Microsoft Planner Review 2026: Is It Worth It?

What Is Microsoft Planner?

Microsoft Planner is a cloud-based task and work management app that is part of Microsoft 365. Microsoft describes it as a way to "manage your tasks, to-do lists, plans, and projects across Microsoft 365 apps in one place". The same app runs in a web browser, as the Planner app in Microsoft Teams, and on iOS and Android.

Planner now contains two kinds of plan, and understanding the difference is the key to this review:

• Basic plans are the original Planner: Kanban-style boards of tasks grouped into buckets, with assignees, due dates, labels and checklists. They are included with Microsoft 365 business, enterprise and education subscriptions.
• Premium plans are what used to be Microsoft Project for the web: scheduled projects with a timeline (Gantt) view, task dependencies, milestones, sprints, goals and custom fields. They require a Planner Plan 1 or Planner and Project Plan 3 licence.

Organisations typically use Planner for:

• Team task boards, such as a marketing team's weekly work or an office move
• Meeting follow-ups, turning actions from Teams meetings into assigned tasks
• IT and operations work, such as rollouts, onboarding checklists and maintenance tasks
• Scheduled projects with dependencies and milestones, on premium plans
• Agile work using backlogs and sprints, on premium plans
• Personal task management, through the My Day and My Tasks views that pull together tasks from across Microsoft 365

Planner is not a standalone product that you would normally buy on its own. Its value comes from the fact that it sits inside the Microsoft 365 environment: the same identities, groups, Teams channels, Outlook mailboxes and security policies.

Who Owns Microsoft Planner?

Planner is made by Microsoft Corporation, the Redmond-based software company. It was released to Microsoft 365 (then Office 365) subscribers in June 2016.

Microsoft has since consolidated its cloud project tools into Planner. In a 2025 Microsoft 365 message centre notice, Microsoft said it would "retire Project for the web and will redirect its users to Planner for the web", starting in August 2025, with premium plans "automatically" available in Planner. Microsoft's pricing pages also state that Project Online was being retired on 30 September 2026. For buyers, the practical point is that Planner is now Microsoft's main cloud project management tool, and the desktop Project application remains for heavy-duty scheduling.

How Does Microsoft Planner Work?

Planner organises work in a simple structure:

• Plans hold the work for a team or project. Each basic plan is connected to a Microsoft 365 group, which also gives the team a shared mailbox, files and, optionally, a Teams channel.
• Buckets are the columns of a plan, such as To do, In progress and Done, or one bucket per workstream.
• Tasks carry an assignee (or several), start and due dates, priority, labels, notes, attachments and a checklist.
• Premium plans add summary tasks and subtasks, dependencies, milestones, custom fields, sprints and goals. Microsoft documents that premium plans, formerly projects in Project for the web, are backed by Dataverse, the Power Platform data store.
• My Day, My Tasks and My Plans give each person a cross-plan view of their own work, including tasks from Microsoft To Do and flagged emails from Outlook.

A basic plan can be converted to a premium plan when a team needs scheduling; admins can switch this conversion off with a PowerShell setting.

A typical workflow looks like this:

Actions agreed in a Teams meeting → tasks added to the team's plan → owners assigned and dates set → work moved across the board → progress checked in the Charts view or, on premium, the timeline

For example, an IT team planning a laptop refresh creates a basic plan in its Teams channel, adds buckets for each office, and assigns tasks to technicians. If the project grows to include supplier deliveries and dependencies, the plan can be upgraded to a premium plan so the project lead can schedule work on a timeline and see which delays affect the go-live date.

Microsoft Planner Key Features

Board, Grid, Schedule and Charts Views

Every plan includes the core views. Board shows tasks as cards in buckets, the familiar Kanban board layout; Grid shows tasks as a sortable list; Schedule (basic plans) shows tasks on a calendar; and Charts summarises tasks by status, bucket, priority and assignee. Filtering and grouping, copying plans and exporting to Excel are available in both basic and premium plans.

Basic plans have a few features that premium plans do not, according to Microsoft's comparison: the Schedule view, recurring tasks, Outlook calendar and SharePoint integration, and the Tasks app in Teams mobile. This is a common source of confusion when teams upgrade. If you just need a simple board, our Kanban board template follows the same idea.

