By now, most heads of PMO and IT directors in the UK will have heard the news. Microsoft Project Online retires on 30 September 2026. If you're still running your project portfolio on it (and thousands of organisations are) you have a deadline to migrate.
What you might also have heard is the accompanying suggestion from Microsoft: move to Planner.
On the surface, that recommendation sounds perfectly reasonable. You're already in Microsoft 365. Planner is already there. Your teams probably use it for task lists already. The integration is seamless. The cost argument is compelling. Just... move to Planner.
Please don't make that decision without
reading this first.
What Microsoft Project Online actually did
Before we talk about what Planner is and isn't, it's worth being clear about what organisations will be losing when Project Online goes away. Project Online was Microsoft's enterprise-grade PPM platform. For all its complexity and quirks, it gave organisations a proper infrastructure for:
- Portfolio governance - seeing all projects in one place, making prioritisation and investment decisions across the portfolio
- Resource and capacity management - understanding who is working on what, spotting over-allocation, planning future capacity
- Financial management - tracking project costs, budgets, and forecasts at both project and portfolio level
- Programme management - coordinating multiple related projects, managing dependencies, tracking benefits realisation
- Reporting - generating governance-level reports for boards, sponsors, and regulators
- Audit trails -maintaining records of decisions, changes, and approvals in a way that can withstand scrutiny
This is not task management. This is delivery infrastructure.
What Microsoft Planner actually is
Microsoft Planner is a task management tool. Planner was never designed to replace enterprise PPM.
Planner's hard platform limits include 3,000 tasks per plan, 10 custom fields, and 20 task dependencies. For a large programme or a busy PMO, you could hit those limits within a single month.
More fundamentally, Planner has no meaningful:
- resource management or capacity planning
- portfolio-level view across all projects and programmes
- benefits realisation tracking
- financial management or budget controls
- governance workflows or approval processes
- compliance-grade audit trails
- executive reporting at portfolio level.
Why organisations are at risk of making the wrong call
The pressure to just move to Planner comes from several directions at once:
- The IT argument: "We're a Microsoft shop. Let's keep everything in M365 and reduce our vendor footprint."
- The finance argument: "Planner is included in our licences. It's essentially free."
- The speed argument: "We need to migrate before September. Planner is the quickest path."
We want you to think about: what does our PMO actually need to function?
The question you should be asking
Before you make any decision about where to migrate, spend time with your PMO team answering these questions honestly:
- Do we need portfolio-level visibility across all our projects and programmes?
- Do we manage resources across teams and need to plan and track capacity?
- Do we have governance or compliance obligations that require audit trails and formal approvals?
- Do we track benefits realisation or outcomes at programme level?
- Do we manage project financials, budgets, or cost forecasts?
- Do we produce regular reports for board, exec, or ministerial audiences?
- Do we run programmes with multiple interdependent projects?
If the answer to most of those is yes, you need a proper P3M platform, not Planner.
You don't have to leave the Microsoft world
Choosing a proper PPM platform doesn't mean abandoning Microsoft 365. Modern P3M solutions, including Verto, integrate natively with Teams, Outlook, and the rest of the M365 ecosystem. Your users don't have to leave the Microsoft world. They just get the right tool inside it.
What to do next
Download our PPM Decision Framework, our practical guide that walks you through the requirements you need to consider and helps you assess whether any given tool can meet them. It takes about 10 minutes to work through and it could save you from a very expensive mistake.
