing employee records from your Workspace directory, with a CSV import available for anything that isn’t already in Workspace. That CSV import has a real, specific gap for this post’s audience — rows whose email address didn’t match the org’s Workspace domain were silently skipped on import, which is precisely the extended-workforce case (contractors, volunteers, board members) this post keeps returning to. Multiple email domains can be added to fix that, but it’s a paid-tier feature, not available on the free tier tested here. What does come in isn’t kept live, either — a CSV import is a one-time pull, and it’s genuinely unclear whether records synced from Workspace itself stay current automatically or need re-syncing by hand; left as an honest “we don’t know” rather than a claim either way. Removing the CSV-imported test rows afterward wasn’t obvious — no clear bulk-delete path turned up in the interface. On mapping: the CSV import itself only covers a basic set of fields plus the reporting-structure column — reportsTo, which drives the org chart — with no way to bring in a custom column. The directory view itself looked solid — the thing this post actually cares about most. The product also offers four distinct ways to look at the same roster — Directory, Org Chart, Groups, and a Map view — more built-in views than any template or DIY app builder tested in this post offered out of the box — plus recognition (the platform’s core positioning) and distribution lists, both present and real, not just marketing copy. The org chart specifically, though, was rough: present, but noticeably lower quality than a dedicated org-chart tool produces. One real feature this post hasn’t seen elsewhere in the dedicated-tools category: profiles are editable right from the card view, not view-only — though it wasn’t clear from testing whether editing can be scoped so someone can only edit their own profile, versus anyone with access being able to edit anyone’s.

Honest take: The multi-view idea — directory, org chart, groups, map — is the right shape for this audience, and recognition and distribution lists are real, working extras on top. Editable profiles are a genuine strength, too, assuming editing can actually be locked down to your own profile — that part is unconfirmed. But the mechanics underneath don’t hold up as well otherwise: it’s built to sync from Google Workspace, with CSV as the fallback for anything else, and that fallback only maps a basic set of fields plus reporting structure, and quietly drops exactly the people this post cares about most — anyone whose email doesn’t match your Workspace domain gets skipped on import, without a warning, unless you’re already paying for the multiple-domains option. Fixed-field mapping means you’re working inside GoProfiles’ own schema, not your own columns, and it wasn’t obvious how to clean up test data once it was in. The org chart, despite being a real feature here, was clearly lower quality than what a dedicated org-chart tool produces; the directory itself fared better. There’s also something structurally a little odd about the whole product: it’s built on the assumption you already have an HRIS (or a Workspace-managed employee base) feeding it, which means a fair amount of what you’d configure here — domains, records, reporting structure — probably already lives, and gets managed, in that HRIS too. You’re not just adding a directory on top of your roster; you’re potentially maintaining a second, overlapping copy of settings your HRIS already owns. If recognition and engagement are genuinely what you’re buying, the directory, org chart, and distribution lists are a solid bundle. If a Google Sheet with a mixed roster is your actual starting point, the CSV-import domain filter alone is reason to test this carefully with your own real data before assuming it’ll include everyone you need it to.

Sift — The most directory-first, search-focused tool in this list, and genuinely worth including on that basis. Pricing checked live on justsift.com/pricing on 2026-09-01: the page’s own estimate for a 123-person org — the same headcount this post uses throughout for its worked example — runs $330–$590/month, paid annually, spanning the cheapest tier up to Complete (org chart, profiles, and directory bundled together) at $590/mo. That’s specific to 123 users, not a flat base price the way the older $150–$200/mo figures this post cited earlier looked; those may still be roughly right as a starting floor at Sift’s 20-user minimum, but that’s now unconfirmed rather than restated as fact. The $330–$590/mo figure for this post’s 123-person worked example is the number this post relies on throughout — real, live, and specific to the headcount that matters here.