My Day, My Tasks and To Do

My Day is a personal list of what you plan to work on today, and My Tasks gathers tasks assigned to you from every plan, together with personal tasks from Microsoft To Do and flagged emails from Outlook. For people who work across several teams, this is one of Planner's most useful features, because it removes the need to check each plan separately. It works like a built-in to-do list connected to team work.

Timeline (Gantt), Dependencies and Milestones

Planner Plan 1 adds the Timeline (Gantt) view, task dependencies, milestones, summary tasks and subtasks, and custom calendars that set which days count as working days. Microsoft's support documentation describes finish-to-start, start-to-start, start-to-finish and finish-to-finish links, with a scheduler that "will automatically update execution dates for your plan" when something changes.

This turns Planner from a task board into a genuine Gantt chart tool for moderately complex projects. Understanding how task dependencies and project milestones work will help you get more from it.

Baselines, Critical Path and Lead and Lag

Microsoft's pricing page lists baselines and critical path and advanced dependencies with lead and lag among the features of Planner and Project Plan 3, alongside task history, the Assignments view and the right to create portfolios. A project baseline lets you compare the current schedule with the original plan, and the critical path highlights the tasks that determine the end date. Leads and lags allow overlaps and waiting time between linked tasks.

Plan 3 also includes the Project desktop application, so project managers who need full scheduling, resource levelling and cost tracking can still use it. In our assessment this is Planner's strongest card for organisations moving off Project Online: scheduling depth that most work management tools at the same price do not offer.

Backlogs and Sprints

Premium plans support Agile planning with a prioritised backlog and time-boxed sprints that tasks can be moved into. It covers the basics of sprints and a product backlog, which is enough for teams that run light Agile processes alongside other work. Microsoft's pages do not describe story points, velocity or burndown reporting, so software teams that rely on Scrum metrics should test it carefully. Our sprint planning template shows what a sprint plan should capture.

Goals

Plan 1 includes project goals: you set goals for a plan and link tasks to them so progress can be tracked against what the project is meant to achieve. Microsoft's product page says goals can be defined "at the organizational, team, or project level". This is lighter than a dedicated OKR system, but it is useful for keeping a project focused. Our OKR template can help you define good goals first.

Custom Fields, Conditional Colouring and Templates

Premium plans let you create up to ten custom fields per plan (text, date, number, yes/no and choice), and conditional colouring rules highlight tasks that match a condition, such as overdue or high priority. Planner includes basic plan templates for every user and premium templates on Plan 1; Microsoft lists ready-made templates for marketing, sales, software development, IT, HR, project management and operations.

Ten custom fields is enough for most teams, but much less than the configurable data models in tools such as monday.com or Wrike.

Portfolios

Microsoft's pricing page lists view portfolios on Plan 1 and create portfolios on Plan 3. Portfolios group premium plans so managers can see several projects together; Microsoft told Project for the web users to migrate their old Roadmaps into Portfolios, because Planner does not support roadmaps. This helps with managing multiple projects, but it is not a full portfolio management system.

People and Assignments Views

The People view (premium) shows how work is distributed across the team, helping managers spot people who are over- or under-allocated. The Assignments view (Plan 3) lets project managers set effort per person by day, week or month for more precise resource and cost estimates. These support basic resource allocation, but they are not a substitute for dedicated resource management.

Plan Size Limits

Microsoft's comparison lists a limit of 9,000 tasks for basic plans and 3,000 tasks for premium plans. Most team plans never approach these limits, but large programmes should be split into several plans. Capterra reviewers also note that Planner becomes harder to manage on very large projects.

Microsoft Planner AI Features

Planner's AI features come from Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is sold separately. Microsoft's Planner pages are explicit: "Access to AI capabilities in Planner and Planner in Teams requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license."

Copilot in Planner

According to Microsoft, Copilot in Planner can create buckets and tasks from your planning goals, help you "set clear, measurable goals", generate status reports and keep you up to date on high-priority tasks, potential risks and team availability. AI-assisted templates and plan creation are also listed on the pricing page.

Planner Agent

The Planner agent, previously called the Project Manager agent, is an AI agent you can assign tasks to. According to Microsoft 365 message centre notice MC1250279, as reported by Office 365 for IT Pros, it was renamed in March 2026 and extended to basic as well as premium plans, with general availability expected by early May 2026. When a task is assigned to it, the agent works in the background and produces a written outline of how to complete the task in an editable Loop component, which plan members can review, regenerate and discuss.

The agent needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and the agent activity tab was reported as available in the browser and Teams but not in the Planner mobile app.

