Planner and Project Plan 3 Review 2026: The Manager’s Working Licence

Fix it now

Project Plan 3 is now Planner and Project Plan 3, and it is still the schedule owner’s licence: the Project desktop application, baselines, critical path, advanced dependencies and the ability to create portfolios. What has changed is the other half of it. The Project Online side retires on 30 September 2026.

1. Buy it for the person who builds and defends a schedule: baselines, critical path, advanced dependencies with lead and lag, and a desktop application that can hold a large dependent plan.
2. Buy it if you want the desktop client and the shared Planner service under one per-user subscription rather than two purchases.
3. Buy it if contributors on Planner Plan 1 need to update their own work inside plans the schedule owner maintains.
4. Skip it for team members who only move tasks along. Planner Plan 1 covers them and mixing the two tiers is the intended design.
5. Skip it if planning is offline, file-based and lives on one machine. A perpetual Project licence does that without a recurring charge.
6. Do not buy it for Project Online. Timesheets, resource engagements and Project Web App reporting all sit there, and Project Online retires on 30 September 2026.

Microsoft states the Project desktop applications continue to be available and supported for both existing and new customers. It is Project Online, the server-side service behind Project Web App, that is being withdrawn.

If that settles it you can stop here. If you need the dates, and which half of the licence survives them, keep reading.

Why it happens

This tier has had two things happen to it. In September 2024 Microsoft renamed Project Plan 3 to Planner and Project Plan 3. Then, more consequentially, it set an end date on Project Online: end of sale on 1 October 2025, no new Project Web App sites from 1 April 2026, and retirement on 30 September 2026. Half of what this licence has historically been bought for sits on the wrong side of that date, and any review written before it is describing a product that no longer exists in the same shape.

Start with the half that survives, because it is the better half. Plan 3 carries the Project desktop application, which is the full scheduling engine: task calendars, baselines, resource assignments, levelling and a critical path you can defend in a meeting. It is a per-user subscription rather than a per-device licence, so one person covers the machines they work on. Alongside it you get the premium Planner experience of Plan 1 plus task history, the assignments view, the ability to create portfolios rather than only view them, baselines and critical path in the browser, and advanced dependencies with lead and lag.

The half that is going is everything that lived on the server. Project Online is where timesheets and timesheet approvals ran, where resource engagement requests were submitted and approved, and where the out-of-box and custom reporting, dashboards and portals sat. Microsoft has published the retirement date and has already stopped new Project Web App site creation. If your reason for holding Plan 3 is any of those, you are on a clock and the sensible move is to work out where that process goes next rather than to renew and hope.

There is also a licensing detail that older advice regularly gets wrong. Plan 3 gives resource engagements on a submit-only basis; reviewing, fulfilling and approving them, and resource capacity planning across the organisation, are Plan 5 capabilities in Microsoft’s own service description. So the common claim that Plan 3 lets you see who is committed where is only half true, and it was always a Project Online feature in any case.

Set against a perpetual Project licence the comparison is unchanged and still decided by how you work rather than by arithmetic. If planning is offline, file-based and owned by one person on one machine, the perpetual licence does that job and stops the recurring cost. The moment the team is expected to update its own tasks, or one person works across a laptop and a desk machine, the subscription wins. Plan for a mixture: schedule owners on Plan 3, contributors on Plan 1, and anyone whose planning never leaves a single PC on a perpetual licence.

The blunt summary is that Plan 3 in 2026 is a very good desktop scheduling licence with a premium Planner service attached, and that this is now the whole of it. Judge it on that and it holds up. Judge it on the enterprise project server it used to include and you will be disappointed on a published date.

Full reference

What each tier carries after the rename

The dates that decide this purchase

The desktop application is not on that list, and that is the point. Microsoft states that the Project desktop products remain available and supported for existing and new customers. What is being withdrawn is the server that sat behind Project Web App, along with the timesheet, resource engagement and enterprise reporting machinery it hosted.

If your Plan 3 estate depends on Project Web App

1. List every process that currently runs in Project Web App: timesheets, resource requests, status reporting, project intake, any custom dashboard.
2. For each one, name the person who would notice if it stopped. That list is your migration scope, and it is usually shorter than the feature list suggests.
3. Export the data you will need to keep before the retirement date rather than after it.
4. Rebuild the scheduling and collaboration parts in Planner, which is where Microsoft has moved the investment.
5. Treat timesheets and formal portfolio analysis as separate problems needing separate answers, because Planner does not currently replace them.
6. Do not create new Project Web App sites. That route closed on 1 April 2026.

Plan 3 against a perpetual Project licence

Buying without over-buying

• Count the people who actually build schedules, not the people who attend project meetings. In most organisations that number is small and stable.
• Licences are per user and mix freely, so a mixed estate of Plan 3, Plan 1 and the included Planner is normal rather than untidy.
• Ask for the entitlement list on the quote. The tier you know as Project Plan 3 appears under the Planner name now, and the two are still both in circulation.
• Review assignments before a renewal. Manager-tier seats are the ones that stay allocated to people who moved on.
• If somebody is being licensed for timesheets, stop and price a timesheet product instead.

Questions people ask about this