Microsoft Project 2024 & Planner Plans

Project Standard 2024 is the basic desktop scheduler — Gantt charts, network diagrams, resource sheets, baselines, critical path analysis, cost roll-ups and report templates. It is the right answer for individual project managers running self-contained schedules on a single PC. Project Professional 2024 adds team collaboration features (assigning tasks, tracking work, resource levelling across multiple projects), the ability to connect to Project Server for centralised portfolio management (Project Online was retired on 30 September 2026), and built-in synchronisation with SharePoint task lists. Both are perpetual, one-time-purchase desktop applications activated against a Microsoft account (retail) or via KMS / MAK (Volume Licensing).

Planner Plan 1 unlocks premium plans in Microsoft Planner — the browser and Teams experience that replaced Project for the web in August 2025, with data stored in Microsoft Dataverse. It is the right answer for teams that want a shared visual board and simple Gantt without the complexity of the desktop app. Planner and Project Plan 3 adds the Project desktop app (the same binaries as Project Professional 2024, delivered as a subscription) plus advanced planning in Microsoft Planner (Project Online itself was retired on 30 September 2026). Planner and Project Plan 5 adds portfolio-level capabilities — the demand-management workflow, portfolio analysis, what-if scenarios and the resource engagement model — for organisations running a PMO function.

These are genuinely different tools. Microsoft Planner (which absorbed Project for the web in August 2025) is the modern, web-first experience built on Dataverse and integrated tightly with Microsoft 365 and Power Platform — it is the right tool for collaborative task tracking, ad-hoc planning and Teams-centric workflows. The desktop Project (Standard / Professional 2024) is the traditional, schedule-centric tool with critical-path mathematics, resource levelling algorithms and the full breadth of Microsoft Project's 30-year feature set. Planner and Project Plan 3 gives you both, which is the most flexible deployment for organisations that want one licence for everyone but support both styles of planning.

Microsoft retired Project Online on 30 September 2026. Project Server Subscription Edition is the current on-premises portfolio platform (Project Server 2016 and 2019 reached end of support on 14 July 2026). Cloud portfolio work now runs in Microsoft Planner with Planner and Project Plan 3 or Plan 5; greenfield deployments should choose between Project Server Subscription Edition on-premises and Planner in the cloud.

Premium plans in Microsoft Planner store their data in Microsoft Dataverse, which means Power BI dashboards, Power Automate flows and custom Power Apps can read and write plan data with the standard connectors. In Teams, Planner tabs replace the retired Project and Roadmap apps, and Planner portfolios replace Roadmap for cross-project views. Desktop Project files (.mpp) can be published to Project Server for portfolio-level visibility, but native cloud authoring delivers the cleanest integration story.

Retail Project 2024 is per-device — one purchase, one PC. Volume-licensed Project Standard / Professional 2024 is per device by default but can be per user under specific MPSA or EA programmes. Planner Plan 1 and Planner and Project Plan 3 / 5 are always per user. Like Microsoft 365, the cloud plans allow up to five PC / Mac, five tablet and five phone installs per user, with shared device activation available for shared-device scenarios.

Decades-old .mpp files generally open fine in Project 2024 with their schedule, resources and baselines intact. Microsoft Planner can import .mpp schedules, but its modern Dataverse data model is structured differently from the classic project file — for active collaborative projects, the better pattern is to recreate the schedule natively in Planner (or in desktop Project published to Project Server) and treat the legacy .mpp as an archived record.