Our Assessment of Planner AI

The AI features are useful for drafting plans, goals and status updates, but they come at a meaningful extra cost: Copilot is $30 per user/month, paid yearly, which can triple the cost of a Plan 1 seat. Copilot also works across Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams, so organisations already buying it for other reasons get Planner's AI features as part of that. Treat AI output as a first draft that a person checks.

Microsoft Planner Collaboration Features

Collaboration in Planner leans on the rest of Microsoft 365. Plans can be added as tabs in Teams channels, tasks can be created from Teams messages and meetings, notifications arrive in Teams and Outlook, and plans can be embedded in Loop. Premium plans add task chat, which Microsoft describes as "real-time, threaded conversations directly in tasks" with @mentions, and task history, which shows recent edits and schedule changes.

This is convenient for internal teams: there are no extra accounts to manage, and work stays next to the conversations that created it. It is less suited to working with clients or freelancers, who need to be set up as guests in your Microsoft 365 tenant rather than simply invited to a project, and there is no built-in proofing or approval of creative assets. Our guide to project communication management covers how to set up good habits whatever tool you use.

Microsoft Planner Reporting and Dashboards

Reporting in Planner is simple. The Charts view shows how many tasks are not started, in progress, late or complete, broken down by bucket, priority and person. Premium plans add the timeline, People view, goals and, on Plan 3, baselines for schedule comparison. Plans can be exported to Excel.

For anything more, Microsoft points customers to Power BI, which can report on Planner data across many plans; because premium plans are stored in Dataverse, that data is available to the Power Platform. This works well for organisations with Power BI skills, but it means building reports rather than using them out of the box. "Reporting capabilities are somewhat basic" is one of the cons Capterra highlights from reviews, and in our assessment this is Planner's clearest gap against tools like Wrike, Smartsheet or monday.com. A regular written project status report still fills the gap for many teams.

Microsoft Planner Integrations

Planner's integrations are mainly within Microsoft's own ecosystem:

• Microsoft Teams: the Planner app, plan tabs in channels and tasks created from messages
• Outlook: flagged emails appear in My Tasks, and basic plans can be shown in Outlook calendars
• Microsoft To Do: personal and Planner tasks appear in one list
• Microsoft Loop: plans and tasks can be added to Loop pages
• SharePoint: Planner web part and full-page app (basic plans)
• Power Automate, Power Apps and Power BI: automation, custom apps and reporting
• Microsoft Graph API: programmatic access to Planner data
• Project desktop: included with Plan 3

Planner does not have its own rules engine of the kind found in Asana or monday.com. Automation is built in Power Automate, which can connect Planner with hundreds of third-party services but adds a layer of complexity and, for some connectors, separate licensing. Microsoft's pricing page notes that some of the Microsoft app integrations require a separate licence. Organisations that use Slack, Google Workspace, Jira or Salesforce as their main tools will find Planner much less connected than tools built to sit between many vendors.

Microsoft Planner Ease of Use

Initial Setup

For a team already on Microsoft 365, setup takes minutes: open Planner in Teams or on the web, create a plan, add buckets and assign tasks. There is nothing to install and no new accounts to provision. Premium plans need licences assigned by an administrator, and organisations should decide early which teams get basic plans and which need premium ones.

Learning Curve

Basic Planner is one of the easiest project tools to learn. Capterra reviewers give it 4.5/5 for ease of use, and "simple and easy-to-use task management" is one of the pros Capterra highlights. Premium plans are more demanding, as scheduling with dependencies, baselines and critical path requires some project management knowledge.

Interface and Licensing Confusion

The interface is clean and familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft 365. The confusion comes from elsewhere: basic and premium plans look similar but support different features (recurring tasks and the Schedule view are basic-only; timelines and custom fields are premium-only), Microsoft's support pages note that apps and workflows built for basic plans "will require modification to work on premium plans", and AI requires yet another licence. Microsoft's licensing documentation says that Planner "includes full editing on basic plans and basic editing capabilities on premium plans", while premium features need a premium subscription, so check exactly who needs a premium licence before rolling out.

Microsoft Planner Mobile Apps

Planner has iOS and Android apps for viewing plans, updating tasks, adding comments and attachments, and receiving notifications. Planner tasks are also available in the Teams mobile app and in Microsoft To Do on mobile.