Tested hands-on. Sift doesn’t connect to Google Sheets at all — the actual data sources are Google Workspace, a CSV import, or Workday, which means adopting it means taking on a genuinely new workflow for keeping the roster current, not pointing it at what you already maintain. The extended-workforce problem this post keeps finding shows up here too, in a specific way: the CSV import uses Sift’s own fixed template, and while a row can be entered without an email address, that person can’t be invited — so contractors, volunteers, or board members without a company email can be listed but not actually given access. Field mapping during import is partly automatic, but only into Sift’s own fixed set of fields, the same limitation found elsewhere in this category; photos have their own separate CSV schema to match. A real CSV sync of 65 employees took noticeably long to process. Search was the roughest part of the experience: an “Advanced search” button that appears alongside empty results didn’t do anything, and the actual advanced search — a per-field filter — turns out to live behind a different, separate button, which took real trial and error to find. On the upside: every employee gets a profile page, profiles support hierarchy navigation, and they’re editable, not view-only. Attributes and fields can be individually marked restricted — the “Restricted Attributes” feature confirmed hands-on here, not just from documentation. UI polish throughout is passable, not more than that. Despite the rough edges above, getting a basic directory, org chart, and profile panel working didn’t take excessive effort. No live sync to any external data source — once imported, the data stays where you put it until re-imported.

Beyond what was tested directly, Sift’s published feature set also includes department- and team-specific org charts (not just one org-wide view), dotted-line reporting relationships for matrixed orgs, and export to Lucid — published claims, not independently verified here.

Honest take: A well-featured directory/org-chart/profile system once it’s set up, and it doesn’t take unreasonable effort to get there despite some real rough edges along the way — a confusing two-button search setup, a slow CSV sync for a fairly small roster, and fixed import schemas for both people data and photos. The bigger issue for this post’s audience: there’s no Google Sheets connection at all, only Google Workspace, CSV, or Workday, so adopting Sift means taking on a new data-entry workflow rather than keeping the one already in use. And the extended-workforce problem that shows up across this whole category shows up here in a specific way — you can list someone without a company email, but you can’t actually invite them, so “everyone affiliated with the org, findable” isn’t fully solved even once they’re in the system. Editable profiles with hierarchy navigation and real per-field restricted attributes are genuine strengths for anyone who needs them.

Pingboard (now part of Workleap) — Not tested hands-on. Workleap is a talent-management and employee-experience platform, not a full HRIS — it’s built to sit alongside an existing HRIS, not replace one — and Pingboard is its org-chart-and-directory piece. That distinction is worth making because the price no longer matches it: real-world cost now lands in BambooHR’s neighborhood, roughly $5,000 a year, not the ~$4/user/month figure this post cited earlier [source: Capterra pricing listing, checked 2026-08-29], which looks like a stale, pre-acquisition rate. So this is now an HRIS-sized bill for something that still isn’t an HRIS. Not a Google Sheets–native tool either way — it syncs from an HRIS or manual import, not a live Sheet read.

Honest take: Treated the same way as BambooHR in this post on cost alone, but worth being precise about why: Pingboard is priced like a full HR platform now without functioning like one — it’s still org chart, directory, and engagement features, the same category as GoProfiles and Sift above, just billed at a very different scale since joining Workleap. If you’re already evaluating Workleap for its broader talent-management tools, it’s a reasonable module to have included. If a directory is genuinely the whole requirement, paying HRIS-tier pricing for it doesn’t make sense.

Full HRIS: BambooHR

BambooHR — Not tested hands-on. Included here as the ceiling this whole post is measuring against, not as a live candidate for “just add a directory”: BambooHR is a full HR information system — onboarding, time off, performance, and (via add-on) payroll and benefits — with an employee directory as one module inside it, not the product itself.

BambooHR’s own pricing page confirms a $10–25 per employee per month range, with add-ons pushing toward the higher end [source: bamboohr.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-02] — its own published range now, not a third-party estimate. For a 150-person org, that works out to roughly $1,500–$3,750/month, though it’s still a range rather than a single number, since where you land depends on which modules you actually add. It’s not stated outright which tier includes the directory itself, but it’s reasonable to assume it’s in the entry tier — the directory is core to what BambooHR is, the data every other module builds on, not an add-on the way payroll or benefits are.

