Microsoft Planner premium vs Project for the web

For a few years Microsoft had two lightweight project tools that looked suspiciously similar — Planner (boards and buckets, included in the licence) and Project for the web (timelines and dependencies, extra licence) — plus the old Project Online and the Project desktop application. The confusion was real and Microsoft resolved it in the most Microsoft way possible: by merging the first two under one name and keeping the others. The result is the new Planner, with basic and premium plans, where "premium" is what Project for the web used to be. This guide explains what changed, what each tier actually gives you, and how the licences map.

What happened

The new Planner (rolled out through 2024 into 2025, in Teams as the Planner app and on the web at the Planner site) combined:

• Planner — the Kanban-style boards backed by Microsoft 365 groups.
• Project for the web — the Dataverse-backed project management app with timelines, dependencies, and resource views.
• To Do — personal tasks, surfaced in the My Tasks view.

The Project for the web app and its old entry point were retired as separate experiences; existing Project for the web projects became premium plans in Planner, with their data still in Dataverse. Nothing was lost, but users who had bookmarked the old URL or trained on the old interface needed re-orientation. If your documentation still says "Project for the web," it means "a premium plan in Planner."

Basic vs premium plans

| | Basic plan | Premium plan | |---|---|---| | Storage | Microsoft 365 group (Exchange/SharePoint) | Dataverse (default environment unless configured) | | Views | Board, grid, schedule, charts | Board, grid, timeline (Gantt), charts, people, goals | | Task structure | Tasks, checklists, labels | Tasks, subtasks, summary tasks, dependencies | | Scheduling | Due dates | Start/finish, duration, dependencies, critical path | | Sprints | No | Yes | | Goals | No | Yes | | Portfolios (cross-plan roll-up) | No | Yes | | Resource assignment and effort | Assignees only | Assignments with effort and a people view | | Copilot in Planner | Limited | Yes, with a Copilot licence | | Included in Microsoft 365 licence | Yes | No — requires a Planner/Project plan |

The practical difference is the row about dependencies and timeline: a basic plan is a task board; a premium plan is a schedule. If someone asks "when does the project finish if this slips," they need premium. If they ask "who's doing what this week," basic is fine.

Because premium plans live in Dataverse, they're Power Platform citizens: environment, DLP, and capacity considerations apply, and Power Automate and Power BI connect to them natively. Basic plans are group content, which means the group's lifecycle (expiry, archival, deletion) governs them.

Licensing

Microsoft renamed the Project licences to match:

• Planner (basic) — included in Microsoft 365 and Office 365 business and enterprise plans.
• Planner and Project Plan 1 — premium plans in Planner: timeline, dependencies, sprints, goals, portfolios. This is the former Project Plan 1 and it's the licence most organisations actually need.
• Planner and Project Plan 3 — Plan 1 plus the Project desktop application (Project Professional installed on Windows), Project Online access, and richer resource management.
• Planner and Project Plan 5 — Plan 3 plus portfolio and demand management in Project Online.

The trap: users with a basic licence can be members of a premium plan and see it, but in a read-limited way; editing premium features requires the licence. Teams that "share a Plan 1" among several people discover this in the first week. Also, the premium features are entitlement-checked per user, so a plan created by a licensed PM and edited by an unlicensed team runs into prompts.

Where Project Online and Project desktop still fit

Project Online is the SharePoint-based enterprise PPM system. It's not retired, and it still does things premium Planner doesn't — enterprise resource pools, portfolio prioritisation, timesheets, and complex reporting. But it's old, it's tied to SharePoint's classic architecture, and Microsoft's investment is visibly in Planner and Dataverse. Organisations on Project Online should be planning a migration horizon rather than expanding.

Project desktop (Project Professional / Standard) is the scheduling engine for people who need one: complex dependencies, levelling, baselines, and .mpp interoperability with contractors and clients. It connects to Project Online and, through Plan 3, to premium plans in Planner. It isn't going anywhere for real project schedulers; it's just not where most users should start.

Copilot in Planner

With a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, Planner's Copilot can create a plan from a description, generate tasks and subtasks, suggest goals, and answer status questions. It's more useful in premium plans, where it can build a dependency structure and a timeline — a genuinely fast way from "we need to launch in Q2" to a draft schedule. It's not a project manager; the draft needs a human who knows the work.

Choosing, plainly

• Team task tracking, no schedules → basic Planner, already licensed.
• Projects with dates that depend on each other, sprints, or a Gantt view → Plan 1 for the people who edit them.
• People who live in Project desktop or need Project Online → Plan 3.
• Enterprise portfolio management → Plan 5, and a hard look at whether Project Online is still the right platform.
• OKR-style goals after Viva Goals' retirement → premium plans' goals feature is one of the credible answers.

And a governance note for premium plans: they land in the default Power Platform environment unless you configure otherwise. If you've locked the default environment down — as you should have — check that Planner's premium features still work there, or designate an environment for them. It's the one place where "just turn on Plan 1" turns into a Power Platform conversation.