The mobile apps are fine for updates on the move. Scheduling premium plans, reviewing the timeline and working with the Planner agent's output are better done in the browser or Teams on a larger screen.

Microsoft Planner Pricing

Microsoft's published Planner options are below. Prices are per user per month in US dollars and are shown as "paid yearly" with an annual subscription that auto-renews; Microsoft's Planner pricing page does not show monthly billing prices.

Microsoft says that once a paid subscription begins, you have a seven-day cancellation window for a prorated refund. Pricing checked on Microsoft's Planner pricing page on 7 October 2026; prices vary by region and by agreement type, so confirm before buying.

Is Microsoft Planner Free?

Basic Planner has no separate price: Microsoft's licensing documentation says Planner "is part of the M365 and Office 365 suite subscriptions", and Planner in Teams requires a subscription that includes Teams. There is no free stand-alone Planner plan for people without Microsoft 365. Basic plans include up to 9,000 tasks per plan, the Board, Grid, Schedule and Charts views, and integration with Teams, Outlook and To Do.

Planner Plan 1

At $10 per user/month, paid yearly, Plan 1 unlocks premium plans: subtasks, premium templates, backlogs and sprints, task dependencies, the Calendar, Timeline (Gantt) and People views, project goals, milestones, custom task fields and the ability to view portfolios. For most teams that need scheduling, this is the right level.

Planner and Project Plan 3

At $30 per user/month, paid yearly, Plan 3 adds task history, the Assignments view, the ability to create portfolios, baselines and critical path, advanced dependencies with lead and lag, and the Project desktop app, which Microsoft says can be installed on up to five PCs per user. It is aimed at project managers and PMOs; usually only the people who build and manage schedules need it.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot costs $30 per user/month, paid yearly, and requires an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription. It covers Copilot across Microsoft 365, not only in Planner. Microsoft also promotes a Microsoft 365 Copilot Business offer for organisations with up to 300 users; check the current price, as the discount shown on the pricing page was a time-limited offer.

Microsoft Planner Free Trial

Microsoft offers a one-month free trial of Planner Plan 1 and Planner and Project Plan 3. Its terms state that "a credit card is required to begin a one-month trial" and that the trial converts to a paid subscription unless cancelled. Microsoft's support pages also describe starting a free 30-day premium trial from within Planner, or requesting a licence from your administrator. Note that Capterra currently lists the free trial as "not available" and still shows a Planner and Project Plan 5 at $55, which does not appear on Microsoft's Planner pricing page.

Microsoft Planner Pros and Cons

This matches what users report: people value Planner's simplicity and its integration with Microsoft 365, while basic reporting, limited depth for large projects and licensing confusion are the most common drawbacks.

What Do Microsoft Planner Customers Say?

Ratings and review themes as published on G2 and Capterra on 5 October 2026; summarised in our own words. Visit the links above for full, verified user reviews.

On Capterra, Microsoft Planner is rated 4.3/5 from 298 reviews, with sub-scores of 4.5 for ease of use, 4.5 for value for money, 4.2 for features and 4.2 for customer service (checked 7 October 2026). Capterra classifies 85% of review sentiment as positive, and 57% of reviewers come from small businesses. On G2, Planner is rated 4.2/5 from 237 reviews (checked 5 October 2026). The themes below summarise these third-party reviews in our own words, not Microsoft's marketing.

Positive themes. Reviewers most often praise how simple Planner is, how well it integrates with Microsoft 365 and Teams, and how easy it is to track tasks and collaborate. On Capterra, task management, task scheduling and task editing are all rated 4.6/5 by the reviewers who scored them.

Negative themes. The most common complaints are that reporting is basic, that it becomes difficult to manage very large or complex projects, and that it lacks advanced features and time tracking. G2 reviewers raise similar points about limited features for complex projects.

Review volumes for Planner are much lower than for dedicated tools such as Asana or monday.com, partly because many organisations use it simply as part of Microsoft 365. Treat the headline score as a guide, and read reviews from organisations of your size.

Microsoft Planner Customer Support

Support is provided through Microsoft 365's normal channels: administrators raise service requests in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, and users have Microsoft's support articles, Microsoft Learn documentation, training videos and the Microsoft Tech Community forum. Capterra lists email/help desk, knowledge base, forum, phone and chat support, and training through documentation, videos, webinars and live sessions. Large organisations often get help through their Microsoft partner or enterprise support agreement.