Honest take: The right tool if you’re buying HR infrastructure, not just a directory — but a very large purchase to make because a spreadsheet stopped being searchable. Its Access Levels feature does give you real, granular control over which fields each role can see, which is table stakes at this price point rather than a differentiator. This is the ceiling of what this category costs, and exactly why the cheaper categories earlier in this post exist at all.

The belief underneath this whole post, stated directly: Google Sheets is a genuinely good place for a growing organization’s roster to live — plenty already keep it there — and “you can’t scale on a spreadsheet” is a false argument. What actually breaks isn’t the Sheet, it’s the absence of anything built to search, share, and view it as a directory. Closing that gap is a comparatively small investment, not a big one, and it’s the specific combination this section is describing: OrgNice on top of a Sheet you keep. That pairing holds a low total cost of ownership for a long time as an organization grows, and it’s a particularly good fit for organizations with an extended workforce — contractors, volunteers, board members — that most other tools in this post struggle to include at all.

OrgNice reads that Sheet live: every time someone opens the directory or the org chart, it’s reading the current state of the Sheet at that moment, not a copy imported once at setup — the same test this post has been applying to every other tool. Each person gets a stable, shareable profile URL; the directory is searchable by name, title, ID, or any field in the Sheet, custom ones included; and the same roster can be viewed as a searchable directory, card-style profiles, or a reporting-hierarchy org chart — three built-in layouts, not one you’d have to design yourself the way the DIY section above required. Both the directory and the org chart can be embedded — Confluence, a Google Site, an intranet — as an iframe that keeps updating without needing to be re-embedded. Categorical fields can be turned into visual layers, color-coded by department or location, which is the “information at a glance” requirement from earlier in this post. Contractors and partners without a Google account get view-only, individually revocable share links, rather than needing a seat in your Google Workspace at all.

Pricing is flat and per-project, not per-seat: a free Basic plan with no credit card required, then Standard at $20/month and Plus at $25/month (both billed annually), with a 7-day trial available on Plus — full detail at org-nice.com/app/pricing.html. The low-TCO case rests on two things: no per-seat charge, so the bill doesn’t move with headcount or an extended workforce, and auto-mapping, which reads the Sheet’s columns directly rather than asking you to wire up pages or design a data model by hand — a first directory, formatted and color-coded, is typically minutes away, not the hour-plus of tinkering this post found even in the app builders that got furthest. Everything from there is customizable; you’re just not starting from a blank page to get there.

The honest gaps, stated plainly: OrgNice is view-only, so it doesn’t support editing profile fields the way some tools in this post do — updates happen in the Sheet, not in OrgNice. And it doesn’t have role-based visibility, of either views or fields — everyone with access sees the same directory.

Honest take: The case for OrgNice comes down to total cost of ownership, not just the sticker price. No per-seat fee means growth and an extended workforce don’t inflate the bill the way they do everywhere else per-seat pricing shows up in this post; auto-mapping means there’s no build-and-maintain burden either, since you’re not the one designing a data model or hand-wiring pages the way this post found necessary everywhere else in the DIY category. The honest tradeoff: it’s view-only, and visibility isn’t role-based, for views or fields — real limitations for the smaller set of readers who need them, and the right reason to look elsewhere if you do. (Some unnamed sources — who may or may not sit two desks over from the person writing this — suggest at least one of these might be closer to the roadmap than “not currently supported” implies. Take that for what it’s worth.)

Adding it up across what we actually reviewed

Every tool in this post falls into one of three pricing shapes, and they don’t compare cleanly against each other — which is exactly why it’s worth lining them up rather than taking any one pricing page at face value. Put a real number on it, using the same org across every category in this post: 90 employees, 25 contractors, and 8 board members — 123 people, the mix this post keeps coming back to.

Free — Template.net, Vertex42, Lattice, and OrgNice’s free template all cost $0. The catch isn’t dollars, it’s time: you’re the search function, the access control, and the sync mechanism, by hand, indefinitely. A real cost, just not one that shows up on an invoice — more on that below.

