Planner Plan 1 Review: The Renamed Project Plan 1, for Team Members

Fix it now

Project Plan 1 is now sold as Planner Plan 1, and it is a contributor’s licence: premium Planner in a browser with a timeline, dependencies, goals and milestones, and no Project desktop application. Buy it for the people who update scheduled work, not for the person who builds the schedule.

1. Buy it if your team needs a Gantt timeline, real task dependencies, milestones and goals rather than the buckets and checklists the included Planner already gives them.
2. Buy it if people work across different devices in a browser and installing software on each of them is impractical.
3. Buy it if contributors need to open the portfolios and premium plans somebody on Plan 3 has built.
4. Skip it for whoever owns the schedule. Baselines, critical path, advanced dependencies with lead and lag, the assignments view and the Project desktop app all start one tier up.
5. Skip it if what you want is a shared task list. The Planner included with Microsoft 365 covers grid, board, schedule and chart views, task creation and viewing of dependencies and custom fields at no extra cost.
6. Read the name on the quote. Microsoft renamed Project Plan 1 to Planner Plan 1 in September 2024, so the licence may not appear under the name you searched for.

Project for the web retired in August 2025 and its plans now open in Planner. Microsoft states that no migration and no licensing change were needed, so an old Project for the web deployment is already a Planner one.

If that settles it you can stop here. If you want to see exactly where the line falls between the free Planner, Plan 1 and Plan 3, the rest of this covers it.

Why it happens

The product this licence unlocks is Planner, and the licence itself is the thing that changed. In September 2024 Microsoft renamed Project Plan 1 to Planner Plan 1, and renamed Plan 3 and Plan 5 to Planner and Project Plan 3 and Planner and Project Plan 5. A year later Project for the web was retired, in August 2025, and the plans built in it opened in Planner instead. Microsoft states that no migration and no licensing change were required. So if you are comparing this against an article written before 2025, you are comparing against a product that has since been folded into a different application.

What you are buying is the premium half of Planner. Everyone in a Microsoft 365 tenant already has Planner: task creation with files, checklists and labels, grid, board, schedule and chart views, basic and custom templates, and the ability to view task dependencies and custom fields somebody else created. That covers a surprising amount of ordinary work, and it is the thing to rule out before you buy anything.

Planner Plan 1 adds the parts that make a plan a schedule rather than a list. Sub-tasks. Premium plan templates. Backlogs and sprints for teams that work that way. The ability to create task dependencies rather than only look at them. Calendar, Timeline and People views, the Timeline being the Gantt chart people usually mean when they say they need a project tool. Project goals and milestones. Custom task fields, up to the published limit of ten. And read access to portfolios.

What it withholds is consistent and easy to describe: everything that belongs to the person who owns the plan. Task history. The assignments view. Creating portfolios rather than viewing them. Baselines and critical path. Advanced dependencies with lead and lag. And the Project desktop application, which appears only at Plan 3. If the licence is going to someone who will be asked why the end date moved, they need the tier above.

The honest dividing line between free Planner and Plan 1 is dependencies and dates that react. If the plan is a list of things that need doing, the included Planner is enough and adding a subscription buys you very little. If finishing one task shifts the start of three others and somebody has to see that consequence on a timeline, that is a scheduling tool and Plan 1 starts earning its place. Test that on one real piece of work before you licence a department, because the free tier is more capable than most people assume and the test takes an afternoon.

The other thing worth saying plainly is that this is a per-user subscription and the tiers mix freely. Nothing requires a team to be licensed uniformly. A schedule owner on Plan 3, six contributors on Plan 1 and everybody else on the Planner they already have is a normal and cheap arrangement, and it is the one most organisations should end up with.

Full reference

Where the line falls between the three tiers

A test you can run before spending anything

1. Take one live piece of work with real dates and put it into the Planner you already have.
2. Record the dependencies you wish you could create, and count them.
3. Ask whether anyone actually needs to see the timeline, or whether the board and the due dates were sufficient.
4. If you filled a page with dependencies and somebody keeps asking for a Gantt view, buy Plan 1 for the people in that plan.
5. If the answer was a list with dates on it, stop. You already own the tool for that.

The naming, and why it matters on a quote

• Project Plan 1 became Planner Plan 1 in September 2024. Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5 became Planner and Project Plan 3 and Planner and Project Plan 5 at the same time.
• Project for the web was retired in August 2025 and its plans became Planner plans, with no migration and no change of licence required.
• Microsoft’s current Planner and Project licensing comparison lists Planner Plan 1 and Planner and Project Plan 3. If a quote names something else, ask for the entitlement list rather than matching the label.
• Buy on entitlements, not on names. The names in this part of the Microsoft range have moved twice in two years and are likely to move again.

Who belongs on this seat

• Coordinators and team members who update their own tasks on a plan somebody else maintains. This is the buyer the licence is built for.
• Team leads who need to look at a timeline and a set of dependencies but never defend a critical path.
• Anyone who needs sprints and backlogs on work that is genuinely project-shaped rather than a rolling queue.
• Not the schedule owner. They need Plan 3, and giving them Plan 1 to save money produces a week of frustration and then a second purchase.
• Not a team whose real requirement is a shared to-do list with due dates, which the included Planner already handles.

Practical notes before you order

• Licences are per user and mix freely inside one plan, so licence people for the role they perform rather than for the team they sit in.
• Custom task fields are capped, so if your process depends on a long list of attributes, design against the published limit rather than assuming it will stretch.
• Portfolios are view-only at this tier. If a contributor is expected to build one, they are not a contributor and they need Plan 3.
• Check what your Microsoft 365 subscription already includes before adding anything, because the free Planner covers more of the basic ground than most buyers expect.

Questions people ask about this