Capterra's customer service sub-score is 4.2/5. In practice, the quality of support depends on your Microsoft agreement and partner, so ask about Planner-specific help, especially for premium plan migrations, before buying.

Microsoft Planner Security

Planner runs within Microsoft 365, so it uses the same Microsoft Entra ID identities, sign-in policies and admin controls as the rest of the suite, which is one of its main advantages for IT teams. Basic plans are tied to Microsoft 365 groups, and premium plans are stored in Dataverse; administrators can control whether users may convert basic plans into premium ones. Microsoft's service description shows Planner available in commercial, education, GCC, GCC High and DoD environments, although some features (such as To Do integration and the Tasks app in Teams) are not available in every government cloud.

Microsoft refers customers to its Trust Center for security and compliance information. Microsoft 365 publishes extensive audit reports, but confirm in the Service Trust Portal which certifications cover Planner and Dataverse in your region as part of procurement.

Microsoft Planner for Different Types of Teams

Microsoft Planner for IT and Operations Teams

IT and operations teams are a natural fit: rollouts, onboarding checklists and maintenance tasks can be run in basic plans inside Teams, with Power Automate for repeatable steps.

Microsoft Planner for Project Managers and PMOs

Project managers get Gantt scheduling and dependencies on Plan 1, and baselines, critical path and Project desktop on Plan 3. A PMO can use portfolios and Power BI for oversight, though portfolio and capacity planning features are lighter than in dedicated PPM tools.

Microsoft Planner for Small Businesses

Small businesses on Microsoft 365 Business plans already have basic Planner, so it is the obvious place to start. Plan 1 at $10 is reasonable for the people who need scheduling. Small businesses not on Microsoft 365 have no reason to choose Planner.

Microsoft Planner for Enterprises and the Public Sector

Large organisations benefit from central licensing, Entra ID security and availability in government clouds, which simplifies procurement considerably.

Microsoft Planner for Software Teams

Backlogs and sprints cover light Agile work, but software teams that need story points, velocity, releases and developer integrations will usually prefer a dedicated tool; see our guide to Scrum software tools.

Microsoft Planner for Marketing Teams

Marketing teams can plan campaigns on boards and timelines and work in Teams, but Planner has no proofing, approvals or request forms of its own.

Who Should Use Microsoft Planner?

Microsoft Planner Feature Checklist

Microsoft Planner Alternatives and Comparisons

Microsoft Planner fits teams of almost any size, from small businesses tracking their first projects to large enterprises and public sector bodies running scheduled programmes in Microsoft 365. It is easy to adopt, even for beginners: anyone who uses Teams or Outlook can start with a simple board, then move to timelines, sprints, goals and Copilot as their needs grow. If you would like to see how it stacks up, we compare Microsoft Planner with Trello, Asana, monday.com, Wrike and others on pricing, features and use cases on dedicated pages:

• Wrike: choose it for far deeper project, resource and approval features. Compare Microsoft Planner vs Wrike.
• Smartsheet: choose it for enterprise spreadsheet-style planning. Compare Microsoft Planner vs Smartsheet.
• Asana: choose it for richer cross-team task management. Compare Microsoft Planner vs Asana.
• monday.com: choose it for more customisable workflows. Compare Microsoft Planner vs monday.com.
• Trello: choose it for simple boards. Compare Microsoft Planner vs Trello.

See all Microsoft Planner alternatives

Microsoft Planner comparisons

Is Microsoft Planner Worth It?

Microsoft Planner is likely worth it if you:

• Already use Microsoft 365 and Teams across the organisation.
• Want simple, shared task boards without buying another tool.
• Need affordable Gantt scheduling, dependencies and sprints (Plan 1).
• Are moving off Project for the web or Project Online and want to stay with Microsoft.
• Value central identity, security and licensing over specialist features.
• Already pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

It may not be worth it if:

• Your organisation does not use Microsoft 365.
• You need rich dashboards and reporting without building them in Power BI.
• You work heavily with clients and freelancers outside your organisation.
• You need built-in automation rules, request forms, proofing or approvals.
• You need detailed time tracking, budgets or resource management.

Our verdict: Planner's strength is convenience. It is already there for most Microsoft 365 organisations, it works inside the tools people use all day, and the premium plans add real scheduling at a fair price. Its limitations are lighter reporting, customisation and automation than specialist platforms, and licensing that takes effort to understand. That balance is why it ranks seventh in our project management software review.

Frequently asked questions