Planner and Project Plan 5 Review: Portfolio Tools on a Retirement Clock

Fix it now

Everything that separates Plan 5 from Plan 3 is a Project Online feature: portfolio analysis and prioritisation, resource capacity planning, and project request forms with an approval workflow. Project Online reached end of sale on 1 October 2025 and retires on 30 September 2026, so this is not a tier to start a programme on.

1. Skip it as a new purchase for portfolio management. The capability you would be buying is hosted in Project Online and has a published retirement date of 30 September 2026.
2. Skip it if you were going to start by standing up a new Project Web App site, because new PWA site creation was restricted from 1 April 2026.
3. Buy Planner and Project Plan 3 instead for the people who build schedules, and treat portfolio governance as a separate tool decision.
4. Keep it, for now, only if you already run portfolio analysis or a formal intake process in Project Web App and you are working to the retirement date rather than ignoring it.
5. Check the name and the entitlement on any quote. Microsoft renamed Project Plan 5 to Planner and Project Plan 5 in September 2024, and its current Planner and Project licensing comparison lists only Planner Plan 1 and Planner and Project Plan 3.
6. If a supplier offers you this tier for portfolio management, ask them in writing which product delivers it after 30 September 2026.

Planner has its own Portfolios feature, which replaced Roadmap. Microsoft states it cannot connect to Azure DevOps projects or Project Online projects, so it is not a drop-in replacement for portfolio analysis.

If that settles it you can stop here. If you need to know exactly what Plan 5 contains and what to do with an existing deployment, the rest covers it.

Why it happens

Plan 5 has always been a governance tier rather than a delivery one. Microsoft’s service description gives it three things Plan 3 does not have: portfolio analysis and prioritisation with resource capacity planning, demand management in the form of project request forms and an approval workflow you configure, and full resource engagement handling, meaning the ability to review, fulfil and approve requests rather than only submit them. It also carries user management, service administration and non-working time setup for the environment.

All three of those live in Project Online. That is the fact this review turns on. Project Online reached end of sale on 1 October 2025, new Project Web App site creation was restricted from 1 April 2026, and the service retires on 30 September 2026. The features are real, they work today, and they have a published expiry. Buying the tier now to build a portfolio process on is buying a foundation with a date on it.

It is worth being precise about what is not affected, because the picture is not uniformly bleak. The Project desktop application continues, and Microsoft says so explicitly. Planner continues and is where the investment has gone: Project for the web retired in August 2025 and its plans became Planner plans with no migration and no licensing change. Planner has a Portfolios feature that replaced Roadmap. What Planner does not have is portfolio analysis in the sense Plan 5 means it: scoring proposals against business drivers, constraining them by budget and capacity, and modelling which combination of work fits.

The organisational argument in the older version of this review still holds, and it now matters more rather than less. Portfolio tooling only works where four things are true: someone owns the intake process and can require projects to go through it, proposals arrive in a comparable form, resource data is maintained often enough to be believed, and a leadership group actually acts on the output. Remove any one and the tool degrades into an expensive record store. That was a reason for caution before. With a retirement date attached, it becomes a reason to build the process first and pick the tool second, which is the right order anyway.

There is a further practical point. Microsoft’s current Planner and Project licensing comparison lists Planner Plan 1 and Planner and Project Plan 3 and stops there. Plan 5 still appears in other Microsoft licensing lists, so it has not vanished, but its absence from the main comparison alongside the withdrawal of the service that gives it its features is a clear signal about where this tier is going. Anyone quoting it to you for a new portfolio programme should be asked to put the post-retirement answer in writing.

Full reference

What Plan 5 adds over Plan 3, and where each part lives

The retirement timetable

If you already run a portfolio process in Project Web App

1. Inventory what is actually configured: portfolio analyses, request forms and workflows, resource engagement rules, custom fields, timesheet periods, reports.
2. Separate the parts a person depends on from the parts that were configured once and never used. The second list is usually the longer one.
3. Export the data you need to keep, including the historical portfolio analyses and the resource pool, well before the retirement date.
4. Move scheduling and collaboration into Planner, which is where Microsoft has put the work.
5. Treat portfolio scoring, formal demand intake and timesheets as three separate replacement decisions, because no single Microsoft product currently absorbs all three.
6. Do not plan a migration that depends on creating a new Project Web App site. That route is already closed.

What to do instead, in order of cost

• Run the prioritisation exercise on paper first: a standard intake form, an agreed scoring basis, a spreadsheet. If that survives two cycles, you have proved the process is real.
• Put the schedule owners on Planner and Project Plan 3 and the contributors on Planner Plan 1. That covers delivery, which is the part most organisations actually struggle with.
• Use Planner Portfolios for the visibility layer, understanding that it is a rollup rather than an optimisation model and that Microsoft states it cannot connect to Azure DevOps or Project Online projects.
• Only then evaluate a dedicated portfolio product, from Microsoft or anyone else, against a process you can already describe.
• Do not buy governance tooling ahead of governance. That was the failure mode before the retirement was announced, and it is a worse bet now.

Questions to put to whoever is selling it

• Which product delivers portfolio analysis and prioritisation for us after 30 September 2026?
• Which product delivers demand intake with an approval workflow after that date?
• Which product delivers timesheets and approvals after that date?
• Is this tier still available for new purchase, and under what name and entitlement list?
• What is the exit route for the data we would put into Project Web App between now and the retirement?

Questions people ask about this