Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner is the work management app in Microsoft 365. Teams use it to create plans, organise tasks into buckets on a Kanban board, assign owners and due dates, and track progress with built-in charts. Since 2024 it is a single unified app that absorbed three previously separate products: the original Planner for team boards, Microsoft To Do for personal task lists, and Project for the web for lightweight project management. It runs inside Microsoft Teams, as a web app, and on mobile.

Part of the SharePoint reference · Licensing and limits verified against Microsoft documentation · Last reviewed 1 September 2026

What the 2024 consolidation changed

Before 2024, Microsoft had three overlapping work management products with separate apps, separate data and separate admin surfaces. They are now one application called Microsoft Planner.

In April 2024 the Teams app previously called Tasks by Planner and To Do was renamed simply Planner. If your organisation’s documentation, training materials or intranet still refer to the old names, this is the rename people are hitting.

Basic versus Premium

The commercial line falls in a specific place, and it catches out teams who assume Planner does project management out of the box. It does not — the scheduling layer is the paid tier.

Planner, Project, and what is retiring

This is where most of the confusion sits, because four things share the name Project and only some of them are going away.

• Project for the web — began retiring August 2025, along with the Project and Roadmap apps in Teams. Its capabilities live on as Planner Premium.
• Project Online — the older cloud service. End of life 30 September 2026. This is the one with a hard date.
• Microsoft Project desktop — a separate product, continuing unchanged.
• Project Server — also separate, also continuing, on its own lifecycle.

If you hold Project Plan 3 or Project Plan 5 licences, you already have Planner Premium — there is nothing extra to buy, and it is worth checking whether those licences are sitting unused while someone elsewhere evaluates Premium as a new purchase.

How Microsoft Planner fits into Microsoft 365

• Microsoft TeamsThe primary home. Planner sits in the left rail, and any plan can be pinned to a channel as a tab so the board lives beside the conversation.
• M365 GroupsEvery shared plan is owned by a group, so plan membership follows the team and inherits the same governance as a Team or SharePoint site.
• SharePointThe Planner web part displays a plan directly on a SharePoint page — the usual way a project site shows its current board.
• Microsoft LoopTask lists created in a Loop component can surface in Planner and To Do, so a checklist in a chat is not a dead end.
• Microsoft ListsThe nearest alternative and a common mix-up. Planner runs work to completion; Lists keeps records that persist after the work is done.
• Power AutomatePlan and task events can trigger flows, which is how approvals and cross-system routing get bolted onto a board.

Limits and thresholds

Planner’s limits are generous for team work and tight for anything resembling a portfolio. The one that surprises people is that Premium allows fewer tasks per plan than Basic, because it runs on a different engine.

Planner on a SharePoint project site

A plan that only exists in Teams is visible to the team in that Teams channel. For anyone outside it — a sponsor, a neighbouring department, someone who joins in month four — the work is effectively invisible. This is why most organisations pair a plan with a SharePoint project site.

The built-in Planner web part puts a board directly on a SharePoint page, and for a simple project site that is enough. Its limits are the familiar ones: it renders the board in its own fixed layout, shows one plan, and offers little control over how it sits alongside the milestones, documents, contacts and decisions that make up the rest of the page.

Common questions about Microsoft Planner