One Month Out: The Planner Premium Gap Isn’t Where You’re Looking

Thirty days. That is what is left. 

Microsoft confirmed the date on September 5, 2025. Project Online retires on September 30, 2026, and after that you "will no longer be able to access your projects or any associated data within the service." Back up your data. Complete the transition. 

By now your IT team has floated and maybe even rolled out the obvious answer: Planner Premium. It is already in the license. It carries the Microsoft Project lineage. On a slide, it looks like a lateral move. 

So, most PMOs do the sensible thing and evaluate it on scheduling. Does it do Gantt charts? Dependencies? Critical path? It does. And that is precisely the trap, because scheduling was never the hard part of running a portfolio. 

The gap is not in the Gantt chart. It is in the portfolio layer that sits above it.

Microsoft is not telling you Planner replaces Project Online 

This is the sentence that should stop the conversation. Microsoft’s own retirement guidance names the transition options, and it is very specific about which need each one serves: 

Look closely at the first row. When an organization needs what Project Online actually did, Microsoft does not point at Planner. It points at Project Server Subscription Edition, which runs on SharePoint Server technology (with a separate license). Try explaining that to your IT department, who were previously asked by Microsoft to switch to the cloud. 

Need timesheets and resource scheduling? That is a different product line again, in Dynamics 365. So, clearly not a one for one replacement. It is closer to a “choose your own Microsoft adventure”, and you carry both the risk and the integration work. 

Microsoft’s own comparison page states it plainly: "Updates are continuously being made to help close the most critical gaps in the premium plan." 

The ceilings your program schedules will hit 

Planner Premium runs on the Project for the Web engine, and Microsoft publishes exactly where it stops: 

Three thousand tasks. Capital programs, ERP rollouts and any detailed WBS blow through that, and note that the premium plan caps lower than the basic one. Add ten custom fields, in five flat types. If your PMO has spent years building portfolio classification, risk scoring, cost center coding and gate tracking, you are not just migrating that data. You are downgrading your PM’s operating model. For portfolios like these, Planner Premium will not cut it. 

The import guidance is equally clear about what happens at the ceiling: a project that exceeds these limits returns an error instead of importing. Your master schedule does not arrive in reduced form; it does not arrive at all, until someone breaks it into smaller plans and loses the cross-plan dependencies that made it a master schedule in the first place. 

Microsoft also publishes what does not survive the import from Project desktop: baselines, resources, cross-project dependencies, deadlines, formulas, project-level custom fields, subprojects, recurring tasks and several constraint types, with the caution that the list "may not be exhaustive." 

What your PMO actually loses 

Strip away the scheduling debate, and the real question is what happens above the project. Portfolio prioritization. Cross-project capacity. Stage-gate decisions your auditors can inspect. Budget, actual and forecast in one live view. That layer is where a PMO does its real work, and it is the layer Microsoft routes to other products. 

The middle column is the one to sit with. Every "not offered" is a capability your PMO uses today, and one Microsoft answers with a second or third product. Planner Premium can be made to work, but it comes with severe compromises, and not every PMO is willing to make them. 

What Planisware offers 

Your PMs do not need to un-learn scheduling. Planisware gives them a full MS Project-compatible view and then some. It comes native with data quality checks that flag missing links, excessive float, and stale progress automatically. In MS Project, that was manual policing or a paid add-on. 

Getting your data across is straightforward. The Planisware-Microsoft Project Connector imports MSP files by drag and drop, creating and updating tasks, resources and calendars in real time with zero data loss. Ford Motor Company migrated more than 1,000 projects using one-click batch imports with full data integrity. 

Governance is native, not bolted-on. Gate deliverables carry validation status, target and actual completion dates and role-based assignments, with a visual pipeline running from proposal to close-out. Above it: a consolidated portfolio timeline across active and candidate projects, and cost variance dashboards comparing budget, actual and forecast, without a separate Power BI build and an analyst to maintain it. 

You also keep the Microsoft 365 experience your teams already rely on. Planisware maintains the same tight integration Planner would, with Teams integration and Office documents opening live inside Planisware. 

One month left 

With 30 days left, the real question for you and your PMO leadership is “are we willing to compromise on our processes and take the risk of another migration 12 months down the road?” The default recommendation will keep the lights on. It will not tell you whether your portfolio is deliverable, where capacity breaks, or what a decision costs before you make it. 

Don’t just migrate your projects. Upgrade how you manage them. 

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