Microsoft Planner

Description

By 2023, Microsoft had accumulated three overlapping task management products: the original Planner for team kanban boards, Microsoft To Do for personal task lists, and Project for the web for structured project management. Each had its own interface, its own data store, and its own user base, and workers routinely switched between all three depending on the task in front of them. Microsoft merged all three into one application — also called Microsoft Planner — in April 2024. The result ranges from a personal grocery list to a multi-team product launch with Gantt charts, dependencies and resource management, all in one interface.

Microsoft Planner is a task and project management application that is built into Microsoft 365. It organizes work into plans — shared boards where teams assign tasks, track progress, attach files, and communicate. The application is executed within Microsoft Teams, via a dedicated web interface at planner.cloud.microsoft, and as a mobile application on iOS and Android. Every plan integrates with the rest of the Microsoft 365 stack: files to SharePoint, conversations to Teams channels, tasks to Outlook and To Do with personal work items. In August 2025, Microsoft retired Project for the web as a separate product and redirected all users to Planner, completing the consolidation.

HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

Microsoft announced Planner in September 2015 and released it to eligible Office 365 subscriptions in June 2016. The product, developed under the internal codename Highlander, entered a market that Trello had established and Asana was growing — visual kanban-style boards where work items moved through columns representing stages of completion. Planner followed that model and added integration with Office 365 Groups, so every new plan automatically created a shared group that connected the board to SharePoint storage, a shared calendar, and a mailbox.

Separately, in June 2015, Microsoft acquired 6Wunderkinder, the Berlin startup behind Wunderlist, a personal task list app with 13 million users at the time of the deal. Microsoft paid from $100 million to $200 million. Rather than continue to develop Wunderlist, Microsoft created a replacement called Microsoft To Do, which was launched in preview in April 2017 and developed by the Wunderlist team. Wunderlist shut down on May 6, 2020. To Do was responsible for personal tasks; Planner was responsible for team work. The two lived together without a clear boundary for years.

Microsoft Project for the web, a browser-based project management tool with timeline views and more structured scheduling than Planner, added a third product in the same general category. The fragmentation was met with consistent criticism from enterprise customers who wanted one tool instead of three.

In April 2024, Microsoft merged all three into the Planner name within Microsoft Teams, followed by a web interface in late 2024. Project for the web retired in August 2025, with its users being redirected to Planner’s premium tier, which inherited all of its capabilities. The consolidation also changed the name of associated licensing: Project Plan 1 became Planner Plan 1, and Project Plans 3 and 5 became Planner and Project Plans 3 and 5.

KEY FEATURES

Plans and Task Boards

A plan is a shared workspace that is organized into buckets — columns that represent stages, categories, or any grouping the team chooses. Tasks are inside buckets in the form of cards. Each task has a title, assignee, due date, priority level, progress status, and a checklist of subtasks. Tasks accept attachments, labels for color-coded categorization, and comment threads for discussion. The Board view displays all the buckets and tasks in a kanban view. Teams move tasks across buckets as work progresses and any member can update a task from any device.

Multiple Views

Planner provides multiple views to view the same plan. Board view displays the kanban layout. Grid view shows tasks as rows in a table, which is good for sorting and filtering in large lists of tasks. Chart view presents progress statistics — task distribution by status, bucket, priority, and assignee — in visual summaries. Schedule view displays tasks on a calendar. People see what each team member has to do and what they have assigned. Timeline view — available with a premium license — displays tasks on a Gantt chart with dependencies, indicating which tasks need to complete before others can start and where the critical path lies.

My Tasks and My Personal Task Management

The My Tasks section is an aggregation of all tasks assigned to the signed-in user across all plans that the user is a member of, as well as tasks from Microsoft To Do personal lists. A My Day view allows individuals to choose tasks to work on for the day. Planner pulls in flagged emails from Outlook as tasks and surfaces them in the same list, so personal work items and team assignments are in the same list without switching between applications.

Integration with Microsoft 365

Each plan is linked to a Microsoft 365 Group, which provides a shared SharePoint document library for plan files, a shared calendar, and a Teams channel if the plan is from Teams. Files attached to tasks upload to the plan’s SharePoint site and are available from SharePoint, Teams, and the plan at the same time. Team members can assign tasks directly within Teams conversations and those tasks appear in Planner without leaving Teams. Outlook users view tasks assigned to them in the To Do sidebar in Outlook.

Premium Features

Premium plans — available with Planner Plan 1, or the Planner and Project Plans 3 and 5 — add capabilities aimed at structured project management. Timeline view gives a Gantt chart with drag and drop scheduling. Dependencies link tasks to each other so that one task must be completed before another can be started, and the type of dependency may include lead and lag times. Sprints group tasks into fixed time periods for teams that follow agile workflows. Baselines represent a planned schedule at a given point in time, and subsequent views represent how the actual schedule differed from the baseline. Custom fields are used to add organization-specific data columns to tasks. Portfolios group related plans under a single view with a roadmap that shows progress across all of them. Task history is a log of all changes made to a task, who changed what and when.

Project Manager Agent

The Project Manager agent is powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot and automates project management tasks using a conversational interface. Users describe a project in simple terms and the agent creates a plan with goals, tasks, subtasks, and buckets. As work progresses, the agent monitors the status of the tasks that are behind, identifies team members with high workloads, and proposes adjustments in case of scope changes. It extracts decisions from Teams meeting transcripts and turns them into actionable tasks without the need for manual entry. The agent interacts via a floating chat button inside the plan and via Teams meetings when combined with the Facilitator AI feature. Users must have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to use the agent.

Frontline Worker Support

Planner includes task publishing, which allows managers to send standardized task lists to frontline worker locations — retail stores, warehouses, service sites — and track completion across all of them from a central dashboard. Workers get their assignments in the Planner app on a mobile device, check them off, and managers view real-time progress at every location. Task notes support rich text and checklists can be used to require workers to complete each step in sequence before marking a task done.