Flat fee — OrgNice is the only tool in this post priced this way: one number, $25/mo on the Plus plan, that doesn’t change no matter how many people are in the directory or how the mix shifts. For this post’s 123-person org, that’s the same $25/mo whether it’s 90 payroll employees or 90 employees plus an extended workforce of 33 more. Worth being precise here, since it’s tempting to lump the no-code app builders and Smartsheet in as “basically flat” too, and they’re not, quite: Softr and Glide charge a fixed number per tier, but that tier comes with real user or credit caps, and growing past them means upgrading or paying overage, not staying flat; AppSheet is priced per app user, not by tier at all; and Smartsheet’s Member seats are genuinely per-seat, just cheap in practice because most of a typical roster can be free Contributors instead. A tiered plan with caps still moves with your headcount eventually. OrgNice’s doesn’t, at any headcount.

Per seat — everyone else, though “per seat” doesn’t mean the same thing twice here:

Charged per person in the directory: GoProfiles’s Basic tier at $2/user/month works out to $2 × 123 ≈ $246/mo — and only if all 123 actually make it in; the free tier tested earlier silently drops anyone off your Workspace domain, and the multi-domain fix needed to include contractors and board members is itself a paid-tier feature. Sift’s own live pricing-page estimate for this exact 123-person org runs $330–$590/month, depending on tier — 13–24× OrgNice’s flat rate for the same 123 people. BambooHR’s own published range, $10–25 per employee per month, works out to roughly $1,230–$3,075/month for 123 people — though it’s not clear the entry $10 tier even includes the directory module, and either way you’re buying the rest of the HRIS alongside it, not just a directory.
Charged only for the people actually maintaining it, not everyone in the directory: Smartsheet’s Member seats run $9–19/month each, and one Member on the cheapest Pro tier can maintain the whole 123-person roster while everyone else is a free Contributor — genuinely competitive with OrgNice’s flat rate at the low end, though real self-serve via dynamic forms pushes that up to Business’s $57/month floor instead.
Priced at the org level, not the seat level: Pingboard is the outlier here — per-seat in spirit, quote-based in practice, with no clean number to run through this math at all. Real-world cost lands somewhere in BambooHR’s territory regardless of whether the mix is 123 payroll employees or an extended workforce, since Workleap prices the whole org, not the seat count.

One more cost this math doesn’t capture, and it’s worth naming directly: the free templates, Smartsheet if you’re building your own sheet rather than using its (too-basic) template, and every no-code app builder in this post all carry a real setup-and-maintenance cost that never shows up as a dollar figure. Someone has to design the data model, wire up the pages, fix what breaks when the Sheet’s structure changes, and keep doing that indefinitely. That cost is genuinely unknown until you’re the one paying it in hours, and it doesn’t shrink just because the subscription price is small or zero.

Run that math for your own org before you sign anything — the gap between “per-seat quote” and “what you’ll actually be charged” tends to be bigger than it looks on the pricing page, in every category except the one priced flat to begin with.

Decision matrix

Start with the fork this whole post keeps coming back to: are you keeping your Google Sheet as the source of truth, or are you willing to migrate to a new system and take on the onboarding and workflow-change cost that comes with it?

Keeping your Google Sheet:

Want your Google Sheet to keep working for the long haul, without turning this into a build project? → OrgNice — flat pricing regardless of headcount or mix, reads the Sheet live, nothing to design or maintain. The lowest cost of ownership of anything in this post.
OK taking on the cost of building an app yourself, either for flat-ish pricing that isn’t strictly per-seat or because you have a genuinely unique requirement no packaged tool covers? → a no-code app builder — Softr or AppSheet specifically, since they’re the two with confirmed live Sheets sync; Glide’s live sync was never confirmed working in testing, and WeWeb/ToolJet/Retool weren’t tested hands-on at all. Pricing here isn’t free of headcount either, so check the specific tool’s model rather than assuming “DIY” means “flat.”

Migrating to a new system:

Cheapest possible per-seat cost, and fine with it staying per-seat? → Sift — still charges per person, including your extended workforce, but the lowest rate of the dedicated tools tested.
Need payroll, benefits, and performance management, not just a directory? → BambooHR or a comparable full HRIS. (Pingboard is worth knowing about here too, mostly as a caution: it’s now priced in the same territory without actually being a full HRIS.)
Willing to migrate, but want to keep cost down for an audience that’s mostly looking, not editing? → Smartsheet — free, unlimited Contributor seats, paid only for whoever’s actually maintaining the roster.
Want recognition and engagement features bundled in with the directory? → GoProfiles — a narrower need than the others above, worth a mention for the reader who actually has it, but not the tool to reach for on cost or on pure directory features alone.

Either way: do you just need this solved today, without becoming an app developer or paying per head? → OrgNice.

Conclusion

Strip away the tool names and this whole post comes down to one choice: stay on the Google Sheet you already have, or move off it to something new. We’ve made the general case for staying longer than you’d think in a separate post on scaling a Google Sheets staff directory — everything below is that argument backed by tool-by-tool specifics: every option reviewed here sits on one side of that line or the other, and it’s worth being honest about what each side actually costs.

Staying on Sheets means the process you already have — whoever updates the roster today keeps doing exactly that — stays intact, and it’s the only path that doesn’t come with a retraining cost on top of the tool itself. But a plain Sheet, even the best of the free templates in this post, tops out at a Ctrl+F search and no shareable view — reporting relationships are a column of names, not a navigable hierarchy anyone can actually look through. Closing that gap without leaving Sheets is either a DIY build (real time, real ongoing maintenance) or a tool like OrgNice, which reads the Sheet live and adds search, sharing, access control, and a real reporting-hierarchy org chart on top of the same data, without becoming a second place anyone has to enter or check.

Moving off Sheets can buy real capability too, though it’s tool-specific, not universal: Sift’s org chart genuinely goes further than OrgNice’s — department- and team-specific charts, dotted-line relationships for matrixed orgs — while GoProfiles’ org chart, despite being a real feature, tested out clearly lower quality than OrgNice’s single hierarchy view. A full HRIS like BambooHR adds payroll, benefits, and performance workflows on top of all of it. But moving off Sheets also means a real onboarding cost — retraining whoever updates the roster and whoever used to just open the spreadsheet to look someone up — and, outside OrgNice’s flat pricing, a bill that grows with every contractor, volunteer, and board member you add, not just every hire.

None of the tools above are wrong, exactly — they’re each a reasonable answer to “buy real directory software,” on one side of that line or the other. The question this post is actually trying to answer is when leaving Sheets makes sense, and the honest answer is: later than the per-seat pricing pages want you to believe, especially if your organization includes people who were never going to show up as payroll headcount. OrgNice exists for the case in between: your data’s in Sheets, it should stay there — search, sharing, and a real org chart included — for as long as that’s genuinely working, and growing, in headcount or in how many non-employees you need to include, shouldn’t be the thing that forces you into an expensive tooling decision before you’re actually ready to make one.

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A note on how to use this post

Everything above reflects our own hands-on testing and research, done as honestly as we know how — including where that made OrgNice look worse, not just better. But if you’re evaluating any of these tools with real money or a real rollout on the line, validate for yourself before treating this post as the final word. Several of the products covered here are large, capable platforms with far more surface area than a time-boxed review can fully cover, and it’s entirely possible we missed a more appropriate plan, mode, or technique that would change one of these conclusions. Use this as a starting point for your own evaluation, not a substitute for it.

This list isn’t exhaustive, either. Tools like monday.com, Deel, Coda, Zoho People, HiBob, and Taito.ai are all real options in this space that didn’t make it into this post — not because they were ruled out, just because reviewing every candidate this thoroughly would make an already-long post unmanageable. If you’re looking at one of them, the same questions this post kept coming back to apply just as well: who’s actually going to be in your directory, and whether the pricing still holds up once contractors, volunteers, and board members are counted alongside employees; how much setup and ongoing maintenance it takes to get there and keep it running; how deep the feature set actually goes once you’re past the marketing page; and whether it reads your data live or just imports it once, leaving you maintaining two versions of the truth. Those hold up regardless of which tool you’re looking at.

Best Staff Directory Tools for Google Sheets Teams — 2026 Comparison